For many years, Russells
Point was famous for its amusement park and ballroom. It has been closed for
many years now, since the seventies, I believe, but I still remember it well,
even though the ballroom—better known as the Minnewawa Dance Hall—had already closed
by the time I was a teen. The only remaining vestige of that one-time
entertainment Mecca is the old steel-girder Sandy Beach bridge that crosses a
section of the Indian Lake harbor.
Before much bigger Ohio parks,
like Cedar Point and King’s Island existed, the Russells Point Sandy Beach Park
was a pretty big deal. Even more famous than the amusement park, however, was
the dance hall. When my mother and father were dating age, some of the greatest
big bands in America played there—among them, the swing bands of Paul Whiteman,
Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Billy May, Gene Krupa and many more.
In its heyday, Russells Point was known as “the Atlantic City of the Midwest”. And
the Minnewawa Dance Hall was billed as the largest in Ohio, with capacity for a
hundred dancing couples and with two separate bandstands.
From my teen years in the
sixties, I have vivid memories of going there with friends, walking along the
old boardwalk, visiting the penny arcades, going through the funhouse with its
crazy mirrors and scary nooks and crannies, riding the thousand-foot long
rollercoaster and viewing the star-studded night sky from the summit of the Ferris
wheel. It was a magical place, but by then on its last legs, a shadow of its
former glory, a bit run down and seedy. But all of that seemed to us to give it
an even more exciting carnival-like thrill.
 |
| The Minnewawa, when the house was jumpin' |
The Village of Lakeview pre-dates
Russells Point by a few years. It sprang up on land owned by a settler named
L.T. Dysert, who lived there with his wife Sarah. The town was actually plotted
as a settlement as of 1881. Dysert and his wife ran a small trading post, and
the village quickly grew up around it. By 1895, Lakeview had enough residents
to gather the two hundred signatures necessary to officially incorporate the
village.
The boon to Lakeview’s
birth as a tourist destination was construction of a new section of the Toledo
and Ohio Central Railway, which arrived simultaneously with the village’s
founding in 1895. Traffic on the rail line was intense, with four passenger
trains a day making whistle stops there, carrying both passengers and the mail.
Freight trains kept Lakeview well-stocked with vital supplies and coal, and
also helped the town build its commerce by picking up the lumber, grain, fruit
and vegetables produced in the area around Indian Lake. And by 1899, Lakeview
had further advanced with the advent of telephone service, and later,
electricity.
Early on, Lakeview
boasted a sawmill and lumber yard, as well as a barrel-making operation. A tile
mill and a grain elevator would be the next additions. Both the elevator and
lumber yard were set up close to the tracks for easy shipping to other parts of
the country.
 |
| Cottonwood Resort, Lakeview. |
As rail services advanced
in Ohio, however, the canal system was rendered obsolete. The Lewistown
Reservoir, now called Indian Lake, became more and more a playground for
boating enthusiasts and anglers, as well as a popular beach resort. Lakeview,
like Russells Point, grew along with the popularity of the lake as a vacation
spot. By the thirties and forties, it was a bustling town with several bars and
restaurants, rental cottages and hotels as well as a healthy downtown area
where, among other businesses, there was a Farmer’s Bank, a Western Auto Store,
a car dealership, an ice cream shop, grocery and clothing stores, and, oddly
enough, a furrier’s shop.
Then as now, the Lakeview
and Russells Point communities were known for their solidarity. This was
largely thanks to a united farming community in the surrounding area.
Collective memory can still recall when the local Farmers’ Association owned a
large community barn in nearby Stokes Township, where area farmers could store
equipment and machinery. But it also became a meeting place where local farmers
and their wives socialized. It was always a potluck affair in which the farm
wives would cook up washtubs full of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and
would make gallons of lemonade, so that friends and families could get together
and share a meal and a chat.
 |
| Al Capone, angler |
My own memories of Indian
Lake are many, rich and lasting. But these are a few flashbacks that immediately
spring to mind:
A NEWLAND FAMILY REUNION on a Fourth of July, in the early nineteen-sixties. Everybody was there, my cousins, aunts and uncles, even Great-Grandma Maude. The most colorful character by far was always my Great-Uncle Dale, Grandpa Murel’s younger brother. I only saw Uncle Dale at the occasional family get-together, some years for Thanksgiving, others for the odd Newland family reunion, still others for the Fourth of July, like this day. The weather failed to cooperate that July Fourth. It ended up being unseasonably chilly with a steady drizzle.
