GROCERY STORE

 

I guess the first real knowledge of social economics I had came from the neighborhood grocery store, I’m not talking about supermarkets, which we Ohioans also frequently call “the grocery”, as in, “I’m going to the grocery, I’ll be back in an hour.” No, I mean the little mom-and-pop stores that catered to people before we all became so vehicular.

It was through my older sister Darla that I learned about financial responsibility. Mainly, that if you were close to somebody who, through no fault of their own, has less than you, then you were morally obliged to help them out. So it was probably at age three or four that my sister—not without a certain measure of reluctance—helped me start laying the groundwork for my future philosophy of democratic socialism. I had the advantage, in my initial contact, of being the beneficiary of it. And I learned it with and from her in what was for us—at ages five or six and three or four—our sole economic marketplace: Tillie’s grocery store.

Tillie’s was located less than a block from our house when we lived on North Defiance Street in our home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio. It’s proprietor, Tillie Neidemire, was the holder of the key to our then modest dreams: little novelty toys and games, comic books, pop, ice-cream bars and a dazzling case full of penny candy. The greatest attraction of this candy was not only its fetching aspect or anticipated flavor, but also that we could afford it. Or better said, Darla could afford it. She could even afford the occasional ice-cream bar. I could as well, but much less so, and that’s where the lesson in enforced solidarity came in. 

Whitie, our father, was a great believer in teaching children “to respect money.” A nickel, he felt, wasn’t “just a nickel” if you didn’t have it. If you were broke, a nickel was a lot of money. He’d grown up during the Depression in a rough neighborhood on the South Side of the industrial town of Lima, located half an hour north of our home town. He’d seen his father lose every cent he’d saved over the course of a couple of decades when the bank where he kept his savings collapsed, before the days of the FDIC guarantee.

At the time, his father owned a grocery store. Like all mom and pop groceries back then, credit was extended to regular customers, with the record being kept in a notebook and without either the convenience or the bureaucracy of credit cards, which didn’t exist yet, and wouldn’t for another few decades. So when my grandfather’s regulars became victims of the Depression as well, and could no longer pay their bills, his business too went the way of his savings.

The influence of what happened to his father back then—my grandfather would later emerge like Phoenix from the ashes and retire, not wealthy, but certainly well-to-do—seemed to have had a profound influence on Whitie as a child and the fear of “losing everything” remained with him throughout his life. That made him a man who was very careful with money.

So as very young kids, we had an allowance. If I remember correctly, mine was a quarter and Darla’s was a half-dollar, and it was up to us to learn how to manage it. We could blow it and trinkets and sweets and be penniless until payday rolled around again, or we could budget from one allowance to the next. It was up to us how we wanted to live.

When I griped about my allowance being smaller, I was told that Darla got more because she was older. So, I got my first lesson in seniority as well. But poor Darla received a hard to swallow lesson as well. If you had seniority, you also had responsibilities. If she went to Tillie’s and I asked to go along, she had to take me, make sure I got over and back across the one street we had to negotiate, and if I was broke, she had to share, because she made more than I did.

Darla, then, could never make plans for her money other than deciding to save it. If her fifty-cent piece went into her piggy bank as savings—in other words, if she decided to “invest it in the future”—then, I was on my own. But if she decided to treat herself and my more meager allowance was already gone, then she couldn’t just say, “Tough!” and enjoy it in front of me. She had to get something for me as well. I never thought about it at the time, but on days when she was particularly peeved about the unfairness of this arrangement, she was probably not the best person to be in charge of making sure I got across busy Defiance Street safely. But in the end, I survived.

Tillie lived in a house that was kind of beside and above the store and she’d had a side entrance put in that was elevated and accessible by a set of mill-ladder stairs. So when you came into the store and the bell above the door jangled, if she was in her house she would appear suddenly on the landing above the steps.

I found her intimidating. I’m sure she was perfectly harmless, just tired of having to attend unaccompanied children who visited the store to buy ten cents worth of candy and took an endless amount of time choosing what they wanted. It was as if we were invading rather than visiting the grocery. And as if, by coming to the store to make a purchase, we were infringing on her precious solitude. So her “friendly” greeting was often, “What do you kids want?”

The obvious answer would have been, “What do you think? Sweets!” But we usually remained there in polite silence until she could make her way down the mill ladder and behind the counter. It was a glass-front closed candy case so that kids couldn’t just reach in and serve themselves. You pointed, “One of those, one of these over here, a couple of this kind...” etc. Can’t say I can blame the lady for getting cranky.

But you could tell she ordered her merchandise with her miniature clientele in mind because she had a good selection of some of the most attractive of penny candies and chocolates: round butter caramels with pressed powdered sugar centers, coconut bon-bons, licorice and red lightning rods (which are now called twizzlers) all-day jawbreakers (which I fractured my teeth gnawing to nothing in an hour and which Darla could make last for days), super-hot cinnamon squares, suckers and lollipops, big sour-grape gumballs, Bazooka bubblegum and Double-Bubble, candy hearts, Tootsie Rolls, Necco Wafers, and all of the best-known candy bars—Milky Ways, Mars Bars, Sky Bars, York Peppermint Patties, Mounds, Almond Joys, Three Musketeers, Clark Bars, Zagnut Bars, Butterfingers, Bun peanut clusters (maple for Darla, vanilla for me), Hershey Bars... And then there was her little freezer stocked with popsicles, ice-cream bars, Eskimo Pies, Drumsticks, Fudgesicles and Rainbow Bars that were orange sherbet on the outside and rich vanilla on the inside.

The store was an old, dark, tired-looking place with squeaky, sagging floors, but for us, it looked like heaven. We missed it when we moved from Defiance to South Pine Street.

