YANKEE REDUX – FIRST STRIKE

Doing some historical research on organized labor one day, I suddenly recalled, in very vivid detail, when I first heard the word “strike”. I can’t remember the political details involved, but I assume it was during a prolonged strike (one hundred fifty-six days) by electrical workers at Westinghouse plants all over the United States that took place in 1955-56. I would have been about six years old at the time.  

My pristine little home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, was located about twenty minutes south of the once thriving industrial city of Lima (pronounced “lie-mah” not “lee-mah”, although it was indeed named after the Peruvian capital). Or, better said, perhaps, Lima is located twenty minutes north of Wapakoneta—since the founding of our town pre-dates that of Lima by a couple of decades. It lies about halfway between Cincinnati and Toledo on Interstate 75. The land where both towns were built all originally formed part of the Hog Creek Reservation, the traditional tribal homeland of the Shawnee Nation, wrested from their hands through a series of broken promises, ignored treaties and forced relocation operations, in which these noble natives were “invited” to make a new life for themselves in Kansas on the distant opposite side of the Midwestern region.  

Oil origins - early Lima sour crude sweetening stills

Back in its day, Lima was best known for its oil industry—boasting, as of the early twentieth century, one of the largest oilfields in the United States and one of the country’s largest oil pumping operations (the Buckeye Pipeline), as well as a major refining and petrochemical operation (which continues to function today, almost a century and a half after its founding).  

Such was the Lima oil boom that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, headquartered at the time in Cleveland, decided to set up refining operations there and to open a major office. Rivalry ran high between JDR and the Lima oilmen. Some historical reports suggest that when at first they resisted his attempts to buy them out,  Rockefeller, whose vast family fortune could easily take the hit, started a price war to force their hand. Whatever the case may be, Standard Oil, known locally as SOHIO (Standard Oil of Ohio) when I was growing up, was to become a Lima institution. 

But oil wasn’t all that Lima was about. It was home to one of the country’s most important locomotive builders, its most important builder of school buses, a major steel foundry, one of the country’s most important military tank and amphibious vehicle construction plants, and the Westinghouse Small Motors manufacturing division, among other industries. This last business, Westinghouse, as I mentioned before, was where I first learned the word “strike”.

Back when I was a little boy, I-75 was still being built and the only way to drive into Downtown Lima from Wapakoneta—unless you wanted to come in from the west and cross the entire West Side—was either on the North Dixie Highway or on what we called “the back way” along country roads. But both of these routes took you through the grimy, industrial area known as the South End. There, the highway ran past endless fields of enormous oil storage tanks and industrial plant gates. The air was usually thick with the sulfurous stench of sour crude and ammonia from the refinery and by night was eerily lit by the sullied orange flames of the operation’s venting towers.

Black Legion members in ludicrous attire

The South End was also home to some rough neighborhoods and some even rougher slums. Although when I was growing up there never appeared to me to be a lot of surface racial tension between blacks and whites in Lima, the city had a bad reputation for racism dating back to when my father, Whitie, was a kid. That was when Lima was a major center for an infamously violent branch of the Ku Klux Klan that was known—ironically enough—as the “Black Legion”. It was, regrettably, a homegrown Ohio racist organization that originated as the “Black Guard”, the armed band of black-hooded thugs whose original job it was to protect KKK officers and their families. In a city with an estimated population of around fifty thousand at the time, the KKK openly held a parade in the center of Lima in 1923, a year after my dad was born, that drew a crowd of a hundred thousand.

Against this background, Whitie grew up in a mostly white enclave of the South End during the hard times of the nineteen-twenties and thirties—an era in which the natural grit of both he and his older brother Red got well-honed living there. Neither of them were guys you wanted to mess with, even before they went off to train and fight during World War II.

Lima Petrochemical in the South End

But Red and Whitie were educated in a bi-racial environment and while they weren’t exactly chummy with the African American kids they went to school with, neither were they hostile. Living daily, blacks and whites together, they weren’t imbued with many of the prejudices and irrational fears of the majority of the people in all-white Wapakoneta. For Whitie, the South End was home and we always felt fairly at ease when we traveled through it with him.

That was not the case with our mother, Reba Mae, who had grown up in the all-white conservative rural community in and surrounding our town. She had nothing against blacks, inheriting her mother’s tolerance for all rather than her father’s open and virulent racism. But she was indeed permeated from childhood with the fear-mongering that was common in many carefully preserved white communities back then. And if we kids accompanied her on a shopping trip to Lima, we knew that when we passed through the last “friendly territory”, crossed an old concrete abutted bridge and started entering the South End, she would invariably begin to almost literally prick up her ears, sitting forward, tense in her seat, gripping the steering wheel hard at ten and two and murmuring, “Are your doors locked, kids? Answer me. Are your doors locked? Roll up your windows. Danny! Lock your door!”     

Switchyard at Lima Locomotive  

So there was always a certain apprehension when we drove through the smoky, oily, steely South End of Lima. But on this particular day there was something new. 

I think Whitie was driving us all to downtown Lima for a dinner of hamburgers, fries and frosted malts at the Kewpee sandwich shop—a kind of busman’s holiday for Whitie, since he was, at the time, part-owner of the Teddy Bear Restaurant, back then, the go-to place for hamburgers, fries and malts in Wapakoneta. I was, as usual, on my knees on the backseat of Whitie’s ’49 Ford, my nose pressed to the window, because I always liked to be watching once we passed the Westinghouse plant and the car climbed the tall bridge over the railway-yard below, to take in that gritty, grimy industrial view—which today promised to be more wintry, grey and thrilling than ever. I especially liked to observe the long rows of air ducts on the roof of the massive locomotive works building, looking for all the world like so many large rusty tin hens come to roost in a row on the soaring heights of the structure far beneath the bridge.

Today, however, something else caught my attention first. Directly across the street from the Westinghouse plant, the sidewalk outside of the factory parking lot and the tarmac on the other side of a tall fence, within the lot, were lined end to end with scores of men. Conspicuous by their absence were women and children. The men inside and the ones outside were grimly facing one another. It wasn’t hard for me to tune into the mood that was very apparently unpleasant and hostile. I noticed that my mother and father were purposely looking straight ahead as we drove by very slowly, directed by traffic cops around the part of the crowd outside the fence that had spilled off the sidewalk onto the pavement, but I gawked unabashed at the scene.

A number of the men on the outside of the fence were uniformed police officers, most holding long clubs at port arms with both hands—one gripping the butt, the other palming the tip. A few of them were carrying riot guns instead. Others on the outside of the fence were men in plain clothes. They mostly wore overcoats against the day’s dank chill, the brims of their felt hats pulled low over their eyes, so much so that their indistinguishably colorless grey clothing also resembled uniforms. And some of them, too, were carrying clubs.

