TRAIN WHISTLES

I remember when I was about six, my first grade teacher, Miss Long, took us on a field trip. It wasn’t a distant one. Just from the Centennial Primary School to downtown Wapakoneta a few blocks away. I recall its being a bright blue day, crisp and cold, since we went first thing in the morning.

Wapakoneta train station, built in 1917

We gathered around the teacher like a gaggle of goslings, our breath visible in the morning air. We were on the cobbled platform of the old brick freight depot, on the west side of the Baltimore and Ohio rail line. I don’t know if, as usual, I wasn’t paying attention or what, but I remember asking myself what we were doing there, even if it was exciting and fun to be playing hooky from the classroom.

Then the teacher said, “All right, children, here comes the train.”

We heard the shrill whoop of a steam whistle in the distance, the tracks trembled, and then there was the chug-chug-chug of a steam locomotive, and more whoops of the whistle. We all squealed as the steam engine, pulling a freight formation behind it, hissed vapor that enveloped us on the platform. The train came to a stop at the depot and stood there huffing and sighing like some large, powerful animal that was taking a breather before chugging on. We could smell the coal burning hot in the fire box, and we could see the tender loaded with more mineral fuel behind the engine. Smoke, like our own breath, billowed into the clear morning air from the locomotive’s stack.

Reading Railroad #602 - Painting by Fred Schuster

We were too young to realize the historical significance of the event. We were witnessing the last stop of a steam locomotive in our town, and one of the last regularly scheduled steam freight services on the B&O line.

My home town of Wapakoneta is definitely a train town. Besides spurs that go to the site of the old stock yard and the now defunct cheese, canning, churn and handle factories, there is a main line that runs right through the center of town. When I was young there were still coal yards along the tracks.

When I was still a primary schooler, we lived for three years near a siding. It was at the end of our street, South Pine, on the east side of Wapakoneta. I had friends in the neighborhood who were as curious as I was. Both their mothers and mine had forbidden us to hang out on what was known as the “right of way”, a sort of grassy easement near the rail spur. They told us “dirty old bums” hung out there and, if we didn’t want our throats cut, we’d best steer clear.

Hobos riding the rails

Of course, we went anyway. We even had a treehouse down there. And the thought of its being a dangerous, threatening place, made it all the more attractive. We never saw any of the rail hobos our mothers told us about, but we did once discover unsavory evidence that someone had spent the night in our treehouse.

What we actually most liked to do was to pretend we were hobos, with just the clothes on our backs and riding the rails to exciting destinations. Occasionally, we would climb up into some boxcar left standing on the siding. We would pretend we were hiding out, being careful not to be seen by a railroad detective, made infamous by The Grit (a national newspaper targeting a rural readership), for tossing bums off of moving trains after beating the bejesus out of them.

There was only one time we did that with adult permission—although not that of the B&O Railroad. Centennial School was just down the alley from my house and the teacher took us all on a little hike down the road to the easement. It was for our primary school “Hobo Picnic”. It was a day when we all had to dress up, as best we could, like tiny rail bums and carry our lunch in a bandana tied to a stick over our shoulders. The teacher thought it would be more authentic if she took us down by the tracks, and, incredibly, she gave us all permission to climb up into a boxcar standing alone there on the rails.   It had been left with the doors wide open. It was empty except, at the far end, for a stack of still wet hides, probably, we figured, from the nearby stockyard. I still remember their raw, rank odor.

Old Wapak station in use prior to 1917

It was hard to live in Wapakoneta and not have trains in your blood. I mean, there were, and still are, townspeople irritated by the constant delays that having level-crossings all across town signifies. If you’re driving east-west from one end of town to the other, chances are good you’ll have to wait for a mile-long freight train to lumber through. But many of us who grew up in a train town found the passing of each rail convoy to be a satisfying if minor daily event. Many of us still love the click and the clank of wheels meeting the track, the jerking clunk of the couplings as the locomotive slows and accelerates, the rumble you can feel in your chest from the heavy formation rolling down the tracks, each loaded boxcar with a gross weight of a quarter-million pounds.

Another factor that made railroads special for us was that we lived just down the line from one of the world’s most renowned locomotive manufacturing operations, Baldwin Lima Hamilton. It wasn’t called that until it merged in 1951 with another famed locomotive-maker, the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. Before that, it had been known as the Lima Locomotive Works, named for its home base, the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, my father’s home town, located up the track fifteen miles north of Wapakoneta.

The Baldwin locomotive firm had been a railroading pioneer, founded in 1825. That was when locomotives were being built by hand, a time when there wasn’t even machinery to manufacture the huge cylinders that train engines required, and they had to be turned and bored by hand. The company was named for its founder, Matthias Baldwin, who was originally a talented gold and silversmith but with an obsessive interest in machinery and practical mechanics.