There, on South Pine a couple of doors south of Benton Street, we didn’t have a grocery very close by. But we were older. I was five and my sister was almost eight, and our mother trusted Darla to get me to the grocery and back in one piece. It wasn’t but a block from where Darla had to accompany me to Bible School, which, that first summer, was held at the Salem Church. That meant crossing three major streets. Fred’s Eastside Market was a block further east from the church, where two of those streets, Mechanic and Pearl, came together in a wedge.

Fred was a nice man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and always had a kind of half-smile on his face. He was soft-spoken and treated everyone, including children, like valued customers. The store had dark red shingles. It was up off the street a few steps and faced the tip of the wedge instead of either of the two sidewalks and was fronted by a porch that gave onto the wedge and onto the two streets. Fred often had fruits and vegetables in crates out there on the porch, neatly angled against the front of the building so that customers could see the merchandise and the prices posted on cardboard signs. He also had a little signboard at the point of the wedge, where he posted the week’s specials.

The candy section was up close to the counter on the right side of the main aisle as you came in. If Fred’s wife was in the store, she was usually posted sitting on a high stool behind the counter. Her character was more like that of Tilly’s so we “felt right at home.” Whenever unaccompanied kids came into the store, you could almost hear her sigh of irritation. She hadn’t mastered that “oooooooommmmmmm” attitude of Fred’s. She would sit there smoking a cigarette, the pack on the counter beside her, and would keep an eagle eye on kid-visitors. There was no candy case at Fred’s. It was an open display. And I’m sure that pilfering must have been a serious problem.

You did well to have your purchase in mind before you entered the store, because if you were under five feet tall, you weren’t going to be given much time before Fred’s wife would say, “You kids planning on buying something or are you just going to hang around all day?”

Fred’s was our go-to junior-economy marketplace for about three years until Whitie decided he hated the little house he’d bought and moved us into a big, old, rambling home in the seven hundred block of West Auglaize Street. We would only be there for about another three years before he again moved us, this time into a new home on Kelley Drive, across the Auglaize River and a field from our old place. But although my parents would live there for the rest of their lives, my fondest memories of any of our homes are of that beautiful old house on West Auglaize.

And it was there too that we had the best of all grocery stores, a place called Wahrer’s Grocery. The back of our house and backyard looked onto Pearl Street, and Wahrer’s was at the end of the block at the corner of Pearl and Buchanan. It was presided over by Clara Wahrer and her husband, Frank, two of the kindest people I ever met. There too, the candy display was where they could keep an eye on it, not from the counter, but from the kitchen of Mrs. Wahrer’s home at the back of the store, the door of which was always open, since it was from there that she mostly managed the place. It didn’t take much management, though, because she had a clerk named Judy who was almost like a granddaughter to her, a funny, zany, laughing girl who loved kids and whom kids took as one of their own, a “big girl” with a friendly sort of authority, but a girl all the same, not quite an adult. She liked to pinch our cheeks and ruffle our hair and make gentle fun of us.

At Wahrer’s kids never felt like they were a nuisance or as if they were unwelcome. Mrs. Wahrer knew us all by name and greeted us from her kitchen door. If she especially liked you, she might even invite you into the kitchen for cookies and milk, and to watch her big, cabinet-model, color TV, one of the first in town. There weren’t many shows that were in color yet then and something I remember about her set was that when you watched it in black and white, it was more like blue and white. Strange.

Clara’s penny candy display was, or should have been, award-winning. She had, for instance, and incredible variety of licorice, both black and red: lightning rods, “shoestrings”, strips rolled into a tight spiral with a tiny licorice-flavored hard-candy ball in the middle, plus the more expensive bars (five cents) of Switzer’s Old Fashioned Licorice and Switzer’s Cherry Licorice, and sometimes she even had dark green spearmint lightning rods. There were jellybeans and tiny rolls of Smarties, little paraffin bottles with a swig of fruity soft-drink in them, rootbeer barrels and cola barrels, lemon drops and little envelopes of Lik-M-Made guaranteed to stain both your tongue and first finger the same bright color of your favorite flavor. She had Lifesavers and Sen-Sen, marshmallow chicks and marshmallow sugarcones, Hot Tamales and gumdrops, Redhots and candy corn, and every type of bubble-gum and jawbreaker imaginable.

There was hardly a candy bar that you could name that Clara Wahrer didn’t sell, including a favorite of mine, Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate. She sold Coke in a stubby six-ounce bottle for five cents each. She charged you a penny deposit on the bottle if you took it with you, so you were sure to bring it back (that’s how we recycled back then). But she was perfectly willing to trust you to sit on the front steps, drink it, and bring the bottle back in, if you only had a nickel. 

At Halloween she handed out miniature loaves of Wonderbread for Trick or Treat, and for a penny you could buy sweetened paraffin buck-teeth, scarlet lips and black mustaches to disguise yourself with, and then to chew when you tired of masquerading. She also had edible candy bracelets and necklaces for the girls (or even for the more secure of boys) and candy cigarettes in packs that looked a lot like the real thing, for those who wanted to look movie star cool while getting their sugar.

But besides all that, Clara had an incredible range of ten-cent individual pies. Cherry, apple, blueberry, wonderful pies each with two matching sugar-glazed crusts. Or, for a nickel, you could have chocolate-coated marshmallow pies—Jack Horners, Moon Pies, Mallomars.

As groceries went, Wahrer’s was a slice of paradise, and we visited it every chance our financial resources allowed.

When we moved to Kelley Drive, there were no grocery stores. It was a “new addition”. It was also eminently residential and just outside of the city limits, so it had no commercial activities at all.

But by then, I was twelve. I had a paper route, odd jobs, a brand new bike I’d bought, and cash in my pocket. I was grown up and independent. Almost a teen. I was no longer tied to the few blocks around home. I was free as a bird. I could ride to any grocery store, and every grocery store, I felt like visiting.