On the inside of the parking lot fence, men stood pretty much shoulder to shoulder as well, but in less uniform style. They came and went and milled about and spelled each other at the fence. Some warmed their hands at a few metal drums from which yellow-orange flames sometimes leaped, others shared steaming coffee from metal Thermos flasks, and still others stood with their fingers laced through the diamond-shaped wires of the chain-link fence, staring down the men outside, their faces challenging and angry. Some of the men inside also wore overcoats and hats pulled low. But others were wearing leather bomber jackets or denim and sported billed caps with ear tabs, ball-caps or snap-billed tweed cloth caps. There were men carrying hand-lettered, poster-board signs nailed to two-by-fours. A few, I recall, had their heads bandaged in gauze underneath their hats.

As we advanced past the scene, I heard my mother mutter to my father, “I wonder when this is going to be over so people can get back to work.” Whitie said hard telling, but probably whenever the damned union got its way...or when the company’d had enough and run that bunch of goldbrickers out of there. I leaned over the seat between them and asked what was going on.

“It’s a strike,” my father said.

“What’s a strike?” I asked.

And that question got me my first abbreviated and editorialized lesson on labor relations.

My parents’ view was pretty much the norm among conservative business owners, small and large, in our area of the country. Indeed, Whitie identified completely with a factory-owner in our town who, when threatened once by his workers with unionization, told them that he was a wealthy man. He didn’t need a job. They did. He treated them fairly, he claimed, and said that if they wanted to unionize, to be his guests, that he would simply shut the place down, put a for-sale sign on the door and send them home. Result: The workers practically lynched the union activists who had tried to organize them, and sent them packing.  

In short, from what I gathered, the guys on the outside of the fence who were defending corporate interests were the "good guys", and the ones on the inside of the fence defending their livelihoods and their families’ lifestyles were the "bad guys". They were anti-American, socialists who wanted to undermine the American economy. I remember feeling afraid of the strikers, being glad they were being contained behind the fence, inside the parking lot, by the “good guys” with the clubs on the sidewalk outside.

It would take me years to figure out that this wasn't always—hardly ever, in fact—the way things actually worked. And it wasn’t until, as a professional musician, I became a union member myself, that I really began to think about the anti-union prejudices I’d been brought up with and to realize that, whatever certain big-labor unions had morphed into, the idea behind unions had started out, and often continued to be a good one: people standing together, without discrimination, to defend themselves and others against helplessness and exploitation. 

 

ONCE A BARBER…

 My grandfather was a barber. I’m talking about Whitie’s dad, my Grandpa Murel Newland. A lot of people never knew him as a barber, because he did a lot of other things in his life. But he never forgot having been a barber—kept the tools of his trade all his life, razors, scissors, hand and electric clippers, barber combs and neck brushes. Kind of like someday he might just take it up again.

My Grandma Alice—she was a Henry before she married my grandfather, and her people were from Paulding, Ohio, her father a teamster when teamsters still drove horse-drawn wagons, the Henries on one side and the Hamiltons on the other—used to let me get the barbering tools out and look at them when Grandpa wasn’t home, because she knew I’d be very careful, whereas she never would have trusted my brother or cousins with them, especially the razors! But she realized somehow that I took these things as a curiosity, that my interest was almost “scientific”, that all I wanted to do was hold them and look at them and be able to picture them in my head, and picture Grandpa using them.

She did the same thing with a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun that my youngest uncle had left behind when he went into the Methodist seminary, and with the compact little Puma .22-caliber six-shooter that Grandpa kept under the front seat of his Studebaker for a lot of the years that he was a life insurance salesman in a few dicey neighborhoods. That was back when a lot of people still paid cash, and he would travel around his “debit”—which is what insurance men of those days called their sales territory—collecting premiums when they came due.

Sometimes I would ask her to tell me about when Grandpa was a barber. Grandma never had a problem telling you a story over and over. It was one of the things my mother, Reba Mae, criticized about her. “God!” she would tell my dad, “If I have to hear your mother tell the same stories over that I’ve heard a million times this Thanksgiving, I’m going to lose my mind!”

But I was only too glad to hear the stories again and again and sometimes she added some new detail that I’d never heard before. When I asked about Grandpa’s barbering years, she would go all the way back to when he was a little boy in the early nineteen-hundreds, living in Alger, Ohio, over in Hardin County. The village, which even today has a population that doesn’t reach nine hundred, back then was quite new. It had only been incorporated in 1896 and Murel was born in 1898. Murel’s father, Elmer Newland—his mother was the former Maude Bower—was the barber in town, and as such also, as barbers were back then, a sort of minor surgeon for every sort of wart, mole, cyst or small tumor, since to handle things like that in those days all you had to be was good with a razor. He also was the ad hoc dentist. Not that he could do bridgework, or fill molars or make dentures, but if a client was suffering and didn’t mind having a tooth pulled with a pair of fairly clean pliers, Elmer was your man.

Murel had been Elmer’s apprentice from the time he was still too small to reach the client without a stool to stand on. But the first thing Elmer taught him to use was a straight-razor, and the boy quickly became proficient at it.

When he was old enough, Murel would leave Alger and move to the “big city”. Indeed, the industrial town of Lima back them had a big-city feel. According to Grandma Alice, he first barbered in a major hotel—probably the posh Hotel Argonne, which now is an historical site, but which back then was a beautiful new piece of Lima architecture, constructed on downtown Elizabeth Street right after World War I, opening its doors to the public in 1919. But ever hot-headed and ready to fight at the drop of a hat, Murel couldn’t get along with the other barber who had also managed to get a chair in that fine establishment.

Alice always described the other barber as “a wop”. I had no idea what that meant, but I could tell by how she said it that she intended disdain. Later, I would retell the story to Reba Mae, and, following Grandma’s lead, would describe the barber in question as a wop. My mother stopped me mid-story and told me that just because Grandma Alice said things like that, it didn’t mean I should. I asked her what it meant and she explained that wop meant “without papers” and that it was a nasty term for Italian immigrants. She assured me that Italians were very nice people and asked me to think how I’d feel if I was an Italian and some little snotnose called me that.

I decided to eschew the word from my lexicon, and later consulted with Reba Mae whenever my grandmother used such other dubious terms as kraut, kike, wet-back, mick and spic. I didn’t think any less of Grandma Alice for it. I just figured she didn’t know any better, and that perhaps Reba Mae was the wiser of the two. Hers, then, was the lead I’d follow.

It seems that the enmity between the two barbers eventually boiled over and Murel ended up clocking the other man. Now, Murel never weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, but he was absolutely lethal—as would be my Uncle Red after him—with his fists. Each blow arrived on target with every one of those hundred and fifty pounds behind it. In this case, it was an uppercut to the ear, that ripped the lobe loose from the other barber’s head and a right cross to the jaw that knocked him out.

Cook & Newland Barbershop, Lima, Ohio, 1925

After that incident, Murel was invited to give up his chair at the hotel and at some point after that, he opened up the new place in the basement of the pharmacy on the Public Square with a partner with whom he apparently got along famously. The Italian barber, for his part, started a rumor that when the doctor had sewn his ear back fast to his head, he’d told him that Murel couldn’t have done that with his fist, that he must have slashed the other man with his razor.

One day Murel took time out from work to drop by the hotel again. He walked into the barbershop and said to the other barber, who went pale when he saw him, “I hear you been a-talkin’ a lot o’ hooey about how I cut you with a razor. Tell you what, keep on a-runnin’ your damn mouth and I’ll be back to knock your other ear loose too."