Dale Newland was born in
1900, and when he was a young man in the nineteen twenties and thirties, there
was nothing cooler for a streetwise guy of his ilk growing up in the industrial
city of Lima, Ohio, than to emulate the gangsters that were his heroes. Dale,
even then, in the sixties, always dressed the part in his Mafia-style suits,
dark shirts with light-color ties, two-tone shoes and finely styled fedoras.
The look was accented by vintage Ray-Ban sunglasses and a pricey
twenty-five-cent cigar with a green tobacco wrapper. He was always a sort of
marginal character, walking a tightrope between righteousness and criminality.
The most “honest” thing he did was sell used cars, and was so good at it that
his name was known up and down the Dixie Highway. He could go to just about any
used car lot from Michigan to Florida and immediately find a job.
Dale’s only claim to fame
as an actual gangster was, legend had it, his sale of a hijacked truckload of
new tires to the Allen County Sheriff’s Department for a bargain basement
price, without the sheriff’s ever being the wiser.
 |
What I witnessed was the
first riot I’d ever seen. A huge group of college-aged kids had gotten out of
hand at the amusement park across the way, and the police had been called in to
restore order. Now everywhere on the main drag in town, kids were running amok,
kicking over trash cans, throwing cans and bottles at police, breaking windows
and generally creating chaos. Fire trucks arrived to give the outnumbered riot
cops a hand, by laying into the rioters with powerful blasts of water from
their fire hoses, while the police fired tear gas and charged at the kids with
their batons.
We were all standing on
the sidelines, close enough to watch the action—as if it were some strange and violent
sport—but far enough back to keep out of the fray. All of the sudden, however,
I started hearing a familiar voice rooting for the rioters and I looked to see
my Great-Uncle Dale stepping onto the curb and gesticulating at the kids with
his cigar. “Hey kids,” he shouted, “Don’t let those cops do that to you! Hit
‘em back! Knock ‘em flat! They got no right to do that to you. Nail ‘em!”
I saw when one of the
policemen got the attention of one of the guys manning a fire hose and pointed
Dale out. Dale never saw it coming and got washed right off of his feet. I
found this hilariously funny, since it was like watching a cartoon character
getting washed away. Dale, for his part, was madder than a wet hornet, and
wanted to take on the entire police and fire departments single-handedly. Cooler
heads prevailed and the Newland men managed to wrestle him off the street and
back inside the restaurant, before he got carted away.
A WEEKEND WITH MY FRIEND, Tom, whose grandfather kept a small cabin cruiser at the lake, and docked it in what I found to be a delightfully crazy invention called a “boatel”—like a motel, but for boats. The “garage” was a shed built over the water, with a private dock for each unit where boats could be tied up. The dock, in turn, led up to the entrance to the living quarters. I was impressed!
 |
| Sandy Beach Bridge, Lakeview Harbor |
Tom tried to teach me how
to get up on a pair of water skis, but I mostly skipped along the surface of
the water on my chin behind his grandfather’s boat. Another friend, Mark, later
also tried to give me skiing lessons at Indian Lake, behind his father’s
speedboat, but that didn’t take either. I drank a lot of lake water, but could
never rise to a standing position.
I RECALL CHILLY AUTUMN MORNING Indian Lake fishing expeditions with a fellow called Bill Benzing, who, with his wife Greta, rented a five room apartment we had in a big house where we lived on West Auglaize Street in Wapakoneta, when I was ten or eleven. Bill was a nice and very pleasant man, who was good and incredibly patient with kids. Even the names of the places we went to fish I found intriguing. He would show them to me on the map and pronounce their names—places like Turkey Foot and Blackhawk—so that to me they sounded like Shangri-La. I remember, in particular, standing with him and fishing from a wooden pier at one of several landings along the lakeshore. It was a foggy morning with a persistent mist. Bill shared the sugary coffee from his Thermos with me and the homemade oatmeal cookies that Greta had sent along. We stood there snug in out jackets and jeans fishing from that pier, and it seemed to me to be the happiest morning of my life.
 |
AND THEN THERE WAS a
foggy, rainy Saturday morning one autumn when I was about six, and my Grandma
Alice called, told my mother that she and Grandpa Murel were going over to the
lake to do some fishing. Did she think I might want to tag along?
