FIRST STRIKE

Doing some historical research on organized labor the other 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 (156 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, is located—as I’ve mentioned here before—about 20 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 20 minutes north of Wapakoneta—since the founding of our town pre-dates that of Lima by a couple of decades—and 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.  

It still says Standard Oil but now it's an art center.

Back in its day, Lima was best known for its oil industry—boasting, as of the early 20^th 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, 125 years 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 on the town square. The building is still there, and still has gold letters on the façade reading “Standard Oil”, but today houses a cultural center.

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.

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 50,000 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 100,000.

Members of the Black Legion in their ridiculous regalia

Against this background, Whitie grew up in a mostly white enclave of the South End during the hard times of the 1920s and ‘30s—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.

But Red and Whitie were educated in a bi-racial atmosphere 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 our all-white town. 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 you door!”     

So there was always a certain apprehension when we drove through the smoky, 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 Dad, 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—and especially 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 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 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 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  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. 

EXCERPT 3 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ – WHEELING AND DEALING

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Two of the memoir I’m currently writing, entitled Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir, about my early days in Buenos Aires. This entry continues describing the events leading up to my decision, following discharge from the US Army, to move “for a year” to Argentina. I hope you enjoy it and look forward to your comments.

Like I said before, at the time, I was doing pretty well as a rather precocious professional nightclub musician, musical instrument salesman and percussion teacher, and had been already for several years before I graduated from high school. After graduation, I did even better, picking up a steady five-night a week gig with a jazz trio at one of the area’s top clubs. I played every other date I could get as well, worked six days a week at the music store in Lima and managed to assemble fifty private students between individual and group classes.

Within a few short days, I was the owner of a ’63 standard 

Chevy Biscayne.

Shortly after the accident and Virginia’s departure, an insurance representative showed up at the music store to deal with me directly on a settlement. This must surely have been illegal, since, for all intents and purposes, I was still considered a minor back in those days when eighteen-year-olds were old enough to go to Vietnam and die but not to sign contracts, drink hard liquor or vote. But that didn’t stop the insurer.

“Son,” the adjuster said, “the accident you were in was clearly our client’s fault. We aren’t going to dispute that. Luckily for everybody, there was no serious bodily injury. Anyway, your car bluebooks at three hundred and fifty dollars.” As he said this, he was retrieving a checkbook and signoff form from his briefcase. He laid both on the glass-topped counter where we were standing. His back was to my boss and store manager Bruce Sims, who had mentored me ever since I had started working for him and who was now sitting at his desk, smoking his pipe and looking our way with more than curious interest. “Now I’m authorized,” the insurance man went on, “to pay you that fair price for your car right now, no questions asked.” Behind the man’s back, Mr. Sims bit down on the stem of his pipe, furled his brow and shook his head. He gestured, palms up, to go higher. 

I too shook my head and said, “You saw my car, right? It was in really cherry condition before your client wrecked it.”

The man said, “Well, I’m only authorized to pay Blue Book, son.”

I hesitated. Mr. Sims shook his head vigorously.

“Sorry,” I said. “But I can’t accept that price.”

The insurance man raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes upward and sighed. “Look, you seem like a nice young guy. I’m going to go out on a limb here.” He drummed his fingers on the glass counter, as if thinking, and feigned a worried expression. “I could get my pay docked for this. I could even get fired. But I’m going to offer you ten percent more. If you take it right now, I’ll write you a check for three eighty-five…and I’ll take the consequences,” Again, behind the man’s back, Bruce Sims shook his head, rolled his eyes and made a fiddle-playing gesture, as if to say that I shouldn’t fall for the guy’s sad story about risking his job.

“Sorry,” I said, smiling. “No dice.” 

Now the insurance man looked stern and sighed again, but this time with something like irritation. He lifted his leather-bound attaché case onto the counter, popped it open and returned the checkbook and form to it with a very deliberate gesture. He dramatically shut the lid, snapped the two catches and folded his hands on top of it.  He leaned forward and, in a confidential tone, said, “Son, I been doing this job a long time and it’s my experience that turning down these outright offers is a mistake. The company might turn the case over to the legal department and it could take ages for you to get your money and there’s no guarantee it’ll be anywhere near what I’m offering you.”

But I wasn’t thinking about what he was saying. I was thinking about an article I’d read recently covering what were being called “whiplash-associated disorders”. It was one of the top claims that insurers in the United States were compelled to pay, since even if X-rays and other modern testing methods showed no sign of trauma as such, it was next to impossible to prove that a claimant wasn’t suffering whiplash symptoms in the back and neck caused by compression and decompression of the vertebrae.

“So what’s it gonna be, son?” the guy was saying. “Do you want to take a second to rethink my offer, or should I walk out of here right now?”

“Well,” I said, with a grimace, reaching up and taking hold of the back of my neck with my hand, “I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve been having a real bad pain in my neck ever since the accident. In the background, I saw Mr. Sims grin and raise his fist in a victory salute. Then he got up and walked off into another part of the store, as if to say, “Okay, I’m outa here. You don’t need me anymore.”

The insurance man’s eyes turned cold and hooded and a sardonic smirk twisted his lips. “Okay, kid,” he said, “what do you want?”

“Four eighty.”

“I’ll give you four and a half.”

“Four sixty-five.”

He opened his briefcase again and wrote me a check for four hundred sixty-five dollars. He held it in one hand while he handed me the release form with the other and then handed me his pen.

“Sign by the ex,” he said, and when I had, he handed me the check and walked out of the store.

