A MINIATURE ROAD TRIP

 When I was back in Ohio in November, one of the things I had on my to-do list was a mini road trip I wanted to take. I had never been to Alger, Ohio, and felt it was about time I paid it a visit.

I called up my friend Mary Jo Knoch, who is an incredible photographer, and asked if she wanted to come along and maybe snap some pictures. Mary Jo wasn’t very sure why I, or anyone else, would choose to go to Alger as a tourist destination, but said, “Hey, you know me. I’m always up for a road trip.

A vintage postcard of the Alger of yesteryear

Alger, for any of you who are unfamiliar with it, is a village of fewer than nine hundred souls, located in Marion Township, in Hardin County. It hasn’t always been called Alger. When it was first founded in 1882, it was known as Jagger, named after Elias Jagger, the man who laid out the plans under which the town first took shape. The name was later changed, however, in honor—and don’t ask me why because the village is nowhere near the northern state line—of twentieth Michigan Governor Russell Alger. It was finally officially incorporated in 1892. The town is located on Route 235, a few miles south of Ada, Ohio.  The village covers a surface area of 0.28 square miles. As my mother, Reba Mae, would have said, if you’re driving through, make sure you don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

For every one hundred women over eighteen in Alger, there are only eighty-two men. That might mean that men are in high demand in Alger. Either that or Alger women “order out.”

Ray Brown

Not surprisingly for a small town in rural Ohio, the population is more than ninety-nine percent white. But oddly enough, then, the most famous person ever born in Alger was an African American. I’m talking about Hall of Fame pitcher Ray Brown. Born in Alger in 1908, Brown played for Pittsburgh’s Washington Homestead Grays, a major team in the Negro National League.  Brown led the league in wins eight times between 1931 and 1944 and led it three times in strikeouts in 1931, ’37 and ’38. He was one of five famous black players named by the Pittsburgh Courier, in a 1938 wire to the Major League Pittsburgh Pirates, as being definite major league material. Accompanying him in that sports writers’ assessment were “Cool Papa” Bell, Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson and renowned Hall of Famer Satchel Paige.

Thinking about Ray Brown I can only reflect that it has to have been frustrating for truly great black players to always be relegated to the “semi-pro” Negro League, as if they would never be “good enough” for the majors because they were born with the “wrong color” of skin. Paige, who once played for the Cleveland Cubs Negro League team, provided an inkling of that frustration, saying:  "I'd look over at the Cleveland Indians' stadium, called League Park... All season long it burned me, playing there in the shadow of that stadium. It didn't hurt my pitching, but it sure didn't do me any good."

So anyway, why Alger? Well, whether I’ve ever been aware of it or not, like Ray Brown, there’s Alger in my veins. Let me take a moment to explain.

Murel Newland, my grandfather, didn’t often talk about his childhood. I always got the impression it had been less than fun. But I once heard him say something about “when he was a kid in Alger.”

I recall one story that my grandmother told about how Murel was always brawling. One of the times at school that he got into it with another kid, the teacher couldn’t find out who had started it, so decided to give them both a whipping—and I mean a whipping.  For that purpose, her weapon of choice was the long-strapped buggy whip she used to drive the horse that pulled her cabriolet carriage—this was sometime before 1910, perhaps 1908—the same year Ray Brown was born in Murel’s home town.

Murel was scrappy, if small, and known for being a capable and resilient streetfighter, as was the other boy. Indeed, the fight had been about who could take whom.  They really didn’t have anything major against each other except the need to protect their tough-guy reputations.

So, when it came time for their punishment, they both wanted to go first, to show who was the bravest. The teacher decided for them, taking the other boy by the ear, and leading him to a space open enough for her to get a swing at him with her whip. Murel listened from behind a divider to the repeated slap of the whip. Ten lashes, and the other kid didn’t let a whimper slip from his lips. He came out from behind the divider red-faced but tearless, and murmured, “Your turn Newland.” And then he waited there on the other side of the divider while Murel took his beating.

Murel’s opponent couldn’t have been more surprised when he saw Murel emerge from behind the divider with tears streaming down his face. According to my grandmother, the other kid came forward, put a hand on Murel’s shoulder and said, “Hey Newland, don’t let that ol’ bag see you cryin’. Come on! What’re you bawlin’ about. I’ve hit you a lot harder than that and you just bounced back up and tattooed the hell out of me. What’s the story?”

Murel looked down at his vest that was hanging open and askew in front.  “I’m not cryin’ about the beatin’,” Murel said, “I’m cryin’ ‘cause her goldarn whip cut the buttons off o’ my vest. My mom could barely afford this suit o’ clothes and she’s gonna be furious.”

Murel was, however, incorrigible. One of the other times he felt the lash at school was when he was climbing the stairs behind his teacher and couldn’t resist reaching up under her bustle and goosing her.

The only image I have of
Great-Grandpa Elmer,
accompanied, I believe, 
by Murel's only sister, Mame.

I never saw any pictures of Murel as a boy. In fact, I never saw pictures of anybody in my Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice’s families until my father’s generation. It wasn’t much of a picture-taking family. I never knew Murel’s father, Elmer, but he appears to have been a rather severe, joyless man. And Murel’s mother, Maude Bowers Newland-Numbers, never struck me as an at all sentimental woman. She outlived two husbands—Elmer, and then Roy Numbers—as well as a “gentleman caller”, by the name of Mr. Hemingway, in between. But she never waited around for a man to provide for her and was always working at one thing or another. This included owning and operating a diner across from the Allen County courthouse in Lima, Ohio, a jail that is most famous for once holding notorious bank robber John Dillinger. Holding him, that is, until two other gangsters, “Handsome Harry” Pierpont and “Fat Charley” Mackley, walked in, shot the sheriff, and broke Dillinger out.

Just as famously—at least in our family—Maude, unbeknownst to her, served the two killers a meal just before they crossed the street and murdered Sheriff Jess Sarber. That was in October of 1933.

Sheriff Sarber

Although Murel lived much of his life in Lima, before moving, in his forties, to Wapakoneta, twelve miles away, he wasn’t, as I say, born there. He was a native of Alger. Elmer made his living as a barber there, and as soon as Murel was big enough to stand on a box and reach the clients in the barber chair, he became Elmer’s apprentice. 

One of the first things Elmer taught him, oddly enough, was one of the hardest: how to give a proper shave with a straight-razor. I can still recall my grandfather using a straight to shave when I was a boy. And he still made a barber’s ritual of it, heating water, soaking a hand-towel in it, and wrapping his lower face and neck in the steaming towel to soften his beard. He would then whip up a froth of shaving soap with his brush in a mug, and lather up slowly and fully with that same brush, before tuning up his fearsome blade on a razor strop, and then carefully scraping off his beard with it. I was in junior high before he deigned to switch to a safety razor in which he always used Wilkinson Sword Steel blades.