And did!   

 

 

 

 

TWENTIETH CENTURY KIND OF GUYS: PART 2, UNCLE DALE

This is the second part of a two-part essay. You can read the first part at the following link: http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2017/07/twentieth-century-kind-of-guys.html

So, as I say, when Bruce and I turn to go back inside the store, after the excitement of the bar fight and arrests across the street simmers down, we look north toward the Square and see a singularly eccentric character heading our way, sauntering down the sidewalk on our same side of the street. Brown-mustard-color suit with extra-wide lapels, dark brown shirt with wide cream-colored tie, two-tone tobacco-brown and white shoes, a broad-brimmed tan fedora with a wide grey sweat band, an extra-long green-wrappered corona clenched in the guy’s teeth.

“Now what?” says Bruce with a chuckle, pausing to watch the man, who looks to be in his sixties, and who, to me, is beginning to look very familiar. “Who the hell is that?” he asks rhetorically, “Al Capone?”

“Nope,” I answer, “that’s my Great-Uncle Dale!”

Bruce turns to look at me to see if I’m pulling his leg. I’m not.

“What, like Red and Whitie’s uncle?” he asks

“The very same,” I say. “My Grandpa Murel’s brother.”

By this time Uncle Dale is approaching us—or rather, he’s about to walk by us. I figure he’s coming from the cigar store on the Lima Square, which I’m sure is one of his hangouts when he’s in town. It’s been a while since I last saw him. I was a pre-teen at the time. I know he’d be hard-pressed to recognize me now.

“Hello, Dale,” I say.

He slows his pace, takes the cigar out of his mouth and, holding it between his index and middle fingers, reaches up and touches the brim of his hat in a perfunctory salute. Bruce and I are sort of standing in the middle of the sidewalk, so if Uncle Dale wants to go by, he’ll have to go around us. The Newland brothers, Murel and Dale, never were about going around. Their path was always through. He’s looking at me a little suspiciously, head cocked to one side, taking me in with one eye from under his hat brim, rather like a tall bird, almost measuring me. What he sees doesn’t seem to impress him in the least. As his eye flicks to Bruce, however, it’s with a look of greater concern for where this might be going.

Uncle Dale's world: High St. Lima in the 1940s

“Do I know you, sonny?” he asks with only just a hint of a snarl.

“You should,” I smile. “You’re my dad’s uncle!” And then, reaching out to shake hands, I say, “I’m Norman’s boy, Danny.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says and reaches out to clench my hand in a warm handshake. I introduce him to Bruce, who shakes hands and then excuses himself saying he needs to get back to work and disappears into the store.

I’ve always had a sense of admiration when I’ve met up with Uncle Dale. The times have been few and far between, but he has always given me the impression of being his own man, of being self-sufficient, of being vaguely irritable but generally uncomplaining. More than anything else, he has always impressed me as being totally himself. And he always seems to be breezing through, on his way to somewhere or from somewhere, but never about to be tied down.

Now is no exception.

“So what’re you doing here, Danny?” he asks.

“I work here,” I say.

“What, in this store?” he asks.

“Yeah, I teach percussion and work as a salesman.”

“Well, good for you!” he says

“So, how are you?” I ask.

“Couldn’t be better,” he says.

“How’s Aunt Martha?”

“Doin’ fine,” he says, and then after a beat or two, “...far as I know.”

This must be one of those times when Dale and Martha are living separately. In those days, their relationship seemed mildly scandalous, on again, off again, sometimes together, sometimes not, but always, I got the feeling, somehow meant for each other—even though Martha wasn’t his first wife. This sort of behavior in my otherwise traditional Midwestern Protestant family seemed even more inappropriate by virtue of the couple’s “maturity”. These break-ups and make-ups might seem romantic and cute when people were in their twenties, but if you were in your sixties, it tended to raise eyebrows. Myself, I found it intriguing, rebellious, non-conformist, and it was part of what fascinated me about them. Somewhere, Dale had a son, Bill, my father’s cousin. But my dad seemed to have had practically no relationship with him—unlike my own cousins and me who were pretty tight as kids—and I’ve never met him.

I’d like to stand here all afternoon talking to Uncle Dale. Or better still, to go someplace for coffee and a long conversation. There’s so much I’d like to know, but at the same time, I can’t really think of anything else to say, and Dale’s getting antsy.

“Well,” he says, sticking his cigar back into the corner of his mouth, “you’d better get back to work, and I’d better get going. Tell Norman I said hello.” And then he shakes my hand again and walks on down Main Street.

The chance encounter gets me to thinking about every story I’ve ever heard about Dale. And although he tries to cover it up, I’ve seen the same boyish admiration in my dad Whitie’s eyes whenever I’ve seen him with his uncle. His usual reaction when somebody mentions Dale is to shake his head with a wry chuckle and to say, “Uncle Dale, what a dude!” But I can tell that Dale evokes a storybook hero quality for him too. More still for Whitie, because he carries his uncle’s name, Norman Dale Newland, Whitie’s given name and Grandpa Murel’s tribute to his younger brother—or perhaps Grandma Alice’s, since Grandpa’s relationship with his brother is, I’ve noticed, a difficult one, fraught with grudges and petty rivalries.

Dale’s exploits were legendary in the family. What’s strictly true and what isn’t has become a moot point over the years. But there’s none of it that one can’t imagine Dale doing. He’d always been a sharp dresser, if in unquestionable gangland style. In the years when he was a young man, the twenties and thirties, Lima was known as “Little Chicago” in the underworld. It was a place with its own mafia, guys who answered to the big bosses in Chicago and Cleveland but who locally were capos. I heard the men in my family as I was growing up talk about how some fairly big mafia names used to come down to Lima to hang out with their guys there “when the heat was on” in the Windy City.