That’s the first outing I
recall in which I had my Grandma and Grandpa Newland all to myself—no siblings,
no cousins, just me. And it turned out to be a memorable day. Just the trip
alone was exciting. It was the first time I had ever gone to Indian Lake, and
at that tender age, the twenty miles over on two-lane road seemed like quite a
journey. The countryside between Wapakoneta and Indian Lake was all new to me
and I relished every minute of it, kneeling on the back seat of Murel’s
Studebaker, facing the passenger’s side window. But the rain was persisting and,
a worrier by nature, I was also afraid that, at any time, my grandfather might
turn the car around and take me back home.
“Dang rain!” I complained.
But Grandpa Murel said, “Why, what’s wrong with a little rain, bud? Rainy days are the best days to go a-feeshin’. That’s when they bite the best. When it’s a-rainin’ a little.”
 |
I was relieved. I knew
that if it had been my mother, Reba Mae, and it was raining when we arrived at
our destination, she would have said, “Okay, it’s raining, everybody back in
the car.” But seasoned fisherman that he was, Murel wasn’t cowed in the least
by a little precipitation. When we got to the lake, Grandpa stopped near a
concrete pier, then he retrieved his see-through nylon raincoat from the back seat
of the car and pulled it on over his white sports shirt and cardigan. His
battered, felt fishing hat—a faded, sweat-stained, dark green Mallory of Fifth
Avenue that had once been a dress hat—was already on his head. His fishing
shoes were scuffed old two-tone wingtips and his fishing pants the bottom half
of a dark suit he no longer wore as such.
Meanwhile, Grandma Alice
broke out her long-billed fishing cap—the one with the marlin emblazoned on the
front—and pulled it down over her blue-white perm. Then she dug through the
trunk for her faithful green men’s cardigan, the one with the black suede patches
on the elbows, and slipped it on over her sober cotton housedress. She handed
me the canvas windbreaker Reba Mae had sent along for me and I put it on, along
with my red baseball cap.
I sidled up beside
Grandma. We were the cane-pole fishermen. We left Grandpa to his casting
further down the quay. This was his fishing spot and the lake was part of his
life insurance sales territory. He knew people here and they knew him, so while
he fished, he chatted with others on the pier. And they only moved to “try
their luck” further one way or another, or drove off to find another fishing
hole altogether when he started hinting that they might want to talk to him
about expanding their insurance coverage.
Eventually, Grandma Alice
laid her cane pole on the pier and, keeping close watch on her bobber, dug into
the picnic basket. She never brought anything boring like apples, celery or
carrots. Today it was pressed ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread, slathered with
butter, crunchy, salty Mike-Sell’s potato chips, hot, sugary coffee with Half-and-Half
in the Thermoses and peanut butter cookies for dessert. And as an added treat
for later, Milky Way candy bars, her own personal favorite.
We were sitting there
munching on our snack when the drizzle turned to a light steady rain. And true
to Murel’s prediction, the fish started to bite—everywhere, apparently, except
where he was casting. Grandma Alice was the first to pull out a nice-sized
bluegill. Then I snagged a nice crappy. Grandma snaked in a crappy as well.
Murel, who’d been bragging about how he was “casting out where the big ones
are”, moved over our way and started trying to toss his line in between
Grandma’s and mine. We each pulled out another fish while his bobber just sat
there in the water with never a twitch. He was fit to be tied, until finally,
after Grandma and I had brought in a third fish each, his bobber jerked once
and then got pulled under. It was clear from how his rod bowed that it was
something heavier that a bluegill or a sunfish. He finally reeled in a
nice-sized bass. He gloated,
good-naturedly, saying things like, “Now this is what a real fisherman goes
for, not them little minnows.”
Grandma said, “Shut-up,
Murel,” put the fish she’d caught on a stringer, and re-baited her hook.
By the time we were chilled
and soaked enough to be ready to head home, we had a nice mess of fish to fry,
and I had a memory of a day with Murel and Alice that I would never forget.