The rumor dissipated and died.      

Anyhow, when I visited Grandma’s house, which I often did, I was allowed to get out all of those things—the barbering tools and the guns—and lay them out on the bed in the guest room or on the floor in front of the hall closet, where they were all kept, even while I was still in grade school. There was only one time when I proved unworthy of that kind of trust. But it didn’t happen at their house. It happened once while we—my family and Grandma and Grandpa—were on vacation together in the Upper Peninsula. We were staying, as usual, in one of the cabins at the Buckeye Rustic Resort, on Lake Manistee, which belonged to Murel’s old insurance partner, Morris Butcher. I must have been about six at the time. And I loved being there with Whitie and Grandpa Murel and Morris. I watched Grandpa’s every move, whether he was fishing or organizing his tackle, or going through his morning ablutions at the galvanized metal kitchen sink in that cabin that was basically one huge room, a small screened-in front porch, a utilitarian privy—just a rudimentary toilet—off of the porch and three bedrooms off of the big main room, the central feature of which was a large potbellied woodstove, and which served as kitchen, dining room, living room and extra sleeping room provided by a fairly comfy couch and a small, dusty, sleeping loft to which access was gained via a steep barn-ladder.

On the morning in question, I’d been watching Grandpa shave, while Grandma Alice and my mother, Reba Mae, were busy preparing a breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and pancakes on the wood-burning cook-stove. It was, for me at least, a fascinating process, because Murel wouldn’t have thought of using a Schick electric shaver like Whitie did. And back then, he still even refused to use a safety razor—he wouldn’t do that until the advent of Wilkinson Sword Steel razorblades, which were the only ones, according to him, that could rival a straight-razor. He still shaved the way he’d been taught as a barber: standing in from of a little piece of mirror above the sink in his trousers and undervest, soaking his face first with a scalding hot towel over which he’d poured water directly from the teakettle, then lathering up with thick foam that he’d whipped up thoroughly by vigorously beating a bar of Williams Shaving Soap in a mug with his long-bristled shaving brush. It was a veritable morning ritual the climax of which was when, with long, clean, careful strokes of a gleaming razor that he had conscientiously stropped, before the whole process began, he would give himself the cleanest shave ever.

Then he’d say, “Feel that, Danny, what do you think?” And I’d run my hand across his jaw and say, “Smooth, Grandpa!” And then he’d say, “Smoothest shave you can get. There’s nothing like a straight-razor.”

On this particular morning, when Murel finished his shave and I didn’t miss a beat of the whole process, I waited until he’d wiped the remaining traces of foam from his face and razor with a hand towel and slapped on his Rexall Bay Rum cologne and expected to see him carefully put the slim razor away in his dop kit before going to the table for breakfast. But just then I heard Whitie call, “Hey Dad, come here a sec and look at this,” from out on the porch, and Grandpa left everything on the drain board and went out.

There was nobody right there. Whitie and Grandpa were out on the porch, Grandma and Reba Mae were busy with breakfast preparation, my brother was just a baby and still fast asleep and my big sister hadn’t gotten up yet either. I figured this was my chance. I whipped up the soap in the shaving mug with Grandpa’s brush and liberally soaped up my face and chin and throat, as I’d so often watched Grandpa do. Then I unfolded the gleaming blade. Grandpa had made it look so easy. So I imitated the way he held the razor to the best of my ability and scraped foam from one cheek with a long stroke, and then started to pull it down the opposite cheek. This time I felt a white-hot burn, and razor and foam came away scarlet. It was just then that I heard my grandfather shout, “What in tarnation are you doing you little dickens!”

And then he was there, snatching the razor out of my hand and quickly lifting me up under his arm to stick my face under the tap, before running icy well water on the wound to try and stop the bleeding. My mother, who heard the commotion, came running over and I heard her exclaim, “Oh my god!”

Murel said, “He’s okay, I’m just a-washin’ it off. Then I’ll put some styptic on that and he’ll be good as new.”

“Stypic!” my mother shouted.

“Just go on back over there and let me handle this,” Murel scolded, and, incredibly, she went.

Expert barber, he had the bleeding stopped in no time and sat me on the edge of the drain board and daubed the cut with a styptic pencil that burned like fire, but closed the wound up so that by later that day it was just a scratch. Reba Mae was furious with me and barely spoke to me the rest of the day. Whitie wasn’t even aware anything had happened. After lunch my Grandma Alice, who always amazed me with her sensible approach and with her unshakable calm in the midst of everyday emergencies walked up to me on the boat dock where I sat, rather dejectedly at having screwed up and been such an idiot, pretending to fish.

“Hey bub,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”

“Fishing, Grandma,” I said laconically.

“Catchin’ anything?”

I shook my head without turning around.

“Hey, look here a second,” she said. I put my fishing rod down, swiveled around on the rough planks and stood up.

She patted my head affectionately with one hand. The other one she was holding behind her back. “Tell you what,” she said, “Next time you feel like you ‘need a shave’, use this.” She brought the hand around from behind her back and handed me something. I took it and saw that it was a very old-fashioned Gillette safety razor with no blade in it. She realized all I wanted to do was imitate Murel and she couldn’t see the harm in it. She even gave me my very own can of Foamy shaving cream and I would enjoy standing by Grandpa applying foam to my face and scraping it off with the bladeless razor whenever we were together and it was time for him to shave.

I kept that old safety razor, and started using it with a real Gillette Blue Blade in it when I was thirteen and first started shaving. And I kept using it until I went into the Army at age twenty, long after Grandma Alice had passed away from cancer and Grandpa Murel had remarried to her first cousin, Floetta, who’d had a crush on him since she was a preteen.  

I was remembering all this because I recently came across a picture of Murel, before he was anybody’s grandpa, in his barber shop on the Square in downtown Lima, Ohio. It was an antique picture that somebody had posted on the memory site of my hometown, Wapakoneta. The back of the photo had an inscription in careful cursive that identified it as a picture of Bob Cook and Murel Newland’s barbershop under Thompson’s drug store in Lima. It also identified Murel as the father of Norm Newland, Whitie’s given name. It said that the photo had been taken circa 1925-26.

For the first time in my life, my grandfather’s barbering days were no longer just invented snapshots in my childhood imagination, the product of Alice’s tales of their youth. I now could see Murel, the twenty-seven-year-old, father of two boys, Whitie and his brother Red, who still couldn’t know that he would be the father of four boys and grandfather to twelve grandkids, a slight, cocky young man in an impeccable white shirt and tie, standing next to his barber’s chair in the shop he shared with his erstwhile partner. Suddenly, it was no longer family folklore, but documented history and it was as if I could embrace my grandfather’s youth as a fond memory of my own.       

REBA MAE—AN INTRODUCTION Part One

I’ve been an orphan since July 22^nd, 2003. I was going on fifty-three when it happened. I guess a lot of people wouldn’t call that being orphaned. But consider for a moment that many people are never prepared for losing their parents, no matter when it happens in life.