According to family lore, Dale enjoyed feeling he was a part of that world, even though he wasn’t. He dressed the part, took on the tough, cynical air, and liked to hang out with other young guys like him who admired the gangsters.

There was one of these guys, the story goes, who seemed more authentic than the rest. Dale used to run into the guy at his favorite hangouts in downtown Lima—coffee shops, the cigar store on the Square, diners, etc.—and they’d stand around chatting for a while. This fellow seemed like a stand-up guy and his gangster clothes were second to none. Although some days, he and Dale looked like a matched set. They liked each other, but weren’t exactly friends, just kind of casual buddies, who enjoyed hanging out in the Square together like a couple of gangland peacocks.

So there comes a time when Dale doesn’t see the guy around anymore. At first he doesn’t think anything about it, since the guy did travel now and again. But then a long time passed and the guy never came back.

One day Dale meets up with a mutual acquaintance and so he asks, hey what do you know about ol’ so-and-so?
 And the mutual acquaintance says, “Didn’t you hear? The guy bought it up in Chicago, a vendetta killing. Got cut down with a machine-gun. Coroner said he had a hundred and four bullets in him.”

“Too bad,” says Dale, maintaining his tough, unemotional demeanor, as if this sort of thing happened every day in his world. “He seemed like a good guy. And a helluva flashy dresser.”

“Yeah,” says the mutual acquaintance, “I’ll say! They said when they stripped his body down in the morgue, he was even wearin’ silk underwear.”

But Uncle Dale was apparently not just all show either. There was a story in the family that he was so slick that he once fenced a consignment of tires that some guys he knew from the South End had jacked and then won a contract to sell them to the sheriff’s department. He was understood to have headed to Florida for a while afterward, just in case the sheriff ever put two and two together. But the sheriff never did.

I only saw Uncle Dale at the occasional family get-together, some years for Thanksgiving, others for the odd Newland family reunion, still others for the Fourth of July. One such memorable occasion was an Independence Day picnic we had decided to hold at Indian Lake. The weather, however, failed to cooperate and that July Fourth ended up being unseasonably chilly with a steady drizzle.

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

What I witnessed was the first riot I’d ever see. A huge group of college-aged kids had gotten out of hand at the amusement park across the way, for which Russells Point was then famous, and the police had been called in to restore order. Now everywhere on the main drag in town, kids were running amok, kicking over trash cans, throwing cans and bottles at the cops, breaking windows and generally creating chaos. Fire trucks arrived to give the outnumbered riot cops a hand, by laying into the rioters with powerful blasts of water from their fire hoses, while the police fired tear gas and charged at the kids with their batons.

We were all standing on the sidelines, close enough to watch the action—as if it were some strange violent sport—but far enough back to keep out of the fray. All of the sudden, however, I started hearing a familiar voice rooting for the rioters and I looked to see my Great Uncle Dale stepping onto the curb and gesticulating at the kids with his cigar. “Hey kids,” he shouts, “Don’t let those cops do that to you! Hit ‘em back! Knock ‘em flat! They got no right to do that to you. Nail ‘em!”

The amusement park at Russell's Point

I saw when one of the policemen got the attention of one of the guys manning a fire hose and pointed Dale out. Dale never saw it coming and got washed right off of his feet. I found this hilariously funny, since it was like watching a cartoon character get washed away. Dale, for his part, was furious and wanted to take on the police and fire departments single-handedly but cooler heads prevailed and the Newland men managed to wrestle him off the street and back inside the restaurant, before he got carted away. 

I never heard of Uncle Dale having a j-o-b-type job. He always had “something going” but it wasn’t like other people in the family who all worked at steady jobs for name companies or were in business for themselves with a business address at which you could actually find them. Whitie once told me that what his uncle mostly did when he didn’t know what else to do was sell used cars.

Was he good at it?

“Good?” Whitie asked rhetorically. “Why, he’s so good that he can walk onto any used car lot from here to Miami, say he’s Dale Newland, and they’ll give him a job right away, because he’s a closer. He sells more cars than anybody else.”

Whitie’s dad had a less high opinion of his kid brother. My Grandpa Murel was street smart and a savvy salesman, but he believed in being a steady, responsible, goal-achieving salesman and it rankled him that his mother had always seemed to prefer the more colorful son, Dale, despite the fact that Murel was always there for her after she was widowed for the second time. It seemed to bother him that she always brightened up when Dale was going to be in town and it bothered him too that his boys seemed sucked in as well by Dale’s gangster charisma.

So over the course of their lives they were always reuniting, only to have new fallings out. After they retired, they both started going to Florida to live during the cold months, and, almost by chance, ended up wintering in the same Sarasota trailer park. While there, they got together often and really seemed to enjoy spending time with one another, even if just to have someone worthy of arguing with.

Whitie was visiting his father in the winter of 1978, and spent a lot of time refereeing between Murel and Dale. Despite his best efforts, however, there was a big row and they vowed never to speak to one another again. Whitie always regretted it that, a couple of days later, Dale died in his sleep and he and Murel never had the chance to reunite one more time.

Dale, my father had once told me, had been what was known as a “century baby”, born just past midnight on January 1, 1900, a child born into an incredible new modern era. He was almost exactly seventy-eight when he died after witnessing two world wars and the worst depression in history, but also some of the most amazing advancements the world had ever known. Street-smart, tough, entrepreneurial and self-confident to a fault, Dale was, indeed, a twentieth century kind of guy, if there ever was one.          

EXCERPT 8 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — INITIATION

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Four of the autobiographical book I’m currently writing, entitled “Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir”, about my early days in Buenos Aires.