Great-Grandma
Maude Numbers

Murel would later—back when Lima, Ohio, was still nicknamed “Little Chicago”— get a job in the city, working in an upscale barbershop in a major Lima hotel. He would then go on to join another barber in opening a barbershop of his own at 38 Public Square, in the heart of downtown Lima.

Although I always enjoyed any stories of the “olden says” that senior members of both my father’s and my mother’s families would tell me, and although I had a more than a passing interest in talking to people from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations from the time I was very young, it has only been in the past decade or so—much too late to matter, perhaps—that I’ve lent even minimal interest to our genealogy. It started with random thoughts about how complicated the spreading branches of a family tree can be. I was considering, despite thinking of myself as a combination of the Newland and Weber clans, how many other families I was blood relation to: the Henrys, the Hamiltons, the Cavinders, the Leningers, the Hatterys, the Bowerses, the Gossards, the Landises, the Kennedys, etc., etc. Who were these people? Where did they come from, and how far back did our mutual roots reach?

However, there always seems to be something more pressing to occupy my time than actually taking a genuine interest in doing a serious genealogical study. Besides, knowing myself and my natural and professional bent for research, taking up a task like that could end up occupying the bulk of my time for the rest of my life.

Murel (wearing tie, standing) in his Lima barbershop

So, making the journey to Alger was a mere gesture, a one-day genealogical fishing expedition, and having an enthusiastic travel partner like Mary Jo along promised to make it fun.  Moreover, once we discussed it, she took a more than pedestrian interest. After all, besides being my long-time friend, she is also an honorary Newland, having been my first cousin Greg Newland’s significant other for forty years before his death.

The thing that had really piqued my interest was that a reader, who had seen a piece I wrote about Murel’s Lima barbershop, in which I mentioned, in passing, his “Algerian” origins, wrote and told me that she was from Alger, and that Newland was a well-known name there. There was even a diner there that was still run by some people named Newland, she said.

It didn’t take much research to find out that my family’s roots in Alger stretched back to at least the time of my great-great grandfather, Abraham Newland. Born in 1812, he was originally from somewhere in Pennsylvania, but had moved, as a young man, to Hardin County, on the site of Alger, in the Ohio Territory. I was excited to find evidence that his mortal remains had been laid to rest, in 1883, at Preston Cemetery in Alger.

Then, as usual, I got sidetracked. Although I made a mental note to visit Alger the next time I was back in the US for a visit, my research stalled at Abe. So when Mary Jo and I agreed on the road trip, it was more of a random long ride in the country with the Newland connection to Alger as an excuse for it.

Google Maps suggested there were several ways to get to Alger from Wapakoneta, where I was staying, but I just clicked START and let the Google lady’s voice guide me along the supposedly fastest route—Wapak to Lima on I-75, exiting at the Hardin Pike, and taking it to Route 235, which runs through the heart of Alger.

After we got off the Interstate, it was a lovely, bucolic journey, through the rural Ohio countryside, on a really gorgeous, crisp, blue-and-golden autumn Saturday. The trip took less than an hour. (There are shorter ways to get there from Wapakoneta, but the Google lady liked I-75, which, I now realize, took us out of our way).

Now, I should note that Mary Jo is a planner, and I could tell that my footloose, no-plan approach to things was making her uneasy.

“What’re we looking for?” she asked as I started coasting around the village at an almost pedestrian pace.

“Damned if I know,” I muttered. “A diner, I guess.”

“Take Lee Street,” she said, “It looks like kind of a main drag.”

We did, but you can’t go very far in Alger before you find yourself out of town again. Eventually, however, we did come across a place that looked as if it was, or had been a diner. But it was closed. Indeed, it looked permanently closed. Then, on Main Street, we came across another place with a big PEPSI sign outside. Mary Jo had a Google Map of Alger open on her phone.

"This appears to be a diner,” she said. “I think it’s the One Fourteen Diner.” But it was apparently closed on Saturday afternoons.

I said, “Okay, let’s try and find the cemetery, then we’ll come back.”

Consulting her phone map again, Mary Jo said, “Okay, turn left…Now turn right. Looks like it’s a couple miles out in the country.”

Shortly, we came to the cemetery entrance. It was a small, typical, rural graveyard, pretty much surrounded by fields, with the exception of a nearby truck repair operation. The internal streets were one-car narrow, and the graves came right up to them, so you couldn’t pull off without parking on somebody.

“If you want to get out,” I said, “I’ll drive to the back and find a place to put the car.”

Mary Jo, amused, glanced around in all directions. There was no one else in the cemetery. No one passing by on the road.

She grinned at me and said, “Doesn’t look like there’s much traffic.”

“Just in case,” I said.

“O-kay,” she shrugged, and got out of the car. I found the only cross-street, which dead-ended at the edge of a field, and left the car there.

"Found it!" cries Mary Jo before I even get started.

“We’re looking for anything that says Newland,” I called to her. “You go that way. I’ll go this way.”

Smart girl, Mary Jo had started perusing the inscriptions on the graves nearest the road. It stood to reason that the ones there would be the oldest graves in the cemetery.

“Found it!” she called before I even had a chance to start looking.

Mary Jo was standing in a section of the graveyard where the tombstones were quite old. So old, in fact, that the inscriptions on most of them were nearly illegible. I kept wishing I had some big sheets of paper and a chunk of charcoal to lift their reliefs. In the midst of all of these old stones, however, was a fairly new, modern headstone with the name Andrew Newland emblazoned on it. He was born in 1838 and died in 1910. I can only guess that there were still members of his immediate family or that he had been a pillar of the community, since his was the only Newland grave with a new headstone.

But what had Andrew been to me and to my cousin Greg. Both Mary Jo and I whipped out our phones and began an immediate, on-the-spot research project.

Andrew's new monument

“Looks like he was Elmer’s brother,” I said. “So our great-great uncle?”

Mary Jo found a site that gave more of the family genealogy and listed Syrus Elmer (strange spelling, but our great-grandfather’s actual first name, which may be why he went by Elmer) and Andrew as siblings.

“But wait a second,” I said, “Andrew was born in 1838, and Elmer wasn’t born until 1874!”  Further and deeper research was apparently going to be necessary.

Right then, and in the coming days, I would find out that Andrew and Elmer were half-brothers. Abe had lived to a ripe old age for those times (seventy-one) and outlived his first wife, Mary Kerns Newland, by twenty years. The couple had six children: Jeremiah, Andrew, William, Rachel, Sanford and Nancy.

Nancy Newland's grave
 in the Hattery plot.