Reba Mae - 1941 - aged 18

I think sometimes for expats it can be particularly bad because you don’t get to see your parents often. In my case, once a year if I was lucky and a couple of times it was several years between reunions. Not only does that generate a lot of regrets, but it also means that you tend to freeze your loved ones in time. In your mind they never age. But then they do. And then they die.

I have friends my own age (which I’d rather not talk about) who still have one or both of their parents. If their parents are still well and happy, which some of them apparently are, I admit that I envy my friends that blessing. If mine were alive today, my father would be ninety-seven and my mother ninety-six. People actually live to be that age nowadays, some of them quite well.

My mother Reba Mae died the same year as my father Whitie did. They were both eighty. Reba Mae was the last to go. Whitie preceded her by six months. I can’t be sure, but I think that might have been a kind of pact they had. I mean, they had been together for sixty years. And from the time he was in his sixties, Whitie was always saying that he hoped he went before she did, because he “didn’t know what he’d do without her.”

Hearing that, a stranger might say, “Aw, isn’t that sweet?” But, believe me, that wasn’t the kind of romantic thing Whitie might say just to be sweet. He really didn’t have a romantic bone in his body. At least none where anyone could see it.  Example: One year for Christmas, he got her a lightweight aluminum snow shovel and put it under the tree with a red bow on it. To be fair, that same year he also got her a pretty tweed coat with a Russian black squirrel collar. But...you know.

Lennox School on the Hardin Pike 1933-34 - one of the one-room

 schools Reba Mae attended. That's her, the one with the banana

 curls just in front of and to the right of the teacher. She was 10.

 (Courtesy of WDN and the Linda Knerr Collection) 

Clearly, although Whitie did have a funny sense of humor, whenever his perennial depression let it shine through the clouds for a moment, the snow shovel wasn’t a prank. It was like, “Okay, what’s Reba been wanting? A new coat and, oh yeah, a lightweight snow shovel!”

When my sister Darla, who was about eleven or twelve at the time—and quite precocious—pointed out that a snow shovel for your wife was about the most thoughtless gift she could imagine, Whitie countered that he didn’t see why. She’d been wanting an aluminum one for years. He knew because he’d had to listen to her bitch about how damned heavy the coal shovel was when it was full of snow. So, he indicated, buying her the shovel she wanted seemed to him to show that he was thinking of her.

“Besides, don’t you think the coat I got her’s pretty snazzy?” he wanted to know, “I sure do. That’s a genuine Russian black squirrel collar on it too.”

So no, his talk of wanting to die before she did wasn’t a sweet nothing. It was pragmatic, practical, because when he said he “didn’t know what he’d do without her,” he actually meant that if she weren’t there to tell him where it was, he literally wouldn’t be able to find his ass with both hands.

I’ve written a lot about Whitie over the past few years since his death. Anyone who has read any of those musings knows that my relationship with my father was, to say the least, conflictive. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. On the contrary, perhaps I loved him more than was good for me and struggled with his apparent lack of empathy for me and with never seeming to be able to achieve any perceptible level of approval from him.

Reba Mae, her older brother Gene and their little brother 

Kenny. Country kids.

His importance to me, nevertheless, should be clear from the fact that, although this is supposed to be a story about my mother, I’ve spent a not small part of the first paragraphs of it talking about my father. But that’s not an error. It’s a given, because the all-pervasiveness of his influence on my mother’s life, let alone mine, would be difficult to overstate.

Suffice it to say that his death—and his dying which drew out agonizingly over the course of several years—proved highly traumatic for me. Much more so than I could have imagined, since throughout much of his life and mine, I’d heard him talk a lot about wanting to die, and hearing his successive therapists opine that he was indeed suicidal when at the lowest levels of his half-century struggle with manic depression (or bi-polar disorder as it is described today).

Perhaps this was because his way of facing the inevitable demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what I had always suspected. Even when his doctors claimed he was suicidal. Namely, that as a suicide, Whitie was a phony. That he didn’t survive long years of combat during World War II because he had a death wish. That when he came face to face with death, when it grabbed him by the throat and sought to choke the life out of him, he latched on and choked it right back, even though he knew it was futile, that he was hopelessly out-gunned. So it was that, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, although they told him they figured he’d be dead in six months, he fought it for four years.

The symbiosis between my parents was palpable to me as a child. Not so much when I was small, but surely by the time I reached my pre-teen years. Despite being the good and loving parent that she was, no one had to tell me by that time that Whitie was Reba Mae’s favorite “child”. Although “favorite” is perhaps not the right term. He was the “child” who most required her help and who most fully absorbed her attention. To my siblings and to me, Reba Mae set the tone for our relationship with her by saying, “I’m not worried about you. I know you’ll always do the right thing and make the right choices, ones that’ll make you proud of yourselves and make your father and me proud of you too.”

Now, we all handled that crushing responsibility in our own way. It was probably toughest for Darla, because she worked hard at being the model daughter, the straight-A student, the best musician, the best she could be, in fact, in every extracurricular endeavor, a popular girl in school as well—a leader. She made it look so easy. But when we became adults she once admitted to me that it had been almost overwhelmingly hard.  

Our little brother Dennis James (or Jim as we called him at home) seemed to have the healthiest attitude. It was like, “Great! It’s all up to me so I’ll do whatever I want.” And boy, did he ever! He literally did it his way practically from the time he was a very little boy. And yet, a lot of the erroneous choices he made, and that lonely feeling of performing on the high-wire without a net, haunted him and caused him great suffering later in life.

For my part, I just mostly muddled through in every respect except my music and my writing. Those were areas where I was in my element, if badgered by self-doubt all the same. Because I took my mother’s demand for commitment and self-governance dead seriously, I was doing that high-wire act from the outset, and always with the nagging feeling that I was screwing it up. That I would, ultimately, fall from grace, and let everybody down. Those self-doubts and constant misgivings turned me into a fiercely independent and often secretive and taciturn teen—a stage when one of my favorite pop songs was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock (I am an island)”. If I was screwing up, I was doing it in private and without asking for help from anybody.

This was the exact opposite of how I had been as a little boy, when I drove my mother nuts with my worrying about every little thing and constantly asking her if I was making a mistake, being bad, endangering my health, sinning, and so on. She had trouble recognizing me as a teenager. And although I’d driven her to distraction as a worry-wart kid, she wouldn’t have minded having that kid back again, I’m sure, from the time I was thirteen or so.  

The month of May always brings back Reba Mae to me more than any other time of the year. First there’s Mother’s Day, and then, a few days later, on the sixteenth, her birthday. It’s a time when I try to remember her out of context, as if she were nothing to me. In other words, without seeing her in the reflection of my own passions and biases.

Reba Mae (right) with her parents (left)

and siblings, Gene (rear), Ken and Marilyn

Although I’ve always been a storyteller, I think my mother’s death was the first time that, in a flash, I could see a person’s life from start to finish, and realize that each individual’s time on earth is just that—a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. In between, there might be rising action, climax and denouement before the inevitable end. Or there might be an anthology of short stories, a sort of life storybook, with a series of beginnings and endings, comings and goings before the last page is written and read. Or in some cases, a life will seemingly flat-line from beginning to end and barely make a ripple. But in those cases, I always suspect there is some underlying secret that no one else will ever know, but that piques, like nothing else, the curiosity of writer types like myself.