Robert Cox had led me to believe on my first night at the Herald that, for the moment, I would mostly be observing, learning the ropes, seeing how things were done, filling in gaps in the personnel roster, basically doing “one thing and another.” In all fairness, he did warn, however, that because the paper was chronically short-handed and run on a shoestring budget, I would frequently find myself on my own when, truth be told, I should be under the supervision of someone more experienced, and that, in those cases, I’d simply have to wing it and hope to hell I got it right.

But I never imagined that this would be so much the case when I came in for my second night on the job. Cox himself intercepted me at the swinging doors of the editiorial department. He was frantic. A couple of the staff had their night off and couldn’t be reached, and a couple of others had called in sick. I’d have to get to work right away, he said, and as fast as I could. He handed me a pile of local news agency cables in Spanish and said I needed to get to work translating them ASAP.

It had never occurred to me when I was badgering the editor to let me work in his paper that a significant part of the job of an English-language newspaper in a Spanish-speaking country would be translating the local news, but that reality became graphically clear to me right off the bat. Other than textbook translations reluctantly carried out in two years of Spanish classes back at Wapakoneta High School and during the two quarters of Spanish I had taken at Ohio State, I had never translated anything in my life. My Spanish skills were shaky to say the least. Despite a few months living in Buenos Aires, my Spanish was still decidedly Tarzanesque.  Translating a single paragraph of news copy with the constant help of a bilingual dictionary took me ages, and I was to learn quickly just how little column space a translated paragraph could fill. I was in awe of veterans like local news editor Andrew Graham-Yooll, senior reporter Reginald “Toby” Rowland and cables editor Stuart Stirling, who could hammer out translations as fast as they could type. Needless to say, I felt totally inadequate. When I had struggled through my first fifteen-line brief, I took it to Graham-Yooll, as Cox had told me to, and timidly said, “Mr. Cox told me to bring you this as soon as I was finished translating it.”

Graham-Yooll looked up from his work and narrowed his eyes at me as if I were a panhandler who’d just asked him for the price of a pint, wheezed, muttered, “Thanks,” and laid the piece off to the side before returning to the developing story he had rolled into his typewriter. I went back to my hammered-to-death-give-it-to-the-new-guy typewriter in a far corner of the room and started struggling to understand a second cable in Spanish. But as I worked, I couldn’t help glancing over Graham-Yooll’s way every little bit to see when he was going to get to my translation. When he finally did, I stopped working and watched as he placed it on the desk in front of him, paused, took his long beard with one hand and stroked it,  while retrieving a pencil from within the shaggy hair that hung over his ear with the other, and beginning to edit—slashing, marking out, circling, writing in, slashing, slashing, slashing, writing in, then writing instructions to the shop at the top of the page before laying the piece off to the side again.

When he was done, he leaned back far enough to open his middle desk drawer, rifled around in the pencil tray inside, took something out, then got up and walked over to my desk. I smiled. He didn’t. Instead, he leaned over my shoulder where I sat, and with his thick index finger, punched a series of aes, oes and ees on the blank page in the roll of my typewriter. Then he pointed at them as if to say, “What do you see?” What I saw was that the centers of the letters that should have been white were blacked out, which made it easy to mistake one letter for the other. I looked at the letters, then craned my neck backward to look at him and when I did, he held up a longish straight pin that he was pinching like a tiny sword between his thumb and forefinger up in front of my eyes and said, in his serene, asthmatic, Alfred Hitchcock voice, “I hereby present you with the Order of the Pin. Clean those out so we can tell which letter is which.”

As he turned to leave, I addressed the back of his head. “Um, how was the piece.”

“I’m sure it’ll get better,” he said, still walking and without turning toward me. And then he added, “It can’t get any worse.”

As I was starting my second translation, Bob Cox rushed out of his office and over to my desk again. “Dan, how are you doing?” he said in a tone that made it clear that this was a rhetorical question. “Um, I have something here I think you might be suited to,” he went on.

“Well,” I said, “I still have these to do,” and pointed to the little pile of agency cables on the corner of my desk.”

“Oh...yes, well, you can continue with those afterward. Right now, I need you to write an obituary. It’s for a lady who worked at the Missions to Seamen.”

“The what?”

“Missions to Seamen,” he said again, and then muttered under his breath, “Quite, you wouldn’t know about that, would you?” Being a bloody Yank and a Midwesterner to boot, he could have added, but, politely, didn’t. “It’s an Anglican organization,” he continued, “that has branches in ports all over the world.” He explained that these missions were usually run by Church of England chaplains with a few staff, and the rest of the people working for them were all volunteers.

It sounded to me like a sort of USO, without all of the singing and dancing. It had started in the nineteenth century when Britannia ruled the waves and there were British seafarers all around the globe. The organization’s mission was “to offer practical, emotional and spiritual support to seafarers through ship visits, drop-in centers and a range of welfare and emergency support services.” Since the Herald had started out as a maritime journal and still had strong ties to the shipping community, Cox had been asked to put something nice in the paper about this lady, Jenny, who had worked for the local Missions to Seamen drop-in center for something like forty years.

Rather hesitantly, Bob now handed me the press release he’d received and said, “This thing’s bloody awful but all of the basic information is there. Could you try and write something that sounds like we knew her? You know, a nice short article about what a nice person she was, how helpful to these sailors far from home, something warm and human.

“I’ll give it a shot,” I said.

“Cheers!” he answered and rushed back to his office, leaving me alone with Miss Jenny and a blank sheet of paper.

Thinking myself a consumate writer, I told myself this would be a piece of cake and quickly dashed off an obit that I thought would bring tears to the editor’s eyes. I zipped it out of the typewriter and strode briskly across the editorial bay to the editor’s office. Maybe I couldn’t translate for shit, I told myself, but I could write my ass off.