Abraham later remarried, taking Rebecca Hattery, who was thirty-two years his junior, as his bride.  With Rebecca, Abe sired four more children—Melvin (1864-1920), Charles (1867-1943), Mary (1873-1938), and Great-Grandpa Elmer (1874-1932). It was interesting to find out just how closely linked to the history of the Village of Alger my family was. Even up to the time of Elmer and my Grandpa Murel. Of Elmer’s siblings, two, Melvin and Charles, are buried in Preston Cemetery. The body of Elmer’s sister, Mary Newland Shaw, lies in the cemetery in nearby Harrod, probably in her husband’s family plot. Elmer, for his part, is buried next to my Great-Grandma Maude, who lived to be eighty-six, in Memorial Park Cemetery in Lima, where my grandfather and grandmother were also laid to rest.

Of Elmer’s half-siblings, the only one not buried in Preston Cemetery is Jeremiah, a Sergeant in the 82^nd Ohio Infantry of the US Army, whose body lies in a cemetery in Cass County, Nebraska. He was twice wounded during the Civil War at Chancellorsville, Virginia, and at Wauhatchie, Tennessee. I can only assume that it was the Indian Wars of the eighteen-sixties and seventies that took him to Nebraska, where he was probably discharged and later died, in 1886, aged fifty-one.  There is no record of the burial of their mother, Mary Kearns Newland, but she is listed as “probably buried in Preston Cemetery.” Nor does Abe have a tombstone any longer—natural wear and tear, vandals? Who knows? But there is indeed a record of his burial there. His second wife, Rebecca Hattery, is also buried at Alger’s Preston Cemetery, and we saw a Hattery monument within the area where the Newlands are buried while we were visiting the graveyard. We also found William’s tombstone, broken off of its base and lying flat in the grass under a walnut tree.

William Newland's stone, broken
off and lying in the grass

Andrew, like Jeremiah, served with the Union Army during the Civil War. He was a corporal, also with the 82^nd Ohio Infantry. He was severely wounded at the Gettysburg, during the bloodiest battle of the war, in July of 1863. His wounds were such that he was discharged from further service and returned home to Alger. Despite this, he would live for another forty-seven years.

All of this rich family history, Mary Jo and I were able to glean from clues we found in the little cemetery on the outskirts of the Village of Alger, the town where the Newlands’ Ohio history appears to have begun.

“Let’s go back to town and see if we can find anybody who knows some Newlands that aren’t dead,” I suggested, and Mary Jo concurred.

Easier said than done. It seems Alger pretty much rolls up the sidewalks on Saturday afternoons, so it wasn’t like we had throngs of people on the streets to talk to. But we did find a convenience store open, where people were actually lining up inside to buy this and that.  When there was a lull, I walked up to the young woman behind the counter and said, apropos of nothing, “Hi! Do you know any Newlands here in town?”

Eroded to nearly illegible

She smiled amiably, but looked at me as if I were a lunatic.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m a Newland. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Newland?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I don’t, but I’ve heard the name.”

“Yes,” I laughed. “Preston Cemetery’s full of them.” And then added, “Are you from here originally.”

“All my life,” she said. She was in, probably, her early twenties, so in all fairness, “all her life” didn’t cover a lot of history. “Maybe check the phone book?” she suggested helpfully, but she didn’t seem to have one.

“Thanks anyway,” I said.

Outside, Mary Jo had struck up a conversation with a guy in a pick-up truck. She introduced me and said he was a local contractor.

“Yeah,” the guy said, “we do just about everything you can think of in building and remodeling.” He handed Mary Jo his card.

“Well listen,” I said, “you must know a lot of people around here. My people are originally from here. Do you happen to know any Newlands?”

“I know there are some around,” he said, “but I don’t know them.”

After he left, I turned to Mary Jo and said, “Okay, I’m googling Newland – Alger, Ohio.”

Right away I got a hit: Newland’s Landing.

“Landing?” I said. “Is there water around here?” Then I saw the marker on the virtual map and calculated that it was nine miles south of Alger and was located on Newland Drive. I clicked START once again and let the Google Lady dictate a few twists and turns, until I realized that we were heading for the backwaters of the sprawling Indian Lake Reservoir. The fact that the Google Lady had taken us to Alger via I-75 North and the Hardin Pike had kept me from realizing that we could have approached from State Route 33, which runs right by the lake through Russells Point and Lakeview. In Alger, we were only a stone’s throw from the lakeshore.

Look more animated...

Shortly, the Google Lady ordered me to turn left onto Newland Drive. As soon as we made the turn, however, Mary Jo said, “Well, we’d better stop and get a few pictures of this.”

“What?”

“The road sign!”

“Oh right!”

So I pulled over onto the grassy berm of the narrow gravel road.

“Go over under the sign,” Mary Jo instructed. I stood there under it, stiff as a cigar store wooden Indian.

I heard Mary Jo go “Ummm…” But she didn’t finish the thought. She said, “Uh, okay,” and shot a couple of frames. I smiled and started to walk back toward the car. “Listen,” she said, “we’ve gotta do something about making you look more animated.”

...like this!

“Animated?”

“Yeah, you know, alive!  Here,” she said, “I’ll pose and you take a picture.”

I got out my phone and looked at the viewfinder as she used the sign post to strike a sort of pole-dancing pose. I took the picture.

Mary Jo said, “See what I mean?”

I went back over, grinned like a self-conscious moron, and pointed up at the sign.

Mary Jo shot a couple more frames, and said, “Well, that was better…” with the unspoken continuation of that phrase going “But, man! You have got to lighten up!”

Um...better.

We then got back into the car and I drove down Newland Drive, which dead-ended in a really lovely little resort. Newland’s Landing, obviously. If you were to look in the dictionary under the term “landing”, there probably would be a picture of this quaint little place.  It was on a picturesque back channel of Indian Lake. It had tidy docks and a boat livery with a concrete slip to launch small-craft off of boat trailers.  The administration was housed in a pretty cottage-style building that fronted on the channel. But most of the boats were covered and everything looked closed for the season. Indeed, although a chained dog was barking at us from a nearby house, the only two human beings stirring in the place were Mary Jo and me.

It was as we were taking a few pictures that I realized we had just debunked a family myth. Back in the day, my grandfather had done a lot of fishing in the Lakeview and Russells Point area. Sometimes he even took me along.

When he found out that there were Newlands in the area, Murel being Murel, he started knocking on their doors. To a man and woman, they said they knew of no connection between the Indian Lake Newlands and the Wapakoneta Newlands.

Now, something you should know about Murel is that for the last twenty-five years before his retirement, he was the quintessential high-pressure life insurance salesman, and his territory included the entire Indian Lake region. I’m quite sure—because he even tried to sell me life insurance—that whatever genealogical inquiries he made, were prefaced by a foot-in-the-door insurance sales pitch. So who, in their right mind, would admit to family ties, when letting this guy in would surely end up in an hours-long pitch designed to make you feel like dirt if you turned him down and refused to “provide for your family’s future?”

