Wednesday, March 27, 2024

AN INDIAN LAKE HOMAGE

Ohio’s Indian Lake super-tornado is already old news on national news schedules, but for many of the residents of the villages of Lakeview and Russells Point, the nightmare continues. It’s one thing to hear about one of these super-storms that are an ever more frequent consequence of global climate change—to see the news coverage and pictures of the wreckage in a place you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint on a map without the help of Google—and entirely another to be able to picture the location in your mind, smell the air, hear the sounds, remember the buildings and some of the people, recall the curves in the road leading to a place that you’ve visited many times since childhood. No matter how much you might empathize with and feel sorry for people who aren’t your neighbors who have been caught in a natural catastrophe, it’s not the same as when it strikes so close to home.

Lakeview and Russells Point are villages in Logan County, located six miles from one another on US Route 33, along the waterfront of the Indian Lake Reservoir. Indian Lake is just twenty miles southeast of my hometown of Wapakoneta, which is also on US 33—a road that connects towns all through the central part of the state with the capital in Columbus. The two villages have similar demographics and stable populations of about twelve hundred to fourteen hundred people each. Both are best known as summer resorts. But of late, the two towns have also become retirement communities and places where people from larger surrounding towns and cities have vacation homes and cottages.

Russells Point takes its name from James Russell, the original owner of the land around which the village was to grow. It officially became a community in 1913, when a post office, which is still in operation today, was first opened. Some of the stores and restaurants in the downtown Main Street strip of US 33 along the reservoir can be accessed from either the road or from the lake, with docks having been built to allow patrons to tie up their small craft.

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.

The Minnewawa was a venue for some major contests, during the Great Depression Era, when marathon dancing was a fad. The rules of the marathons included a requirement for couples to dance forty-five minutes out of every hour, until all but one couple had been eliminated. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, the Minnewawa Dance Hall hosted the National Endurance Dance Marathon. The competition ended up lasting an absolutely legendary eighty-eight days and two hours.

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.

But again, it was rail services that bolstered the village’s tourist industry, as 1908 brought the arrival of the “Interurban”, an electric train service run by the West Ohio Electric Railway, which also operated out of my hometown of Wapakoneta, one county west. In Wapak, there was an Interurban station next door to the site of what would eventually be my own family’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear. Back then, the lot my grandfather would buy in 1945 was still occupied by an eatery known as Zint’s Cabin, which was right across Blackhoof Street from the Zint family’s sweet store known as the Candy Kitchen.

Cottonwood Resort, Lakeview.
In 1913, a concrete retaining wall was built between Lakeview and Russells Point, which further deepened and expanded the lake and would eventually help integrate the Lakeview tourist community with the Sandy Beach Amusement Park. It’s interesting to note that the site of Indian Lake was originally a Native American settlement. The basin for the lake was a six hundred-forty-acre area that featured a series of ponds, lagoons and marshes. It was best known as a good hunting ground and fishing spot. But in the 1850s, the basin was damned up to create the Lewistown Reservoir, a six thousand three hundred-acre feeder lake to provide water to the Miami and Erie Canal, a mule-driven barge transport system that ran the entire length of the state from the Ohio River in Cincinnati to Lake Erie in Toledo.

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
During the Prohibition Era, famed Chicago gangster and bootlegger Al Capone was rumored to have a hideout on one of the lake’s islands. He was also rumored to make a regular stop at the now locally iconic Alpha Bar, then a speakeasy, in Wapakoneta, to have a few drinks with his “boys” on the way to Indian Lake, since, so the legend goes, the Alpha was a customer of the Capone organization’s illegal booze operations. But like I say, that’s all part of local folklore and I have no way of confirming it. It’s part and parcel of the rich storytelling tradition of my grandfathers’ generation.    

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.

It was Dale’s second wife Martha who saved the day that Fourth, managing to reserve the party room in the Redbird restaurant (which my dad Whitie jokingly referred to as "The Early Bird", a name that stuck at our house) on the main drag in Russells Point, where she then worked as a cook. The lunch was a great success with Newlands and in-laws from all over showing up to enjoy one another’s company. But just after lunch, there was an ungodly commotion out in the street and most of the men decided to go out and see what was happening. I must have been about ten or eleven at the time and, with a couple of my cousins, tagged along.

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.

It was only after making these discoveries that I realized how close Alger was to Indian Lake, an area where the Newland name was well-known. Mary Jo and I ended up driving the nine miles to the lake, turning off the highway onto Newland Road, and visiting Newland’s Landing. This all convinced me that members of our family who had always said that the Indian Lake Newlands and the Wapakoneta Newlands weren’t related were wrong. And I promised myself that on my next trip back to Ohio, I would go to the lake and try to talk to some Newlands to try and find out if they were related to the Alger Newlands, and, therefore, to me.  

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.