In the early days of his firm, Baldwin partnered with a talented machinist called David Mason. This was the beginning of the Baldwin Machine Company. But it didn’t become the Baldwin Locomotive Works until, after experimenting with steam-driven machinery for several years, Baldwin and Mason, in 1832, put together their first successful steam locomotive, which they called Old Ironsides, an engine they sold to a Philadelphia rail line that, until then, had been purchasing from a steam locomotive manufacturer in England.  

The Old Patagonian Express - La Trochita

I recall once, many years ago, waxing nationalistic on this subject, when I was watching a documentary in Argentina, where I live. It was about the Patagonian Trocha Angosta, a narrow-gauge train that once linked numerous remote destinations in the wilds of the Patagonian region—with a section of the rail link still operating today, but mostly as a tourist attraction, although some local residents still use it to get from point A to point B.

Once a thriving wild west frontier line, La Trochita, as it is fondly known—and better known to Americans as The Old Patagonian Express, since the 1979 best-selling travel book of the same title by Paul Theroux—employed a score of narrow-gauge steam engines, powered by coal from the Río Turbio mines of southern Patagonia back then, but today converted to fuel oil. Anyway, in this particular documentary, they explained that the little stretch of La Trochita that is still in operation is served by seven steam engines that are still operable. When asked about the make of the locomotives, a commentator said they were all Henschells and Baldwins, which he described as “English”.

Well now, at the time, I didn’t yet know that Henschell engines were German, but I sure as heck knew that Baldwins were American. And like a good native son from a Midwestern train town, I didn’t hesitate to get hold of the TV channel airing the program and give them a piece of my mind.

Baldwin's "Old Ironsides" - 1832

The Baldwin Locomotive Works struggled in the firm’s earliest years, living project to project for American railway companies. It went through especially difficult times following the panic of 1837, a US financial crisis that sparked a major depression that would stretch on into the mid-eighteen forties. For more than a decade after that, BLW would, to a large extent, live off of steam stock production for railways in the Southern states that were using the rails to an increasing degree to move their agricultural production.

The secession of states below the Mason-Dixon line over the burning question of American slavery practices seemed once again to spell hard times for the Philadelphia steam engine builder. But those concerns turned out to be short-lived. When the Civil War broke out, the Union military began moving troops, supplies and ordnance increasingly by rail, and steam engine production burgeoned as a result.

Baldwin would remain a powerful player in US railroading from then on, until the advent of diesel locomotives. Baldwin had difficulty making the transition from steam to diesel, which led to its post-World War II merger with the Lima Locomotive Works (by then known as Lima-Hamilton, after a previous merger with a machine-building firm based in Hamilton, Ohio).         

Lima Loco's Shay geared locomotive

Long before the merger with Baldwin, however, Lima Loco, as it was colloquially known, was already famous worldwide, for building some of the world’s finest steam locomotives. Founded in 1869, the firm was known, prior to 1878, as the Lima Machine Works.  But it was in that year that industrialist James Alley contracted Lima Machine to construct an innovative geared steam locomotive, specially designed by Ephraim Shay for the lumber industry.

The first Shay engine was completed in 1880 and became an instant hit throughout the US logging sector.  Over the next decade, Lima Loco would turn out some three hundred such steam engines. The Shay locomotives were low-speed, high-traction steam engines designed to pull heavy loads through mountainous terrain. But by the twentieth century, Lima Locomotive had largely covered that market, and was already turning to “super-power” steam technology.

Shay "Dixiana" logging train

This was a homegrown concept developed by Lima mechanical engineer William Woodward. His development concentrated on maximizing the locomotive’s prime capability—namely the generation and use of steam power. This so vastly increased the power and efficiency of Lima’s steam engines that the New York Central railway ended up buying more than three hundred of the Woodward-technology locomotives. While Lima’s production had earlier concentrated on pulling-capacity, the new locomotives of the nineteen-twenties were built for speed, and it was during that time, when my father was a boy growing up in that town, that Lima Loco became internationally renowned for building some of the world’s fastest steam engines. The maximum expression of this new breed of locomotive was the Berkshire 2-8-4, a powerful iron workhorse with a top speed of seventy miles per hour.