Left to my own devices, I would surely have ended up blowing the money on some overpriced flashier car than I ended up buying. But this time, my father intervened. The Ol’ Man was a real horse-trader when it came to buying cars. I’ve never heard of anyone who got better deals on cars than he did—with the possible exception of his Uncle Dale Newland, a star used car salesman, who was always welcome to work for commission on just about any used car lot from Detroit to Miami.

“Hey, by golly,” Dad said when I told him the story of how I’d gotten top dollar for my car, “I just heard about a grocery company that’s selling off its sales fleet.”

“What kind of cars?” I asked.

“Good serviceable ones, three-speed stick-shifts with reinforced springs and no frills. I’m sure I can get you one at way below market.”

So I put dreams of a flashy ride out of my mind and let the Ol’ Man work his magic. Within a few short days, I was the owner of a ’63 standard Chevy Biscayne. It was a car that would easily fetch six-fifty on the market. Thanks to Dad, I got it for simply endorsing my four hundred sixty-five-dollar insurance check.

Gimme a Ticket for an Airplane

That car ended up being my ticket to adventure.

At the end of that same year, I decided college and my playing career could wait. To my family’s utter amazement, I quit the jazz trio, got a passport, drew part of my savings from the bank, sold my five-year-old Chevy at a two-hundred-dollar profit, bought an airline ticket and was on my way to Buenos Aires for a month. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday on the flight. I ordered and the Pan Am flight attendant served me the first vodka and tonic I had ever drunk without stealing it from a liquor cabinet, and I drank it watching the moonrise from the window of a Boeing 707, on a direct flight from JFK in New York to Ezeiza International in Buenos Aires.

Took a Pan Am 707 Clipper out of JFK

By noon the next day, Virginia's mother was rushing me through Customs. She spoke no English, but gave me a warm hug, made me understand who she was and motioned me to follow her. At the last minute, Virginia also showed up at the Customs desk and we were all hugging and laughing and paying little attention to the irritated Customs officer, who finally handed me back my passport and waved us through, just happy to be rid of us. It wasn’t usual for common everyday civilians to be permitted to hang around in the Customs area with incoming passengers, but Virginia's mother had made up a story convincing enough to get the MP at the door to let her through. When the same guard stopped Virginia, she asked him why the “other lady” had been let through if she couldn’t go in.

"Secret Service," the guard said.

"Secret Service my eye," Virginia said. "She's my mother!" and the guard let her through too.

Those were obviously gentler times in Buenos Aires, despite the rigors of the dictatorship of General Onganía, whose days were already numbered. An unapologetic dictator, Onganía made no pretense of being a constitutional caretaker as had other coup leaders before him and as would others afterward. Instead, he was bent on establishing a new political and social order in Argentina, in which the Armed Forces would be the legally established rulers.

I celebrated my 19th birthday on board

For now, I knew next to nothing about any of this. I was simply an enamored Midwestern teen, who had followed his heart to an exotic city in South America. I fell instantly in love with Buenos Aires, with its people—who, I learned, were called porteños—with the lifestyle, with my girlfriend’s family, with their friends, with practically everything.

From the very first day, Virginia’s family and friends went far out of their way to make me feel at home. They took me on personalized tours of the city, took me out to bars, restaurants and night clubs, to movie theaters downtown, to a Christmas party in the suburbs. They made me an integral part of the family’s year-end celebrations. They even took me on what then, before the days of four-lane highways, was a seven-hour car trip to the Atlantic resort city of Mar del Plata. As a Midwestern boy, it was my first glimpse of the ocean, and once I’d seen it, I never wanted to leave.

Buenos Aires itself was my first experience with urban life in a major world capital and I was fascinated. Even the subways, buses and trains that were part of the most mundane of the city dwellers’ world seemed to me an almost magical environment teeming with the stories of the millions who road them daily to the common events that formed their separate lives and that crossed their destinies in random fashion.

First passport  - the trip had only whetted my 

appetite. 

If I had fallen in love with Virginia when we had met and dated back in Ohio, I was now to the point of no return. I wanted to be with her, to share in her life and to invite her to share mine. And far from satisfying my wanderlust and my yearning to delve into her world and into other exotic destinations, this trip had only whetted my appetite for more. 

I returned to Ohio promising I would be back. The pain we’d felt when she returned home from Ohio was now intensified by this month of daily intimacy that we had shared. And the image I carried with me back to Ohio was of her waving tearfully from the observation deck at the old Ezeiza Airport as my plane taxied away from the terminal to the runway.

Truth be told, I would gladly have stayed on in Buenos Aires right then. But for now, I didn’t feel I had any choice but to go back home. I had made a commitment to the musicians who had mentored me, to my high school band director, and, I felt, to the opinion of my community, which expected great things from me in the arts. I had also made a commitment to myself, to get a music degree, and to study writing as well, to eventually be a writer by day and a musician by night, to garner a career that would someday lead to New York or LA and what I saw as my destiny as a renowned writer and musician. It was, in the end, the theme of the great American novel: small-town boy makes good. And back then, there was no question in my mind that this was to be my happy fate, even when I had no real idea how I would go about achieving it.

Nor could there be any delaying the next step. It was the Vietnam era and you were either in school or you were drafted into the Army. Simply staying in Argentina was out of the question. Although I was against all of the underlying reasons behind the Vietnam War, I had no thought of dodging the draft. Draft-dodgers—as Thomas Wolfe might have said—couldn't go home again.

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.