Cox’s door was open and he was sitting at his typewriter, hands poised to type, looking at some notes on his desk.  When I knocked softly on the door-jamb, he looked up from his reading but his hands remained poised over the typewriter keys. The body language was not lost on me. It said, I hope you don’t plan to bother me for more than a couple of seconds.

“What is it, Dan?” he asked.

“Here’s the piece.”

“What piece?”

“The obit...Jenny...Missions to Seamen?”

“Oh yes, cheers, Dan,” the editor said accepting the proffered sheet of paper and, for lack of any desk space in his cluttered office, laid it on a magazine on his knee, picking up a fountain pen from next to his typewriter and starting to edit in his scrawling hand.

Already by the second line, however, he was shaking his head and muttering, “Oh dear...Oh, bloody hell...Oh Christ!” And then he looked up at me and said, “Christ, Dan, you’ve made the poor woman sound like a tart! I mean... ‘providing aid, warmth and comfort to hundreds of sailors...Really?”

I could feel my face flush and my scalp prickle with embarrassment.

“Go back and rewrite the bloody thing, and try to stay away from language with dual meanings that can be misinterpreted.”

For the better part of an hour after that (an inordinate amount of time in a daily’s newsroom) I re-wrote and re-wrote the obituary until I figured it couldn’t be more perfect, then returned to the editor’s office. Cox was still at his typewriter, looking harassed, his hair in disarray from running his fingers through it. Standing apologetically in the doorway, I cleared my throat and he looked up.

“Ah yes, Dan again,” he said. “Let’s see,” and he held his hand out for the piece of paper I was holding.

I wanted to discuss the original version with him, offer my apology, tell him I knew I was better than that and had no idea what had gotten into me, but the editor’s body language and harried attitude invited no conversation. I stood in silence while he read, half expecting him to say something like, “Now this is a story!” But instead, he merely used his fountain pen to black out extraneous words, to draw lines and arrows changing word orders, to line out most of a paragraph entirely, and to write in a few words that he considered to be vital additions.

Then he penned in shop instructions and a headline at the top of the page, handed it back to me and said, “Drop it off at the Night Desk window, will you?”

“Sure.”

“Cheers.”

And that was it. I had written my first professional news story and the die was cast.  

ON THE BANKS OF THE AUGLAIZE (Part Three):

Winter Solstice...A December baby, I was born with it in my blood. Like every schoolboy, I often longed for the freedom of summer. But in my heart and mind lived the clean black and white landscapes of northern winters; the low, chill sun that, on the short days of winter, passed from east to west almost more horizontally than vertically, dodging behind houses and trees and surprising you in the clearings; the glint of daylight on the frozen road; the hiss of the drifting snow blowing north to south across the fields, the impeccable white mantle on the lawn by first light after a storm, before anyone had polluted it with their boot prints; the warmth of yellow lights in the windows of cozy homes when nightfall caught you out of doors in the late afternoon.

Years later, living in Buenos Aires for two decades, those were the scenes from childhood that I would miss most—the snow, the sharp cold, the black and white landscapes—in a city where snow had been a once-in-a-lifetime event that the old-timers remembered and talked about, but that smacked of urban legend to those who had never experienced temperatures below 40º F. I would try to time my visits “back home” with northern winter, and preferably Christmas. A few times I even prefaced visits with family and friends by taking a few days in wintry Toronto, before flying across the puddle to Cleveland and then “home”, as if to make sure I was storing enough frost in my cells to see me through until the next time that I could fly north.

As a boy, Ohio winter whisked away my Huck Finn fantasies of summer and immersed me in the harsh northern world of Jack London and in the TV adventures of Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, in the hopes and dreams of Christmas and in the stark beauty of Arctic-borne weather that changed everything so that it was hard to recall what it all had looked like that summer before...so long ago, it now seemed.

There’s a joke that claims that the seasons in Ohio are “almost winter, winter, still winter and construction.” That wasn’t quite true, even back then, before the vagaries of global warming. Summers could be long and very, very hot—Southern hot!—when Ohioans traded the Arctic blast of persistent winter for the equally persistent heat and humidity of the South Wind that blew up across the Ohio River and through the Miami Valley like the gritty draft from the subway grate up Marilyn’s skirt. But the mid-seasons were often brief and unpredictable: a fleeting shout and burst of amazing autumnal hues from late September through October, or a Stravinsky-esque rite of spring that flooded, roared and raged, then returned to intermittent winter again from late March to almost May before settling into a sudden explosion of unfolding leaves and multi-colored buds and blooms, just before the early arrival of the summer heat. Often it was hot enough for the city pool to open on Memorial Day, hot enough even for a member or two of the high school marching band to feel faint while standing at field rest and have to sit on the curb in order not to pass out during the endless droning speech by the VFW president at the end of the parade route—and before all were shocked out of their stupor by the color guard’s 21-gun salute.

But West Central Ohio winters were indeed long—often running from mid-November through March, with abundant snow and bitter cold, including wind chill factors that frequently and consistently plummeted to double digits below zero. It was Arctic weather, Alaskan weather, the icy breath of the polar circle that reached us undiluted, straight out of the glacier-planed north on 35-mile-an-hour winds that could drift the snow taller than a man—dunes more than drifts, like a sort of miniature, frigid Sahara.

(Photo courtesy of Steve Centers)

But when you’re a kid, unconcerned with job schedules or road conditions, you don’t care how much a severe winter storm costs businesses and the economy, and you can only hope that it’ll be bad enough (or good enough) to keep you from going to school. You listen with bated breath from the breakfast table to the radio as the local announcer reads the list of schools that have been snowed out and hope that you’ll be among the lucky ones who get to stay home and play in the snow. You explore your own yard as if it were uncharted territory and delight to see that, where it hasn’t yet been plowed, you can’t tell the road from the ditch or the yard from the road. Winter, then, is just another part of the rich tapestry that is your childhood, another backdrop for everything fun you invent to do. And in my case, it was my favorite time of all.