DECADES LATER—last year,
in fact—I spent another pleasant autumn day near and at the lake. I had
discovered that the cemetery in the village of Alger, Ohio, was a veritable
genealogical goldmine if I wanted to track down my Newland family roots. In the
company of my friend Mary Jo Knoch, we searched the little cemetery in Alger
and found Newland family members dating back to 1812, including my great-great
grandfather, some of his siblings, one of his two wives, and other members of
his immediate family.
 |
With the tornado and
terrible devastation in Lakeview, I was fondly recalling the pleasant days I
had spent over the years in the Russells Point-Lakeview area. I watched the
lists to see if the people I knew had checked in as being safe. When I messaged
one of them, a Lakeview resident who hadn’t checked in, she said, “We’re fine,
but this place will never be the same again.”
I suddenly not only felt
sad about the people who had lost their lives, their homes and their businesses,
but also about the loss of those two communities as I had always known them. I
suddenly was confronted with the reality that those two picturesque villages would
never be the same, even once they were eventually rebuilt. The Lakeview and the
Russells Point that I knew as a kid and as a teen would be no longer.
I couldn’t help but
strike a parallel in my mind with the big old barn of a house on Van Horn
Street in Wapakoneta, where my maternal grandparents once lived. I could only imagine
the pain and emptiness the people in Lakeview and Russells Point must feel when
faced with their disastrous loss. I felt it must be like when I would travel back
to visit Wapakoneta and would go to that corner where my Grandpa Vern and
Grandma Myrt’s home only exists now in my memory.
 |
| My brother Dennis and me at our Grandpa and Grandma Weber's house on Van Horn St. Wapakoneta |
But as long as I’m alive, I’ll be able to park on the opposite side of the street, gaze at the desolate parking lot that replaced it and still picture that house--the sunny country kitchen, the narrow cellar stairs, Grandma Myrt's canned goods and muslin-wrapped fruitcakes on the shelves down there and her wringer washer and tub on the other side, the linoleum-floored living room with couch, armchair, old black and white Admiral TV and Grandma's treadle-operated Singer, right under the window with the lace curtains she had made herself, and next to the little desk, under a cuckoo clock where Grandpa kept important papers and other treasures, like his German father's gold watch that he would give to me when I was twelve. I recall the front room, that they called the parlor, and that was off limits to children, the narrow mill-style stairs up to the three bedrooms, only one of which was in use now, but how the other two were kept fully made up anyway, with hand-sewn quilts on the beds. The little hall closet up there, cornered under the gambrel-roof eave, with its ever-locked door because it was where Grandpa Vern kept all of his guns--all but one, the over-and-under that he stowed loaded behind his armchair in the living room, "just in case". I remember the downstairs bedroom that had doors that entered it from the kitchen and from the parlor. In winter they slept upstairs because it was warmer, and in the summer, downstairs because it was cooler, since the house had no central heating or cooling system, just a big oil stove in the kitchen and another one in the living room. I remember the closed back porch where there was usually a bushel basket of pears, apples or walnuts, their sweet smell mixing with the kerosene stink of the glass-globed coal oil lamp on the shelf by the window and the barn lantern hanging from a nail on the wall, and all of Grandpa's work-outerwear, jackets, coats, rain and sweat-stained hats and wash-faded engineer caps, all hanging from hooks on the wall, a disused window that gave onto the living room and that was now painted over. I recall the summer kitchen, the spicy smell of homemade sausages still penetrating the walls even though the little building had long-since become a store room. The three, splintery, homemade steps down from the porch, always carefully painted in matte grey. The one-time woodshed that now was kept locked and that served as a garden-tool shed. The big old clapboard barn where Vern parked his Galaxy 500 and homemade trailer. There too was his workbench with the tool-board above it and a vice at one end, the former hay loft that by then was stacked with lumber and auto-parts. The little white picket fence around Grandma's flower garden and what she called her "back-forty" beyond--an incredibly productive vegetable garden that produced everything from tomatoes and cabbage to spinach and from rhubarb to turnips and kohlrabi. The carefully-manicured square of lawn that reached the sidewalk on Van Horn.
For now, it's all still
there for me, but my perception is that when I'm gone, so it will be too,
forever, unless there is still someone interested in the stories I tell. Sadder
still, it won't mean a thing to anyone but me, unless I can effectively pass
those memories on. That’s why it’s so important for those of us who have memorable
stories of the past in communities like Lakeview and Russells Point to share
them, record them, and commit them to collective memory, so that what no longer
exists physically can still be brought to life in the minds and imaginations of
generations to come.