Reba Mae was a very internal person. Her younger sister Marilyn once described that as a trait of the Weber side of the family. What she actually said was, “We Webers are all a bunch of tight-lipped krauts.” But in Reba Mae’s case, I could sometimes see a glimmer of her rich inner world, into which she never intentionally let anyone, and especially not Whitie. That was where she lived in the quiet moments. It was her survival mode. Since although she sought to keep it simple on the surface, she was a highly cerebral woman.

Given half a chance, Reba Mae could have been just about anything she wanted to be. She was intelligent, creative, curious and witty. She was also beautiful, a real knockout when she was young. But she was also almost pathologically shy in her younger years, and under-confident throughout most of her life.

Reba Mae's maternal and paternal families: 

(Left rear) paternal grandparents Salome (Leninger) 

and John Weber, followed by her maternal grandfather 

Job Cavinder, and by her father Vern Weber. 

(Middle row left to right) Maternal grandmother 

Mary Landis Cavinder, holding Reba,and Reba's mother's 

sisters, Edith, Flossie and Ruth. Kneeling, her mother's 

brothers, Jesse and Ivan, who is holding

Reba's brother Gene. 

Because she was so beautiful and intelligent, her shyness was often mistaken for haughtiness. Nobody could understand why such a gorgeous and very apparently smart woman would have anything to be under-confident about. So when she lowered her head and walked by somebody like she hadn’t noticed them, some people took offense and described her as “stuck up”. It wasn’t until they got to know her a little that they realized her reluctance to engage was all about not knowing why anybody would be interested in talking to her, so best not to make them feel obliged to say hello if they didn’t want to.

Reba Mae's father, Vern Weber

Reba Mae was the daughter of a tenant farmer. My grandfather, Vern Weber, was the son of immigrants. His parents were Germans from the Alsace Lorraine. My mother would sometimes reflect that it made her sad to think of her grandmother, because the only thing she could remember was that her Grandma Weber was an unhappy woman who never smiled.

They had a small farm of their own near the village of Glynwood in west central Ohio. When Grandpa Vern first married my grandmother, Myrtle Cavinder, who herself grew up on a farm near Jackson Center, he built them a bungalow on his father’s property, figuring he would one day inherit the farm. Instead, when his parents died, according to my mother, the farm went to a couple of old bachelor uncles. It caused bad blood in the family and apparently had something to do with Grandpa Vern’s sister, to whom he didn’t speak for twenty years or more.

Long story short, my grandfather ended up working as a tenant farmer within the farmland empire of another German immigrant, Charles Herbst. He worked three different farms for Herbst in Shelby and Auglaize Counties before eventually moving to the Auglaize County seat, Wapakoneta, my home town, once my mother and her older brother Eugene reached high school age.

Egg money helped make ends meet.

So, Reba Mae spent her childhood in the countryside. She grew up during the Depression, so times were tough. But thanks to the fact that they lived on farms, her family always had enough to eat. And between the thirty dollars a month that Herbst paid for living expenses, the money my grandmother made selling eggs and a small share of the crop harvest and dairy production, as well as my grandfather’s skill as a small-game hunter, they managed to make ends meet.

But until her family moved to town, Reba Mae never lived in a house with electricity or running water. She attended the one-room schoolhouse nearest to whichever farm they were living on and did her homework by the light of a coal-oil lamp. School was always at least a mile away and she either walked it or rode her Shetland pony. The homes she lived in always had an outhouse, a hand pump in the kitchen sink and a woodstove for cooking and heating. The one modern convenience was always a telephone, a wall-type device that featured a crank-operated ringer box with a fixed mouthpiece and a detachable cone-shaped audio handset.

That life instilled my mother with an inherent love of animals and nature in direct conflict with a distaste for any and all things “rustic”. Although she deigned to live in a cabin at the Buckeye Rustic Resort on Lake Manistee in Michigan for a week’s vacation once a year, that was the limit of her stomach for life in the wild. While she was frugal and unassuming as an adult, she wanted every comfort and modern convenience money could buy...including a lightweight aluminum snow shovel.

(To be continued) 

The Tour 1 – Defiance Street

Caption: Our fomer house on Defiance Street as it looks today.

The very first home I recall in my hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, was the one on Defiance Street. It wasn’t the first place we lived after I was born, but we moved there not long afterward.

The first place was, I am told, on Lima St. (That’s Lima pronounced like lima beans, not like Lima, Peru). That place my mother, Reba Mae, had gotten not long before my father, Norm, came home from World War II, when the fighting in Europe ended. They got married in the early days of US action in the war, while he was on a three-day leave from training and maneuvers. Almost immediately, he went into processing for overseas duty. He was gone for three and a half years.

Mom had saved for the down payment on that place, first waitressing and then working at the Tank Depot in Lima, Ohio, which was the most important military tank and amphibious vehicle maker in the country. She rose through the ranks there from being a “duck” taper – the job consisted of using a special tape to seal all seams on the amphibs (landing craft called “ducks” because they could “swim” in the sea before coming ashore bearing infantry troops) – to the post of tank inspector by the end of the war.

Lima…not that one, the other one

Since I’ve mentioned Lima twice, I might as well permit myself a generous digression here, since – in addition to the fact that my father was born and raised there – for all of us in Wapak back then, Lima, located 15 miles north, was “the city”. Anybody today seeing, for the first time, the rather hollow shell of Lima that has remained would find this hard to understand, but back then, in the first half of the 20^th century, Lima had a real big-city feel about it. And indeed, it was an important American city on a number of fronts.

It was built on what had been part of the Hog Creek Reservation, land which, for a number of years after the Treaty of Greenville, belonged to the Shawnee Nation, but which was opened to white settlement in the 1830s, when the Shawnees were rounded up and forced to surrender their holdings, before being packed off to Kansas. Malaria was rife among the first settlers along the swampy banks of the Ottawa River (better known as Hog Creek – or if you’re from there, Hog ‘crick’). When the settlers found relief through a remedy manufactured in Peru, a pioneering city father known as Judge Patrick G. Goode, suggested that the early white settlement should be called Lima in honor of the Peruvian city where the medication was made. The Judge insisted that the name should be pronounced as in Spanish: Lee-mah. But the Anglicized pronunciation, Lie-mah, was the one that stuck.

It was also on the banks of the Ottawa that Lima’s first source of fortune lay. In 1885, businessman Ben Faurot accidentally discovered oil there. It wasn’t that he wasn’t looking to exploit some natural resource, just not oil. He owned the Lima Paper Mill and wanted a cheap source of both natural gas and water to run it. So he decided to drill for either on the banks of Hog Creek. Whatever he struck first, he would figure that’s what he’d been drilling for. But what his drill hit wasn’t gas or water. Instead, he struck oil and in so doing kicked off the Northwest Ohio Oil Boom.

A savvy operator, Faurot organized a syndicate of local businessmen to buy up the oil rights on farmland on the outskirts of Lima and in the surrounding two counties. But when word of their find got out, the little syndicate, called the Trenton Rock Oil Company, even with its 250 established wells, wasn’t enough to scare off the likes of John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was operating out of Cleveland at the time.