Newland's Landing, Indian Lake

The no-link myth was further underscored by Murel’s second wife, Floetta—a tee-totaling Methodist, and my grandmother’s first cousin—who, when my brother and I once mentioned the Indian Lake Newlands, told us, “Oh no, no. They’re no relation. Those are the drinking branch of the Newlands.”

This struck my brother Dennis and me as hilarious, since back then, in our thirties, we mutually prided ourselves on being able to drink each other, and everybody else, under the table. I said, “So, Bro, we’d better go hang out at the lake!” Floetta was not amused.

But now, standing here at Newland’s Landing, on Newland Drive, and with a slew of my Newland ancestors pushing up daisies in a graveyard just nine miles up the road in Alger, I couldn’t help but ask myself if the Indian Lake Newlands and the Lima-Wapakoneta Newlands “not being related,” wasn’t a bit too much of a coincidence to be credible.

Right then, I vowed that the next time I came back home to Ohio, I’d make a point heading for the lake, finding some members of “the drinking branch” of the Newlands, and toasting their good health.

 

YANKEE REDUX – GOING ROGUE IN THE GOLDEN YEARS

 This may sound strange, but lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ohio-born writer Ambrose Bierce. Bear with me. At my age, this makes sense to me, and I think it might make sense to some of you as well.

Scene from a French film adaptation of 
"An Occurrence at Owl Crrek Bridge"

For those of you who don’t remember Ambrose Bierce, he was a famous nineteenth-century American writer, journalist and poet. He was an extraordinary short story writer. Perhaps his best known story—and one of the best known of all stories in modern American literature—is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a Civil War tale which, in short, is a description of everything that runs through a man’s mind as he is hanged from a railway trestle, from the time he is pushed from the bridge with a rope around his neck until the noose snaps his spine.

Not your lighter, more optimistic literature, mind you, but a masterpiece all the same. Published in 1890 and anthologized for the first of many times in 1891, it is also considered one of the great early examples of stream of consciousness.

Contemporary bestseller Kurt Vonnegut once described the story as “a flawless example of American genius, like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.” (He also defined as “a twerp” anyone who’d never read it).

Biographer Richard O’Connor said that “war was the making of Bierce as a man and a writer.” O’Connor praised Bierce for his grim and graphic style, observing that he was “truly capable of transferring the bloody, headless bodies and boar-eaten corpses of the battlefield onto paper.” Even the often jaundiced and disdainful New York Review of Books and Washington Post critic Michael Dirda concedes, if snottily, that Bierce “is arguably the finest not-quite-first-rate writer in nineteenth-century American literature.”

There’s a substantial literary reason, then, why other later extraordinary writers (Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Vladimir Nabokov among them) were influenced by Bierce’s writing—just as he was influenced by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and other great and innovative authors who preceded him. But Bierce wasn’t just a writer. He himself was to become the stuff that fiction is made of—the subject of a mystery that remains unsolved and is the topic of vast research and speculation up to the present day.  

Like me, as I mentioned, Bierce was born in Ohio, but on the opposite side of the state, in Meigs County, which today borders on West Virginia, an area which is part of the Appalachian region. The tenth of thirteen siblings—all with given names beginning with the letter “A”—while he was still a small child his parents moved to Kosciusko County, in north-central Indiana, where he grew into adolescence. He would eventually attend high school in the town of Warsaw, the county seat.

Lieutenant Abrose Bierce, 1862

If he wasn’t born with ink in his veins, young Ambrose would quickly be immersed in it when he struck out on his own at age fifteen and went to work as a printer’s apprentice at an Ohio abolitionist newspaper called, oddly enough, the Northern Indianan. Working at a newspaper was not a random choice. Although he came from a home of humble means, his parents were highly literate people and obviously encouraged him in his love of books and his penchant for storytelling and writing.

From the print shop, Ambrose would edge his way into journalism, but that career ended up being interrupted by the US Civil War, in which a still very young Bierce would attain the rank of first lieutenant in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment of the Union Army, and would lead his men in such famous (and infamous) confrontations as Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, the Atlanta Campaign and the Battle of Nashville, among numerous others.

Bierce was cited for bravery in one of the earliest battles in which he took part (and indeed, one of the first of the Civil War) and was seriously wounded at Kennesaw Mountain. Although he spent several months in 1864 on medical furlough because of the head wound he had sustained, he returned to battle in September of that same year and was only discharged from the Army in January of 1865, a few months before the war ended. However, his former commander, General William Hazen (who had recommended Bierce for admission to the military academy at West Point) re-commissioned him in 1866 to take part in an inspection tour of Great Plains Army outposts, a journey which ended up in San Francisco, California. There, Bierce was awarded the largely ceremonial rank of “brevet major” and resigned from the Army forever.

Battle Scene from Kennesaw Mountain, where 3,000
Union soldiers and 1,000 Confederates died, and
Bierce was critically wounded.

It was there, in San Francisco, however, that Bierce seriously delved into his career as a newspaperman and writer. As a journalist, he attained great acclaim while working as a reporter and columnist for the Hearst family’s San Francisco Examiner, as well as for other publications. He would continue to write for Hearst papers until 1909, just five years before his disappearance and presumed death.

Bierce’s trenchant commentary and in-depth reporting not only brought him fame, but also the rancor of many of the powerful people he wrote about. It is to the credit of the highly controversial William Randolph Hearst—who in the 1880s inherited the Examiner at age twenty-three and with whom Bierce had an often combative relationship—that, despite what must have been intense pressure to fire Bierce with the aim of silencing him, the famed newspaper owner kept the writer on his payroll for decades. The opposition pressure on Bierce himself was such that he is said to have started carrying a pistol with him wherever he went.

As I have learned in my own career as a journalist, if you please everyone with what you write, you’re not doing your job. If you write an in-depth piece or an editorial that elicits praise but no opposition, you need to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong...or find another profession. The irascible if cruelly witty Bierce was the clear embodiment of this principle.

But he was also—like many journalists who are writers first and foremost—a multi-faceted artist who also excelled in satire, short story writing, fantasy and early sci-fi, humor, criticism and poetry above and beyond his notable work as a newsman. Some of his best known work, as O’Connor points out, was based on his vast military and combat experience during the Civil War.

What I’ve been mulling over recently, however, is less about his writing than about his way of approaching life. After an admirable career as a man of letters, Bierce could easily have retired, written the odd story or commentary, traveled a bit, dabbled in his memoirs and been the toast of the town. But that would have been completely out of character for Ambrose Bierce. He was a man of action.

Bierce in the early 1900s.

In 1913, at age seventy-one—in an era when the average male life-expectancy in the US was between forty and fifty—Ambrose Bierce had already lived to a ripe old age. But what was left, he must have wondered, to sit in a rocker on the porch and wait for death? Not likely. He hadn’t been a particularly good husband or father, but now even those tenuous ties were pretty much gone. His former wife, Molly Day, had died some time before this, but he had already been estranged from her for years by the time she passed away. Of his three children, only his daughter, Helen, who was nearly forty years old by this time, was left. One of his sons, Raymond Day, had committed suicide in 1889 at age seventeen, and the other one, Leigh, had died of alcoholism-related pneumonia in 1901, aged twenty-seven.     