Often, tempestuous winter storms were followed by serene, windless, bright blue and white days, when the surface of the snow seemed glazed and glittered like diamonds in the pale sun’s rays, days when the surface snow was too dry to pack and the lack of humidity in the air belied the shrunken mercury at the very foot of the thermometer. Paying scant heed to our mothers’ warnings about the dangers of frostbite and exposure, we broke out our Radio Flyer sleds and took turns pushing each other down the hill on our road. And once the county snow plow cleared the road, as many of us as could duck our mothers hurried off a few blocks to a slope next to the city swimming pool in Harmon Field that was just made to order for sledding.

Oh, and we froze, just like our mothers said we would, so that when we made our way back home for lunch, it was on numb feet in socks, street shoes and rubber boots and pulling our sleds with mittened yet unfeeling hands. Back home the pain of thawing out fingers and toes and ears was excruciating and those appendages seemed about to catch fire once the initial pain of circulation had passed...But none of it was so terrible that we didn’t want to go right back out into the snow again, once hot soup and fried bologna and cheese sandwiches had been devoured and chocolate tapioca pudding eaten. Snow came often and sometimes stayed all winter, with new snows building on top of old. But in our minds it was unpredictable, ephemeral. You took snow while you had it because there were no guarantees for its endurance.

It was when I moved to Oakwood Hills, just across an open field from “our river” that the Auglaize first became part of my winter territory. At first I got to know the joys of winter ice on common foot leather and with my sled (to the chagrin of figure skaters who hated sled runners on the ice)—removing my rubber snow boots and depositing them on the bank so as to increase my slide factor. By the time I got there that first year, the ice had already been thoroughly tested and cleared of snow by other people of all ages so I forged confidently out onto it, only mildly frightened by how expansion and contraction made it creak and crack and thud and groan underfoot. With temperatures that often dipped well below zero at night and never got above freezing for weeks on end during the day, the ice became solid and deep enough to hold just about anything you placed on it, and as such, it became the town’s winter playground.

Back then there were people on the ice at pretty much all hours of the day, but after school things really got lively. At that hour, skaters who did the entire run from near the dam to the downtown Blackhoof Street Bridge—gliding under it, continuing past the back of town and then making the curve and skating north to the Harrison Street Bridge and back again—had to thread their way through absolute beginners who jigged, scrambled, recovered, then fell in their path, past random hockey games that sprang up wherever there was a puck and enough boys with sticks and skates to make two teams, around young families with mothers and fathers skating at a leisurely pace pulling sleds full of small children behind them, and skirting other figure skaters who imagined more than drew a circle, as far as possible from the hockey stars, in which to practice their twists, spins, leaps and axels, imitating as best they could their favorite athletes from the Winter Olympics team.

(Photo courtesy of Don Elsass)

Immediately, of course, I started badgering my parents for a pair of skates. Although Whitie was always pestering me to take up a sport, figure-skating wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, so he said that if I wanted skates I’d have to get out and shovel sidewalks until I had enough money to buy a pair. I already had an early-morning paper route before school, but the proceeds from that brilliant job would never be enough for skates—at least not if I wanted them before I was 30. So I started also shoveling snow off of every walk anybody would pay me to shovel, only to find that, with those handsome profits, I might be able to cut the projection for when I’d have my skates to, say, 25 years old. It looked hopeless.

But then, my Uncle Chuck saved the day. Chuck was a little guy, like most of the Newlands. I took after the Weber side of the family, and at age 12, already had the same shoe size Chuck did. He was always razzing me about my big feet, asking if I had “paddles for those canoes” and so on. One day at the family restaurant that he, Whitie and their older brother Red owned, he said (for everyone to hear), “I swear, if Dan ever grows into those big feet of his, he’ll be nine feet tall.”

Mr. Z, a maintenance man in the local school system, happened to be sitting, reading his newspaper, at the long community table next to the counter where the town’s men sat and “fixed the world” over coffee in the morning. Mr. Z was a good six-feet-five tall and wore size 15 work shoes, so huge and boxy that they prompted the kids to refer to him as “Herman Munster” or “Frankenstein” behind his back. Without even glancing up from his newspaper, he said, “Hey son, just tell that pipsqueak it takes a bigger foundation for a courthouse than it does for an outhouse.”

Everybody guffawed, except Uncle Chuck, who flushed with irritation and embarrassment. But then he pulled me off to the side and said, “Hey Dan’el, your dad said you wanted skates. I have a pair I never wear any more. If you don’t mind used ones, I’ll bring them for you. If they fit, you’re welcome to them.” I thanked him profusely. I couldn’t wait!

(Photo courtesy of Douglas Beam)

Within a year, I’d outgrown Uncle Chuck’s skates—for the next couple of years I outgrew my shoes by half-sizes every few months and my trouser legs always looked as if I were preparing for high water—but those used blades served their purpose well that first winter when I was learning to skate. The first season I fell a thousand times and spent more time lying or sitting on the ice than skating on it. But by the end of winter, though bruised from head to foot, I was gliding more or less effortlessly from the dam to town and back again and had learned to stop and turn without breaking any bones (or accidentally flying over the dam).