Rockefeller moved Standard Oil into Lima, built a refinery to improve the sour crude (petroleum with high sulfur content that stinks to high heaven) that the local basin yielded, and by means of the kind of price fixing he had employed elsewhere to create monopoly industries – in this case selling oil at 15 cents a barrel when the earlier market price had been 60 cents – sought to run his smaller Lima competitors out of business. The local oilmen fought back, however, and when an anti-trust decision handed down in 1911 forced Rockefeller to break up his interests, fourteen independent Lima producers founded the Lima Oil Company that would later evolve into Marathon.

In the first decade or so of its history, the Lima oilfield was the largest in the United States and although the Texas oil boom was to render it pale by comparison, Lima remained an important oil industry center, as both a major pumping station (home to the Buckeye pipeline that piped crude all the way to Chicago) and as the headquarters for huge refining operations (the Standard Oil Refinery and Lima Petrochemicals).

I recall when I was a kid, Lima residents being proud that, due to its oil interests and the Tank Depot, Lima was – legend had it – “seventh on Hitler’s list” of American cities he would bomb if Nazi Germany ever found a way to attack the United States directly.

But oil was not Lima’s only claim to fame. Lima steel tycoon John Galvin’s Superior Coach was to become the world’s largest manufacturer of school buses and funeral coaches. The Lima Locomotive Works (later Lima-Baldwin-Hamilton) created the prototype for the modern steam engine and was known worldwide for creating some of the fastest, most powerful steam locomotives anywhere. Out of that industry grew the Ohio Power Shovel Company, a renowned steam-shovel builder. Westinghouse had a major plant in Lima, as did Ford. The Ex-Cell-O Corporation had its headquarters there, as did the electric machinery-maker Lima Electric. The city was also a major manufacturer of parts for heavy cranes used in steel, logging, construction and other industries. And Lima was, additionally, home to a wide variety of other industrial shops, cottage industries, factories and printing operations.

To add to the big-city feeling, it had a few modest “skyscrapers” like the Cook Tower, the National City Bank Building and the Hotel Argonne. No fewer than eight railways served the city carrying passengers and freight all over the United States. The city had two major hospitals, its own symphony orchestra and, eventually, a branch of the Ohio State University. All of this in a city whose population, even in its heyday, never surpassed sixty thousand.

Caption: Lima even boasted a few "skyscrapers" like Cook Tower.

Big-City Bad Boys

But the big-city illusion was also upheld by the less savory side of city life. In the Prohibition years (1919-1933), when the United States Congress provided the Mafia with a golden business opportunity by banning the making, purchase, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages, Lima developed, along with its connections to big business, some no less fluid ties with the mob. In those days and in certain circles, the city was known as “Little Chicago”. And although the Italian families that were popularly known to have Mafia connections were considered to be “small potatoes” at a national level, they were apparently held in high esteem in their peer group, since Lima was where certain “heavies” hung out when things were too hot in Chicago or Cleveland, and the local bosses were their hosts: a sort of hospitality industry for temporarily exiled gangsters. As a result, Lima was also home to some great Italian nightclubs, restaurants and speakeasies.

Perhaps the most notorious event in the city’s crime history was the Dillinger jail break, which ended up being a little slice of my own family’s history.

Caption: Notorious gangster, John Dillinger

Bank robber John Dillinger’s criminal reputation reached the status of an urban legend by the time Federal agents gunned him down coming out of a movie theater in Chicago in 1934. But, truth be told, his “fame” was largely undeserved. The fact is that Dillinger went to prison after his first serious armed robbery. He and a friend, who couldn’t find work in their native Indiana, decided to hold up a grocery store. They beat up the owner, stole 120 dollars and were promptly arrested. The judge decided to make an example of Dillinger, who had a previous rap for grand theft auto, and sentenced him to ten to twenty years in prison. He was paroled after eight and a half years in 1933. While he was in prison, he made friends with some of Indiana’s most hardened criminals and became a highly applied apprentice. When he was paroled, it was as if he had graduated from “crime school”.

That year was the one in which Dillinger built his reputation as an armed felon and – in the hard times of the Depression when so many were out of work because of a stock market crash caused mainly by Wall Street’s greed – became, along with Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and other “professional” gangsters, something of a folk hero.

He went on a crime spree immediately upon release from prison. The first bank he robbed was in New Carlisle, Ohio in June of that year. But after that one he became more sophisticated, posing as a vault security expert and gaining access to safes in several banks using this trick. He and the gang that he formed were eventually credited with having stolen a total of more than 300,000 dollars (an absolute fortune in those days) from a dozen or more banks in a series of holdups using a variety of modus operandi. They also held up a few police stations in order to supply themselves with weaponry, bulletproof vests and other paraphernalia. But all of Dillinger’s major exploits took place within the single year between June 1933, when he was paroled and July 1934, when he was killed in the Chicago shootout with Federal officers.

His jail break at the Allen County Jail in Lima, was what placed him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list – that and the fact that while he was on the run he stole a car and drove it across the state line into Indiana, which gave the Feds the excuse they had been looking for to take over the Dillinger investigation from a variety of local police from Chicago, Illinois to Dayton, Ohio and points in between. On September 22, 1933, Dillinger and his gang robbed the Citizens National Bank in nearby Bluffton. He was holed up in Dayton, 70 miles south of Lima when he was recognized and tailed by police back north to Lima, where he was placed under arrest.

It was on Columbus Day, October 12, 1933, that three gunmen from Dillinger’s gang, Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley and Russell Clark rolled into town to break him out of the Allen County jail. My great-grandmother, Maude Numbers, owned the diner right across North Main St. from the Allen Country Jail and Courthouse in Lima. She was just closing up when two hulking men in overcoats with slouch hats pulled low over their eyes tried the door and, finding it locked, tapped on the glass with the edge of a fifty-cent piece. Maude ignored them at first, but they were doggedly persistent. When she drew near the glass and mouthed the words “I’m closed!”, one of the men said, “We just want a couple o’ steaks, lady.” Then, holding a fifty-dollar bill up for her to see, he added, “We’ll make it worth your while.” She remembered thinking that they looked like cops or gangsters, one or the other, not just your normal run-of-the-mill guys.

Maude let them in and made them a meal and coffee. They ordered more coffee and pie for dessert. Then they paid her the fifty dollars they’d promised, thanked her and crossed the street to the Allen County jail, where they were joined by a third man.

It was only a matter of minutes afterward that Maude heard gunfire and shouts from across the street. She was hurrying around the counter and across the little dining room to relock her door when – according to her own account – a cop who was one of her morning regulars, burst in, jumped the counter and lay on the floor trembling, revolver in hand saying, “Sweet Jesus, Maudie, they’re gonna kill us all! They’re bustin’ Dillinger out!”

From her description, it seems likely that the two gunmen who ate at Maude Numbers’ diner were Makley and Pierpont. Makley was a big guy with an imposing presence whose nickname was “Fat Charles” and Pierpont (a.k.a. “Handsome Harry”) was always neat, well-dressed and presentable enough to pass for whatever he wished. He had actually held a legitimate job as an insurance salesman – when he wasn’t knocking off banks.