Some accounts claim that the thought of being put out to pasture was weighing heavily on Bierce when he decided that sitting still wasn’t an option if one was alive, and set off on what was very probably his last great adventure. There are a number of conflicting accounts of where Bierce went and what happened to him, but the most plausible story appears to be that he started out from Washington DC on a research tour of Civil War battlefields that eventually led him to the Texas border with Mexico. He is thought to have crossed the border at El Paso.

Francisco "Pancho" Villa

In Mexico, Bierce supposedly gave free reign to a fantasy he had entertained for some time of catching up to famed Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa and riding with him as an observer. Some accounts say that he joined up with Villa in Ciudad Juárez and was at least with the revolutionary for the Battle of Tierra Blanca, which was fought thirty-five miles south of Juárez and was considered a major win for Villa over forces loyal to Mexico’s dictator, Victoriano Huerta.

From there on, the story becomes hazy and speculative. Some versions have Bierce being executed by a detachment of federales for his relationship with Pancho Villa. Others have him being shot as a spy by a rebel firing squad. One town even claims that it was there that he died and has erected a monument that is visited by tourists. But the body of Ambrose Bierce was never found. 

Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta

There are strong indications that Bierce accompanied Villa’s army to the city of Chihuahua in northwestern Mexico. In a last letter to his niece, Lora, Bierce is purported to have said that he was writing to say good-bye. “What an intolerable world this would be,” he wrote, “if we said nothing but what is worth saying! And did nothing foolish—like going into Mexico and South America.”

He added that “if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.”

His last communication read: “I don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much. Adios.”

Much of Bierce’s fiction is said by critics to highlight “the inscrutability of life and the absurdity of death.” His own disappearance and probably violent death ended up being as inscrutable as it was absurd for a man of his age and literary stature.

Whatever the case may be, while some observers have claimed it was tantamount to suicide for Ambrose Bierce to wonder into the Mexico of Huerta and Villa like some ad hoc septuagenarian foreign correspondent, I consider it a declaration of independence and freedom, and an act of uncommon courage. It was a clear choice to live life to the fullest, right up to his last breath. It’s a philosophy each of us coping with the so-called “golden years” might do well to ponder and, to the extent that we can, and each in our own way, to imitate, in the interest of making the absurd worthwhile.

 

 

JIM BOWSHER - LIFE 101

 My friend and writer colleague Jim Bowsher has the Big C.

That statement deserves a paragraph of its own. So does the next one:

It’s Stage Four. That’s usually thought of as the “ALL She Wrote” stage of that rotten scourge of a disease.

Jim Bowsher in his fabulous Rock Garden
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch - All rights reserved

I know a little bit about cancer. My father died of it. So did my mother. Both aged eighty. My father’s mother died of it at sixty-six. My father’s older brother at seventy-five, my father’s middle brother at about the same age as his mother, and their youngest brother, the reverend, who fought it with all of his grit and faith, managed to beat it until he was in his mid-eighties, when it finally took him.

One thing I’ve learned? It’s not a good death, I mean if there is such a thing.

I take after my mother’s side of the family. Despite her death by cancer, they mostly die of some sort of cardio-vascular disease. Somewhere that statement may hold out some glimmer of optimism for me—cardio-vascular is no picnic, mind you, but it’s not cancer either.

My little brother was the spitting image of the Newland clan—actually the cancer trend appears to have originated with the Henrys, my Grandma Alice Henry Newland’s family—but he flipped a giant bird to that part of the family’s cancerous medical history by dying of what appears to have been a massive stroke, in his sleep, at age fifty-one. It was exactly the sort of “bite me” thing he was famous for. But still, I think I might have been willing to give up part of the nearly two decades that I’ve survived him just to have him around a while longer. You couldn’t help but love that boy, and the world is a much less interesting place without him.

I also know something about diagnosis and prognosis. They’re not infallible. There is a great deal to be said for will, and what some of my British friends have been wont to call “sheer bloody-mindedness.”

Good example? My dad, Whitie. Bloody-mindedness got him through years of combat during World War II. And, despite having been a man who was often suicidal due to decades of chronic depression, he took on the challenge of cancer as if he were going to war. His was lung cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of only nine percent. When the diagnosis was made, and an attempt to remove one lung failed, he was told he probably had about six months. For all of his talk of suicide in earlier years, telling Whitie he couldn’t do something—like live—was a sure-fire way to get him to do it.  Result? He lived for another four years.

In that sense, Jim Bowsher reminds me a lot of Whitie.  Some time back, before I went to visit him, I called to see how he was doing. When he failed to answer the phone for a few days—in all fairness, that’s not unusual for Jim, who always has better things to do than answer the phone—I began to worry. The thing is, Jim only has a land line with an answering machine. He doesn’t own a cellphone or a computer (he still writes on a manual typewriter). He doesn’t have an email address. He isn’t on social media. In a very real way, for Jim it continues to be the sixties, when he and I were both growing up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where he still resides, in his phenomenal museum of a house on the edge of his artistic masterpiece, the Rock Garden, which surrounds his Temple of Tolerance.  I wrote about both, and, indeed, about Jim, in a book titled The Rock Garden and Other Stories (available on Amazon, and at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta). As that book reveals, Jim lives in an analog world of his own making. It’s as if his entire environment were the contents of an enormous time capsule.

He does have a website, created by his friend and collaborator Scott Bruno. But other than knowing what content goes into it, Jim is completely estranged from that technological process. He’s incurably old school. But google his name and the references to him on the Web go on and on, references from Wapakoneta, from Ohio, from all over the United States and from around the world. So, Jim doesn’t really have to go to the Web. The Web comes to him.

Anyway, after three or four tries I finally get him on the phone—Jim seldom if ever calls somebody back even if they leave a message. And even though he is a dedicated writer—who is a disciplined keeper of the old rule, “Writers write every day”—he also discourages epistolary contact. Long ago I once offered to write back and forth via snail mail. “It would be a waste of your time,” he told me. “I’m a terrible correspondent. You’ll write me, I’ll read it and enjoy it, and I’ll never write you back.”

At the time, I said okay and left it at that. Now, however, when things are as finite as they’ve always been, but with my awareness of that fact heightened, I’m thinking I wish I’d written him anyway all these years, even if I’d never gotten an answer. It was selfish and lazy of me. I offered, he said don’t bother, and I didn’t. Such is life. Such is ego. 

“Jim! Finally! So glad you picked up.” I shout into the phone.

“Yeah, I heard your messages and was listening for the phone. So how are you?”

“I’m fine. I mean other than a few old-man issues. The more important question is, how are you?”