By the next winter, there was no longer any way that I could stuff my feet into Uncle Chuck’s skates. But I went down to the banks of the Auglaize every day that homework and odd jobs allowed and hung out anyway, watching with something like longing as the other kids glided along on their wide variety of skates—shiny-bladed figure skates (black for boys, white for girls, sometimes with pink pompoms attached to the uppers for a coquettish touch), battered two-tone hockey skates on stocking-capped lads armed with hockey sticks, “shoe-skates” that were basically a set of blades that strapped onto the wearer’s street shoes, double-bladed skates (like training wheels for beginning skaters)—and envied them their mobility. I’d had it too. I’d been one of “the skated”! But now I was grounded on the river bank in my buckle-up snow boots.

(Photo courtesy of the Siferd Family)

That, however, was a new world I hadn’t known before. I had a powerful and growing interest in girls by then—actually, I’d never gone through the typical girl-hating stage that most boys do and had always had “girl friends” but now what I was looking for was more like a girlfriend. And, it seemed, girls were in great supply next to the campfires that skaters built on the south bank of the river to get warmed up.

That’s where I met up with Mary and had an immediate and searing crush on her. Most of the girls my age in town I’d known since kindergarten. They were as familiar to me as sisters. But Mary was “exotic”, a parochial schoolgirl who went to Saint Joseph’s. I was seeing her for the first time there in the firelight, with her prominent overbite and high cheekbones that were like an arrow through my heart, and I wondered where she’d been all my life! She skated like an angel, graceful, swift and agile, in her short white jacket with faux fur collar, pink and white-striped stocking cap worn fashionably askew, and leg-hugging black ski-pants tucked into her impeccably white skates with their pink and white pompoms.

By the fire, she was always surrounded by a covey of boys, some wearing Catholic school Knights varsity jackets, and she always managed to entertain them with her magnetic wit and sensuality. I tried to get close, tried to find the courage to talk to her, but always ended up standing on the outer edges of her campfire circle. I was, after all, skateless! Like a lizard who drops his tail in a fight in order to get away and is then ostracized in his own society until he grows a new one, I formed part of the unfortunate “unbladed” and there was no way to be cool if you didn’t have blades. Besides, Mary was an older woman. She was gorgeous 14 and I was barely, bespectacled 13. What hope was there? So I suffered and waited.

But I didn’t have to wait long. That winter, my mother took pity on me and bought me a brand new pair of shiny black figure skates for Christmas. And when I reached the Auglaize the very day after Christmas, I was amazed to find that skating was a lot like riding a bike: Once you knew how, you never forgot, and off I went on my new skates and never stopped until the ice thawed the following spring. Once I was “skated”, I dropped by Mary’s fire a few more times and skated close when she was on the ice, but it wasn’t meant to be. She didn’t even know I was alive. In the end, however, it was easier than I’d thought to write her off as “stuck-up” and move on. I mean...what was it about girls on skates!? Girls I went to school with every day...strap a pair of skates on them, put them on the ice in the orange glow of the streetlamps or in the blue light of the rising moon and they suddenly had a new allure, a kind of seductive magic as they glided on the smooth ice or warmed up in the firelight, and I would fall in love at least a dozen more times before that skating season was over.

I was 54 the year my father died and I made an unscheduled journey back to Ohio from South America. I was sorry that I hadn’t made it back in time to see him one last time before he passed away. He’d been very ill for a very long time, so when my brother called to let me know that they were sending Whitie home under the care of Hospice because there was nothing left to do for him, I somehow figured there would still be time. But he was gone before I could book a flight. He died in mid-January and my brother sagely suggested that I not rush home for the funeral but wait a few weeks for when everybody had delivered their condolences and offered their immediate support and our mother ended up being left very much on her own.

When I finally got there, it had been hard-freezing cold for weeks on end—one of those old-fashioned winters like when I was a boy. I never travel back to my home town, back to my past, that I don’t spend a great deal of time walking, retracing the paths of my childhood and youth, revisiting the neighborhoods that saw me grow up, passing by the four houses that I called home at different points in that journey. And these pedestrian sojourns never fail to lead me to the Hamilton Road Bridge, where I did a lot of my best (and worst) thinking when I was young.

Despite the frigid temperatures, this trip had been no exception to my walking tours, and now I found myself standing midway across the Hamilton Road Bridge, gloved hands folded and forearms resting on the railing, gazing at the stretch of the Auglaize between the dam and the Blackhoof Street Bridge. My thoughts on this particular walk, and throughout these difficult days, had been unequivocally existential: what my father’s life and death meant to me, what they had been to him, the realization that my mother might also be gone soon, my links to this town as a base that I had always come back to and what their passing would signify in that context, the fact that the passing of the older generation meant that mine was becoming the “new” older generation...

But suddenly, I was distracted from these thoughts by the long, broad stretch of clean, smooth ice that was the surface of the Auglaize River that day. At first, it was just the sheer beauty of it that attracted me. It was a clear blue day, despite the polar cold, and the pale sun gleamed on the ice as if it were a freshly waxed green marble floor. It was stunning, that straight stretch of natural ice between the two bridges. But that was also what was disturbing enough to have shaken me out of my existential reverie: There wasn’t a blemish on it—not a rock thrown to gauge its safety, not a skate or sled mark on it, not a single burned-out blackened bonfire scar on the right bank, not a single pitch squared off as a hockey rink, not a single sign that any human being had noticed the gift that winter had bequeathed to the town. Perhaps, I thought, the joy of skating, like so many other wonderful things from times gone by, had been discouraged and prohibited. “But how conformist could kids these days be?” I asked myself, and wondered what authority, short of the National Guard, would ever have been able to keep teens of the sixties generation off of that exquisite ice.

I stood there gazing up the frozen Auglaize, every other thought gone from my head, seeing images of the new-millennium cyber-kids all home with their PCs, laptops, notebooks, play stations, MP3s, etc., etc., and felt genuinely sorry for them. They had no idea what they were missing!