This was not Grandma Numbers’ only brush with gangsters in Lima. She once left her car running in front of the butcher shop while she went in to pick up an order of meat for her diner. While she was inside, a man who had just been involved in an armed robbery and was running from police, jumped into her car and drove off, burning rubber. The car turned up a few weeks later in a high-speed chase in Chicago in which police strafed the vehicle with machine gun fire, killing the driver. He turned out to be a second cousin to Chicago Mafia boss and bootlegger Al Capone. Maude’s car was returned to her much the worse for wear.

In the Dillinger break-out, it seems probable that the thugs were betting on the county jail’s only having a skeleton crew at that hour on a holiday. Although Columbus Day wasn’t declared a Federal holiday until the following year, it was already widely celebrated as a banking and administrative holiday in the United States. It seems odd that Allen County Sheriff Jesse Sarber wouldn’t have been better prepared when holding someone as notorious as John Dillinger, but news stories from that time indicate that when Dillinger’s men walked into the county jail, the sheriff was sitting at his desk reading the newspaper and was accompanied only by Mrs. Sarber and Deputy Wilber Sharp.

Rumor had it at the time that the breakout was a Plan B. The Dillinger Gang had first asked their mob contacts in Lima to check around and see if Sarber could be bought. The answer that came back was, “not a chance”. So they decided to try a ruse instead, telling Sarber that they were Indiana State prison officials and that they were there to take delivery of one John Dillinger and return him to that state for trial. Sarber coolly asked them for their credentials and that was when Makley, Clark and Pierpont all pulled handguns. Clark apparently covered the deputy, while the other two trained their guns on the sheriff and his wife and told Sarber to hand over the keys to the cells. When the lawman reached for his desk drawer, Pierpont evidently thought he was going for a gun. That’s when he shot the sheriff in the stomach. Jesse Sarber fell to the floor, critically wounded.

Now completely out of control, both Pierpont and Makley started shouting at the dying sheriff to tell them where the keys were and punctuated each shout by clubbing him with their pistol butts. Finally, Mrs. Sarber handed over the keys to make them stop pistol-whipping her husband, but by then the sheriff was already mortally wounded.

They gave the keys to Deputy Sharp and made him open the cell block, locking the two witnesses in a holding cell and leaving the sheriff bleeding to death on the office floor. Sharp was later quoted as saying that they fired their guns down the corridor to intimidate the other prisoners and one of them shouted, “You other bastards get back. We don’t want anybody but Johnny.” It was also reported that when Dillinger emerged and saw the moribund lawman on the floor in a pool of blood in the outer office, he said, “Why did you have to do that?” Dillinger knew what this meant. Now there was a murder rap against them, and not just any murder, but that of a cop – and a sheriff to boot.

The murder in the City of Lima not only placed Dillinger on the most wanted list, but also turned out to be the final downfall of Pierpont, Makley and Clark. They were on the lam for some months after the jail break that cost Sheriff Sarber his life and got as far as Tucson, Arizona, but by March 1934, they had all been captured, tried and found guilty of murder. When they were extradited to Lima for trial, it was the new Allen County Sheriff, Don Sarber, the late Jesse Sarber’s own son, who headed the posse that escorted the prisoners back to the scene of the crime and bound them over to the court for trial.

Makley and Pierpont were sentenced to death. Clark got a life sentence. Makley, a native of Saint Marys, Ohio, was shot to death in a botched prison break at the state penitentiary in Columbus, where he was awaiting execution. Pierpont, who was born in Muncie, Indiana, but whose family later moved to the Leipsic area in Ohio, was wounded in the same attempt but survived and was later put to death in the electric chair. Clark – Indiana-born and raised, like Dillinger – lost his nerve and decided at the last minute not to take part in the escape. He lived to serve 34 years of his life sentence. He was paroled in 1968 for reasons of health and died of cancer four months later on Christmas Eve.

First Light

But although Lima was to play a big role in my youth later on, when we first moved to Defiance Street, I was too young to know or care that the city even existed. My world, the first one I recall, was restricted to that house and the yard and sidewalk on which it stood. And at that age, it seemed like an entire universe.

Many years after the fact, my mother admitted that she was crushed when my father came home from overseas and taking one look at the home she had created for them with great sacrifice, said he didn’t plan to live in “a shithole like that” after sleeping in foxholes, salt mines and pigsties for three and a half years in combat. The place was a reconverted log cabin with only basic facilities, but she figured they would be happy wherever they were as long as they had each other. Norm had other, bigger, ideas.

The house on Defiance Street was Dad’s father and mother’s place before we moved in. My grandparents built a much smaller house half a block away on the other side of the street for themselves, and Dad took out a mortgage to buy their place. I was only about two years old when we moved in so my first remembered images are from there.

My very first recollection is of lying on my back, very comfortable and warm, hearing my mother hum a tune while she cooked at the stove next to me and seeing the beautiful pattern of light that the half-closed Venetian blinds cast on the kitchen ceiling. When I told my mother about this purely sensory memory years later, she said it was because she used to place a laundry basket on the kitchen table next to the side window with a cushion and blankets in it and put me in there while she baked, so she could keep an eye on me while I had a nap.

From then on it was as if my mind had suddenly awakened. I can recall sitting on the wet sidewalk in the sun after a summer rain, leaning forward to wet my head in a puddle of clean, clear water and seeing my face reflected there for the first time. I remember watching black ants marching along in a straight column through an expansion gap in the cement sidewalk slabs carrying leaves on their backs, and hearing a mourning dove coo and a cicada (that we called locusts) sing and asking my mother what they were. And I also remember being awakened on a mid-summer morning, light from the east window of the room I shared with my older sister flooding in, hearing the sound of a jackhammer breaking up the pavement on Defiance Street outside and thinking it was the most wonderfully powerful sound I had ever heard, loving the vibration of it in my chest.

Caption: Dan and sister Darla, back porch on Defiance Street, 1952.

I have a memory too of sitting under the sill of one of the downstairs windows that looked onto the street and watching my sister, Darla, trot down the steps to the sidewalk and board a school bus. It was a dark, wintery, rainy morning and she was wearing the kind of bright yellow oilskin slicker and matching sou’wester hat we almost all wore to school on rainy days back then. Its yellow hue was so bright that both Darla and the bright yellow school bus seemed to be giving off a light of their own in the pouring rain. I was crying because I didn’t want my sister to leave and my mother handed me a picture book that she had read to me a thousand times. It was called “Daddies” and it was all about what daddies – good all-American, hard-working daddies – did when they went off to work in the morning. The illustrations were beautifully drawn and painted and that morning my eye fell on the one of a daddy who was a policeman. He was wearing a black slicker not unlike my sister’s yellow one and was directing traffic on a dark stormy morning not unlike this one. So that daddy immediately became my favorite and whenever I saw that book I would open it up to the policeman and ask my mother to read that page to me.