“I’m doing great. I continue to be a medical phenomenon. Nobody can understand how I’m doing so well. I mean, I’m a dead man walkin’, but I’m just fine. The thing is, I’m so busy, I keep forgetting I’m dying!”

Dead Man Walkin’—the term used for a condemned prisoner on the walk to execution—is what some of the little hoodlums that hang out in Jim’s yard will sing out when he emerges from the house. A lot of these troubled kids have been mentored by Jim. Some he has accompanied to juvenile court or visited in the reformatory. They, more than anyone else, will surely miss him when he’s gone. The dead-man-walkin’ thing is a private joke between them and Jim, which they both find amusing.

“The other day,” says Jim, “there was this really nice lady visiting here. She knew about the cancer and wanted to stop by.” So, we walk out into the yard and one of the kids goes, “Dead Man Walkin’!” really loud. Well, you should have seen that poor woman’s face!” says Jim. “She goes, ‘Oh my god, how awful!’ And I say, ‘Oh no, it’s fine. It’s just a joke between me and the guys. It doesn’t bother me, really, don’t worry.’ I’m like trying to comfort her,” Jim laughs. 

Jim's house on Wood St. in Wapakoneta

Later, he tells me about the advancement of his historical framing project. All of his energy right now appears to be going into that, and into creating a foundation to ensure the continuation of his permanent art installation (the Rock Garden) and his local historical research project after he is gone. Every stone, item, artifact, picture and clipping in Jim’s divinely and eclectically cluttered house and yard has a story behind it. He refuses any item that doesn’t. Somebody comes to Jim with some interesting and/or vintage doodad, Jim says, “What’s the story behind this?” If the person says, “I have no idea. It’s just something I picked up at a flea market,” Jim will say thanks but no thanks. “What’s important is the story. If you don’t know the story, why have the thing?”

It appears that it wasn’t until very recently that Jim began to realize he was mortal. That was when Scott Bruno began to collaborate with him, taking on the daunting job of photographing each of the tens of thousands of items in Jim’s story-artifact collection, as a means of documenting this unique historical inventory.

Out of that gargantuan task grew Jim’s “framing project”.

“So tell me more about these frames you’re doing,” I say when we’re talking on the phone (a call between Jim and me never lasts under an hour or so).

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he says. “I’ll show some to you when you come. I’m taking pictures of everything and framing them with their stories. You’ll see. You are still coming, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it!”

“Good, it’ll be great to see you.”

“So how’s treatment going?”

“They keep telling me I shouldn’t feel this good,” he laughs. “The other day when I went in, this oncology nurse—she and I have gotten to be good friends—she goes, ‘Jim, would you like more pain medication?’ I tell her no, that I take one now and then, but I’m really not having a lot of pain. She goes, ‘But Jim, at this stage, you’ve really got to be having a lot of pain.’” Jim’s cancer started out as prostate cancer then spread first from there to his hip. “So I tell her, ‘Look, I can drag a leg if it’ll make you feel better, but I’m doing great. No real pain, see?’”  A doctor friend whom he laughingly tells about this says he’s not the typical case, not what people in oncology are used to seeing. “Yours is all a matter of will and attitude, Jim, of not giving in to the disease.”

It’s true. Clearly, Jim is refusing to give in, refusing to become the disease.  He is refusing to become Jim Bowsher Stage Four. He is striving to remain, Jim Bowsher Phenomenon, which is who he has always been. And for now, at least, it’s working! “The other day at the oncology unit, I told one of the (baffled) staff, ‘Well, at least you’ll remember me when I’m gone.’” He said the woman answered, “That’s for sure, Jim. You’re unforgettable.”

Jim says he likes to cheer up the others awaiting oncological treatment. He finds it so depressing to walk in and see all of their sad, doomed faces. He wants to help them realize that they’re not dead yet, that any day they still open their eyes is a good day, or as Whitie used to say, “a helluva lot better than the alternative.”

“As soon as I walk in, I start hitting them with one-liners,” says Jim, “and pretty soon I’ve got the whole waiting room laughing. There’s this one guy who, when I walk in goes, ‘Oh christ! Here he is again, the stand-up comic of the oncology ward.” Jim guffaws.  It’s good, says Jim. Laughing’s good. It helps them feel better. Not so down and hopeless.

Toward the end of October, after a couple of days in Miami, where my plane from Buenos Aires landed, I fly up to Dayton, and then rent a car and drive to Wapakoneta, an hour away. I could just as easily have flown into Cleveland, where my sister Darla lives and where I have my Stateside residence, but I was really anxious to see Jim right away and see for myself how he was doing. I got there the night of the twenty-fourth, had dinner with my childhood friend—a mutual friend of Jim’s—Mark Gallimore, and was supposed to see Jim the next day, and then drive on up to Cleveland on the twenty-sixth to spend a couple of weeks.

So, the next morning, a Wednesday, I had a pleasant breakfast with a few former classmates—including Mark—at a local eatery known as the Coffey Cup, and was all set to go to Jim’s in the early afternoon. Another mutual friend, who pretty regularly visits Jim on Wednesdays, sent me a text, however, saying that Jim had told her he wasn’t up to seeing anybody. She said he was too nauseous to talk to anyone but hoped I’d get in touch and be sure and see him later.

I was worried. This didn’t sound good.  I tried without luck to reach him several times, then gave up and headed for Cleveland. Two weeks later, I was back in Wapakoneta for a week-long stay. One of the first things I did was start trying to get hold of Jim. I called three times without success and had decided to just go knock on the door. I was only staying a block away at the Moonflower Inn, a lovely little cottage for one that I rent when I’m back in town. Finally, however, I got him on the phone.

“Wow, Jim!” I said. “I’ve been worried.”

“Why? I’m fine.”

“Well, when Philippa told me you were too ill to see us on the twenty-fifth, it worried the hell out of me, and then I had to go up to Cleveland for two weeks. I left you a couple of messages.”

“Yes, I heard them. I’m fine. That thing on the twenty-fifth was just some stomach thing. Nothing to do with the cancer. Just indigestion or something. I was fine the next day! Sorry I missed you. I was really hoping you’d be back”

We make plans to see each other the following day, a Saturday. We always meet at Jim’s place and there, surrounded by his inspiring chaos of stories and things, give free rein to our imaginations and talk about everything and everyone under the sun. But this time Jim says, “We can’t stay at my place. I have all the stuff for my frames spread all over the house.”

“I don’t mind. I love going to your house.”

“Yeah, but there’s no place to sit!”

He suggested we meet as Woody’s Diner, a bar and grill on Wood Street, just up the block (between Jim’s house and the Moonflower), which he and I have always favored.  But we were also supposed to be meeting our friends Mark Gallimore, Tom Shaw (who had flown in from Charleston, South Carolina), and Mary Jo Knoch. When I mentioned Woody’s to Mary Jo, she said, “No, it’ll be hard to talk there. Just come out to my place. I’ll make a barley beef soup and some cornbread.”