It was in that house too, probably out of loneliness and boredom in the hours that Darla was away at grade school, that I invented two invisible friends, sisters called Marie and Chuddah (Chuddah? Don’t ask…), with whom I played and talked all day – to such an extent that I think it kind of worried my mother. Marie was the good girl and Chuddah the bad one and depending on my mood, I identified with one or the other.

When Darla got home from school, or on Saturdays and in the summer, we played with a brother and sister from up the street called Buzz and Brenda. Darla, who was always a smart cookie and had a perversely ornery streak, found the two of them delightfully naive and used to talk them into doing all kinds of things. She was so incredibly persuasive that she even got them, for instance, to actually eat the mud pies she “baked” for them.

The Omar Man and Others

On Darla’s school days the highlights of my day were provided by visits from various and sundry vendors that, in those days of one-car families and corner grocery stores, offered their services and products door to door to stay-at-home housewives.

My favorite, hands down, was the Omar Man. The Omar Man worked for the Omar Bakery in Lima. He came in a red and white panel truck with a winged doughnut on the side. At the time, I was too young to know that the doughnut was also a logo and stood for the O in Omar. For me, it was just a doughnut that could fly. The truck was rigged up specially with a sliding door that the Omar Man could leave open and with a tall steering column and gas and brake pedals flat on the floor so that he could drive standing up. There was a fold-down seat he could sit on to drive the distance from the bakery to his route, but once he was in his territory he had to stop at practically every house and being able to drive with the door open and standing up saved him the time and trouble of having to get up and sit down and open and close the door every few minutes as he made his way up the street.

The Omar Man wore a uniform that reminded me of the policeman’s in my “Daddies” book. It was charcoal gray with a military-style peaked cap that bore a silver shield with the winged O on it, trousers with a regimental stripe down the side of the leg and a waist-length jacket with epaulets and silver buttons that looked a lot like the so-called “Eisenhower” jacket that was part of the uniform my father had worn toward the end of the war, when he was with the Seventh Army. The majority of men from ages twenty-five to forty at that time (the early 1950s) were World War II vets and, whether they were cops, gas station attendants or delivery men, knew how to wear their uniforms with pride and flare. The Omar Man was no exception. You’d have thought he belonged to some elite flying-doughnut squadron.

When he rang the bell and sang out, “Omaaaar!” there was always a struggle between my mother and me, with her trying her best to keep me behind her and out of the doorway. What she was trying to avoid was my perusing the spectacular display of goodies that the Omar Man carried up to the porch from his truck in a large, heavy-laden, two-tiered tray: peanut-butter, chocolate chip and oatmeal-date cookies; rich, cream-filled devil’s food cupcakes with fudge frosting; glazed, iced and powdered-sugar doughnuts; white cake with sky-blue-trimmed white frosting, cream or jelly-filled long johns; buttermilk crullers, frosted cinnamon rolls, sticky pecan rolls…anything to make your mouth water, that guy had it in his portable bakery case. He had white and whole-wheat and rye bread too, but I never paid any attention to them.

If I whined and groveled and badgered enough, Mom would sometimes get something for the evening’s dessert or even some small sweet treat for me to have after lunch – if, that is, she was in the mood. If she wasn’t, however, begging and sniveling while the Omar Man was there smiling at me and subtly egging me on could get me a pinch on the arm, a swat on the bottom or a twist of my hair. But there was no keeping me away when the Omar Man was on our porch.

Other favorites were the Ruck Brothers, two older German gents who drove matching bright red Model T trucks loaded with fresh vegetables and fruit that they hawked door to door, the Meadow Gold milkman who brought fresh milk each day in thick green returnable glass bottles that he left on the porch, and the coal truck from Cotner’s Coal Yard. This last one was a World War II vintage vehicle that the driver would expertly park on the yard between our house and the one next door. He then installed a heavy galvanized iron chute between the bed of the truck and a little trap-window in the foundation of our house that allowed him and his workmate, whose hands and faces were so sooty with coal dust that they looked like black-face minstrels, to easily shovel a ton of flat-black bituminous fuel into the chute and down it, directly into our coal bin next to the furnace. I found the whole process, these night-camouflaged men and their aggressive-looking truck absolutely fascinating.

Early Snapshots

Amazingly, I have, tucked away, a multitude of other memories from that house, despite the fact that we left it when I was barely five: my sister’s and my sandbox in the backyard made from a disused tractor tire that Dad bought from a friend who was a salesman for John Deere; a hemp rope and board swing that hung from the big Elm next to that sandbox; a pair of identical twins who were older than my sister and I and almost diabolically mean, always together, always dressed the same as one another, always doing something cruel with birds and cats and insects, or whipping hunks out of the neighbors’ shrubbery with a bullwhip their father had given them; Jack Snyder and his wife Esther (née) Locomovitz – two of a mere handful of token Jews who lived in Wapak back then – whose miniature junkyard separated from our lawn by a tall wooden fence always tempted me to slip between the loose boards and wander through the surreal array of extraordinarily diverse odds and ends; the way Darla and I used our bed for a trampoline on Saturday afternoons, when we were supposed to be taking a nap (so we wouldn’t “get too tired and catch polio”); when I was three and had pneumonia and Dr. Clyde Berry pressed me like boiled ham under the weight of his fluoroscope in order to X-ray my chest until I thought the claustrophobia would suffocate me; the ear-ache I got on my fourth birthday and how my Grandma Myrt had WIMA-Lima Radio DJ Cliff Willis play “Christmas Dragnet” (the case of the guy that stole Christmas) to cheer me up; our first TV and the first shows, like Arthur Godfrey’s variety shows and specials, “I Love Lucy” and “The Red Skelton Show”, as well as the black and white film version of “A Christmas Carol” starring Fredric March and the Saturday night fights sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades that I would watch sitting on my father’s lap and listening to his running commentary about the fighters…among many other mental pictures that are still fresh in my mind.

But the two most vivid ones are my last two memories of that house on Defiance Street and our life there.

The first was when my parents took me across the street and left me with my father’s parents and took Darla across town and left her with our mother’s parents and promised us they would be back in a couple of days with a brand new little brother for us. I don’t recall either of us being particularly thrilled with this idea, but I remember being fascinated with the little red-faced, red-haired infant when he arrived and figuring he belonged to me somehow, because I was his older brother.

The second happened almost immediately afterward. While Reba Mae was in the hospital giving birth to Dennis James, Norm suddenly developed “a wild hair” and, practically in a single operation, sold our house on Defiance Street and bought a new one on South Pine. (This was one of the first clear-cut signs of what would later be diagnosed as severe manic depression). So when Mom got home from the maternity ward, she almost immediately had to start packing things up and getting ready to move.

Grandpa Vern came with his bright red ’47 Ford pickup and Mom’s whole family helped us move. I got to ride in the back of the truck with some of our stuff on a couple of trips and we all had beef and potpie and mashed potatoes and apple pie at Grandma Myrt’s house for lunch, which made the move fun and less traumatic. But it was the first time I realized that homes weren’t permanent. They could suffer a change of venue at any time, and if you were a kid, it didn’t matter how you felt about it. When Dad said, “We’re moving,” there was no choice but to pack up and go.