Mary Jo's place near the Village of Fryburg

“What should I bring?” I asked.

“Pie,” she said. So I went and bought an entire three-berry pie at Bob Evans.

When I called Tom and he asked what he should bring, I said, “Beer.”

So we were set.

When I went to pick up Jim to take him to Mary Jo’s, he wasn’t quite ready, so he invited me in. I immediately saw what he had meant about “nowhere to sit.” Everywhere there were picture frames and stacks of content to mount in them—pictures, cards, carefully-typed texts, drawings, etc.  Stuff everywhere, on tables, in chairs, on the couch, up the stairs…everywhere.

I got out my phone to take a picture.

“Don’t take any pictures,” said Jim brusquely.

“Why not?” I said. “This is great!”

“Please don’t, Dan,” Jim said tersely. This was one of those moments when Jim Bowsher would suddenly become a stranger, an enigma, even to his friends. This was when, in his own words, he was “at the service of his muse.” This was Jim Bowsher the writer, the historian, the collector. This was the Jim Bowsher who was friends with no one—Jim in Jim’s own world, a world to which no one else had passage.

I looked disappointed and said, “Come on, Jim. This is me. I can’t help myself. I’m a journalist.”

He squirmed and said, “I’d rather you didn’t. I never let anybody see the process when I was creating the Rock Garden. And I don’t want anybody to see the process while I’m creating the frames.”

I put my phone away and sulked while he went off to finish getting ready to go.

In the car, he said he was worried about his brother Walt, that he’d been calling him and Walt didn’t answer. Walt was only very recently widowed and still trying to cope with his wife Aida’s death.

I said, “Oh, don’t worry. Mary Jo said she’d invited him out to her place too, and that he said he was going.”

Jim looked relieved. “Oh, great, so he probably went out there already.”

Walt Bowsher

Sure enough, when we get there, Walt is already ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the living room, and is chatting with Gallimore and Mary Jo.

It was a beautiful autumn day—brisk, with azure sky contrasting with the last of the brightly changing foliage. Mary Jo’s place is a quarter-mile off the road, just past the Village of Fryburg, a few miles south of Wapakoneta.  It’s a little old shingled farmhouse with a good shed and a tumbledown old barn on a few acres of land, surrounded by rolling fields and a nice woodlot. It’s a lovely, peaceful place, and on this bright fall day it seemed utterly idyllic.

At first, in Mary Jo’s comfy living room, we chatted inconsequentially and took turns spoiling her three cats, Fred, Bill and the venerable old Captain Jack. Over beer, however, we entered into more controversial territory—small towns versus big cities, Israelis versus Palestinians, conservatives versus liberals. The tone rose occasionally, and Jim, far from presenting the profile of a dying man, held his own and gave as good as he got.  But in the end, it was a civilized discussion of issues among intellectually sound individuals who understood the value of different points of view and respected each other’s conclusions even if they might not agree with them.

Tom Shaw and Jim debate small towns v big cities

Walt, through all of this, sat smiling quizzically while he petted a very contented Bill. He occasionally offered some contribution, but mostly remained attentive, moving his gaze from one debater to the other, as if watching a ping-pong match. He was the first to leave, because he had a jam session with a group of other amateur musicians. But he was sure to let us all know how much he had enjoyed the afternoon, and thanked Mary Jo profusely for the invitation.  

Mary Jo’s wonderful, nutritious soup overrode debate, as did her cornbread and warm butter.  We then switched from beer to coffee and pie and later sat contently together, playing with the cats again.

Jim had brought along a few of his frames and passed them around, waiting to see our reactions. For me, it was like a light had suddenly been turned on. I got it, understood the dichotomy that Jim was seeking to project with each frame. One story on the front, the same, but another, story on the back. The frames were a stroke of genius, the projection of a voiceless debate between two opposing points of view, or between fact and legend, reality and fantasy. Once again, as in the past when I was writing about him, I was blown away by the profound yet simple messages with which Jim was striving to imbue his widely varied audience.  It was a didactic, thought-provoking idea, and nothing short of analog brilliant.

In the car, as I drove Jim back to his home in Wapakoneta, I half-expected him to revisit the issues debated. Instead, he said, “Wow, did you see Walt’s face? He was fascinated! With his friends, who are mostly of like mind, he doesn’t get a chance very often to hear this kind of debate. He really enjoyed it! I could tell.”

Jim explains one of his historical frames

Any thought of the issues had flown the coop. Jim was entirely focused on his brother, his best friend, and on the great afternoon he’d had, at a time when he was in pain. A time when it was exactly what he needed.

The next time Jim and I met, it was for breakfast.  I picked him up and we went to the Coffey Cup. The weather was accompanying me for my stay. A beautiful blue and gold morning with a light frost. I had asked Jim the day before when he wanted to go.

“You tell me,” he said.

“I can go whenever you like.”

“How about nine-thirty? Too late?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

When I arrived and knocked on door at nine-thirty sharp, it took a while for Jim to answer. When he finally came to the door, he said, “Sorry, I slept in. I’ll be right with you.” And he went off again upstairs to finish getting ready. I spent the time to once again browse among the extraordinary collection of items that cover every surface in the house—walls, tables, shelves, everything crowded with vintage pieces, but more than anything else, with countless mementos of life in Wapakoneta and its environs for the past two hundred years and beyond, clear back to the lives of its indigenous peoples before Europeans had ever heard of America.  You couldn’t get bored waiting, especially if Jim had told you the stories of some of the pieces. And in my case he had already, many times, in the past.  

By the time we reached the Coffey Cup, the place was burgeoning with the breakfast crowd. It was the kind of place where breakfast diners weren’t the type to eat and run. They had time to dawdle over eggs and meat and potatoes and pancakes while drinking hot coffee and engaging in neighborly conversation.

The Coffey Cup from the inside.

Fortunately, Jim and I found a great table by a window near the cash register where someone had just cleared out. This table wasn’t going to be much of a money-maker this morning. More than occupying it, we were taking it hostage. And Jim, who said he no longer had much of an appetite in the morning, only ordered whole wheat toast and butter, while I decided on the cinnamon French toast with maple syrup. We both ordered black coffee, but that was going to be a losing proposition for the proprietor as well, since we never said “no” to refills, every time someone passed by with a fresh pot.

 This time the meeting was one on one. We were, as we say in Argentina, “in our sauce,” talking about the things of interest to the two of us—his yard, his house, his projects (didn’t it seem astonishing that a man with stage four cancer was still awash with projects for the future?) I talked about my books and blogs. We talked about writing and writers. He recalled anecdotes about his youthful adventures when he traveled far and wide making a pest of himself until he could meet some of the writers he most admired. I couldn’t help but recall that when Beat Generation writer Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out, one of the items pinned with a magnet to the refrigerator in his kitchen where he did the deed was one of Jim’s haiku poems, in Jim’s own hand.

And we talked about his poetry—his haiku. Earlier, during one of our long-long-distance phone calls he had told me that he was finally considering publishing them. During the reorganization of his house, he had decided to see if he had enough for a book of haiku poetry. Turned out he did…more than enough, in fact: approximately ten thousand haiku by James Bowsher. He told me that he was now writing haiku about cancer. “You write what you know.”

He had tried one out on his oncology nurse friend. In the waiting room, she saw him scribbling in the notebook he carries in his hip pocket and said, “Jim, can I ask you what you’re writing?”

“Sure,” says Jim. “A poem.”

“What about?”

“Cancer.”

“Do you remember it? Can you tell it to me?”

“Sure,” Jim says. And right then and there, as if I were the nurse, he thinks for a few seconds, looks at the ceiling, and recites the little three-line poem. It compares cancer to a predator shark, swimming in his blood, waiting until the time is right to attack and rip him apart.

“It made her cry,” says Jim. For writer types like us, making somebody cry (or laugh, or think, or remember, or rejoice), well, that’s a bullseye. Says Jim, “She goes, ‘That’s exactly right Jim. That’s exactly what it’s like.’”

The breakfast crowd thins out. For a while we’re almost alone in the place, still drinking the coffee they generously keep offering us. Then, the lunch crowd starts drifting in. And still, we remain holed up in our corner under the window by the door. And soon the place is loaded with patrons again. But when we’re on a roll like this, it’s hard to break it, even though neither of us has the stamina we once had any more.

Finally, it’s Jim who suggests we call it a day. After all, we’ve confiscated this table for the past four hours. It’s the first time in any of our marathon conversations that Jim has ever been the one to suggest a pause. Whenever someone he enjoys talking to suggests ending a conversation, Jim is famous for saying, “Okay, but just one more story. You’re gonna love this one!” I figure he must be getting tired. It’s only natural. But then again, maybe he’s just anxious to get back to his frames.

Jim has always been a fanatical baseball fan. And if there was one thing that had become clear to me, it was that Jim’s philosophy on life had a lot in common with that of baseball great Yoga Berra, who once famously quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

In the car on the way back to his house to drop him off, Jim says, “Thanks Dan. This was great! I’m so glad we got together.”

The week in Wapak goes by like a lightning flash. Suddenly, it’s my last day. Again, a gorgeous autumn day. Cold, but clear and windless. There’s thick frost on my rented car when I get up. I go in the morning to have breakfast with a friend and former employer, Leslie Rigali. I worked for her for a year as a consultant in nineteen-ninety, when she was the owner of Davanti Media in Lima, an industrial city twelve miles north of Wapak. We created some interesting media projects together.

Moonflower Inn, "my home back home" in Wapakoneta

We haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but when we meet at the Harding Highway Panera in Lima, it’s almost as if no time at all has passed. It’s a relaxed, newsy conversation that lasts a good hour and a half.  Toward the end, it occurs to me, as we’re talking about my books, that this is precisely the person—a crackerjack businesswoman with years of public relations and advertising work behind her—who might be able to help me improve my book circulation in the Lima area.

I self-consciously bring the subject up, explaining that I had no intention of doing so, and she is immediately all over it, with ideas and suggestions based on her long experience and impeccable contacts. She says she would be more than happy to help me. We both come away from our breakfast happy to have renewed our friendship.

It’s a great start to my last day back home in Ohio.

As the hours tick by, I try to pack as much as I can into one day. Mary Jo and I meet up for coffee in downtown Wapak. We go to Winans, a place with great coffee and even better chocolates, both of which I try. It’s still such a lovely day, if chilly. that we decide to sit at the single table that Winans has on the sidewalk. A chance for me to revisit my home town at street level. Mary Jo knows a lot of people in town and a few of them stopped to chat a while at our sidewalk table. A little later, after we had finished our coffee, we also stopped a little further up the street to talk with the two amiable ladies who run Macky’s Health and Hemp. The store is a medical cannabis dispensary. Had you told me a few years back that someone would be selling cannabis on the main drag in Wapakoneta, I would have said you were crazy. Later, one of the ladies approaches us again while I am taking some pictures and holds up my book, Visions of What Used to Be, and says, “I just realized…this is you, right?”  I nod. “Would you sign it?”

She made my day. So did seeing that my books were once again in a brick and mortar store, and right in the front window of the Riverside Art Center, a Wapakoneta cultural venue, where I had earlier left ten signed copies of each book.

Mary Jo and I walked around town some more, acting like tourists and taking pictures as if this were the first time either of us had ever set foot in downtown Wapakoneta. Eventually, however, it was time for me to go back to the Moonflower and pack. It was about four when I got back.

Meanwhile, Mary Jo arranged with Gallimore to meet her at six at La Grande Pizza, and then she arranged with Jim Bowsher to pick him up and take him as well. I was to get there as soon as I could.  My packing and straightening up of my quarters at the Moonflower finished, I arrived just after six at La Grande and met my three friends at the door. We sat, fittingly, in a place that was once occupied by what was then known as “the front table”, back when this same building was my father’s place of business for a quarter-century from the mid-forties to the late-sixties.

The Teddy Bear, with Whitie at the head of the front table

Back then, the place was called the Teddy Bear, and for many years, the “front table”, a long, Formica-topped table with eight chairs, was where some of the town’s movers and shakers met for breakfast and to exchange gossip. My grandfather, Murel Newland, had hired local contractor Walter Stinebaugh to build the building toward the end of World War II, so that his three oldest sons would have a place of business to come home to when they returned from military service. In the early years, Whitie was in business with his older brother Red and his younger brother Chuck, but they both eventually moved on to other activities and the Teddy Bear became our family’s business, which my father and mother operated.

The gang at La Grande
Jim, Mark, Dan and Mary Jo

It was only the third time I’d been in that building in more than fifty years since my father had sold it. It was greatly changed. But in my mind’s eye, I could visualize it exactly as it had been. The typical diner, all chrome, Formica, glass blocks and fifties colors. I could remember the cigarette machine beside the door, the jukebox just behind where Mark was sitting and the cigar and candy case at the far end of the counter against the kitchen wall. I could see the old kitchen too, and the backroom and storeroom, the booths along the side wall of the dining room and the tables in the middle, the wrap-around glass-block counter with two stools at the end—one of which now formed part of Jim’s eclectic collection of Wapakoneta memorabilia.

We enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from the town, this town, where we had all grown up.  Eventually, however, it was time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them, a lack of certainty, a sense of hope without expectation.

Outside in the street, we all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you next time.”

When I hugged Jim, I couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. Light as a cat. I said, “Jim, it’s been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”

Jim said, “I’ll be here.”

I believed him.