The Berkshire 2-8-4 super-power steam locomotive

In hindsight, the Lima Loco was, quintessentially, a steam locomotive builder, and it was superb at what it did. It was proud of that history and sought to hold onto to it, remaining ever loyal to steam. Seeing the writing on the wall, it was the new partner, Hamilton, that pushed to make the switch to diesel technology. Between 1949 (the year I was born) and 1951, Lima-Hamilton constructed just one hundred seventy-four diesels, making it the smallest diesel builder in the US.  Using Hamilton engine technology, more than three-quarters of the diesel locomotives that Lima-Hamilton built were thousand-horsepower switchers for use in America’s train yards. A rare few are apparently still in service today.

Lima Locomotive Works factory floor

But it was too little too late, and the 1951 merger with Baldwin could do nothing to save it. The firm simply couldn’t compete with big diesel-electric locomotive builders like Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), Alco, and General Electric Infrastructure (GE). Sadly, in 1956, LBH closed its locomotive operations.

Despite this rich railroading history, what I remember most about growing up in a rural train town like Wapakoneta are the train whistles. Someplace in the back of my mind, from the time of my earliest years, I can still hear the shrill steam whistles. And from my early childhood, I can remember wanting to be at the tracks when the trains passed to see whether they were being pulled by a steam or diesel locomotive.

Lima Loco diesel, still operating freight runs in 2016

I was reminded of this when I was stationed in Germany for more than a year with the Army. I traveled a great deal by train at the time, and it wasn’t unusual then, in the early 1970s, for the German railroads to still use steam for switching and freight operations. It was exciting to see those heavy-breathing steam locomotives chug through, steaming, smoking and pulling with all their might.

But the most vivid memory I have of growing up in a train town is of the mourning doppler howl of the powerful diesels passing through, pulling seemingly never-ending formations of boxcars, flatcars and tankers. It always seemed especially poignant at night, lying in my bed in my parents’ home, and hearing it in the distance, as if in a dream. Or sitting after dark with my friend Mark on the roof of the shelter house in the park, smoking pilfered cigarettes and fantasizing about being on the lam, destination unknown. It was the background tune for our casual discussions of stories like Hemingway’s Nick Adams series or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Now when I go back to Wapakoneta for visits, I stay in a tiny house known as the Moonflower Inn. One of the things I love about the place is that it is close enough to the tracks for me to hear the train whistles at night. It’s nostalgic yet comforting, like being back in my warm bed at my family home.

Indeed, wherever I travel, no matter how far, the sound of a diesel locomotive horn is always sure to carry me away, to take me back home to Wapakoneta.  

JIM BOWSHER - LIFE 101

 My friend and writer colleague Jim Bowsher has the Big C.

That statement deserves a paragraph of its own. So does the next one:

It’s Stage Four. That’s usually thought of as the “ALL She Wrote” stage of that rotten scourge of a disease.

Jim Bowsher in his fabulous Rock Garden
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch - All rights reserved

I know a little bit about cancer. My father died of it. So did my mother. Both aged eighty. My father’s mother died of it at sixty-six. My father’s older brother at seventy-five, my father’s middle brother at about the same age as his mother, and their youngest brother, the reverend, who fought it with all of his grit and faith, managed to beat it until he was in his mid-eighties, when it finally took him.

One thing I’ve learned? It’s not a good death, I mean if there is such a thing.

I take after my mother’s side of the family. Despite her death by cancer, they mostly die of some sort of cardio-vascular disease. Somewhere that statement may hold out some glimmer of optimism for me—cardio-vascular is no picnic, mind you, but it’s not cancer either.

My little brother was the spitting image of the Newland clan—actually the cancer trend appears to have originated with the Henrys, my Grandma Alice Henry Newland’s family—but he flipped a giant bird to that part of the family’s cancerous medical history by dying of what appears to have been a massive stroke, in his sleep, at age fifty-one. It was exactly the sort of “bite me” thing he was famous for. But still, I think I might have been willing to give up part of the nearly two decades that I’ve survived him just to have him around a while longer. You couldn’t help but love that boy, and the world is a much less interesting place without him.

I also know something about diagnosis and prognosis. They’re not infallible. There is a great deal to be said for will, and what some of my British friends have been wont to call “sheer bloody-mindedness.”

Good example? My dad, Whitie. Bloody-mindedness got him through years of combat during World War II. And, despite having been a man who was often suicidal due to decades of chronic depression, he took on the challenge of cancer as if he were going to war. His was lung cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of only nine percent. When the diagnosis was made, and an attempt to remove one lung failed, he was told he probably had about six months. For all of his talk of suicide in earlier years, telling Whitie he couldn’t do something—like live—was a sure-fire way to get him to do it.  Result? He lived for another four years.

In that sense, Jim Bowsher reminds me a lot of Whitie.  Some time back, before I went to visit him, I called to see how he was doing. When he failed to answer the phone for a few days—in all fairness, that’s not unusual for Jim, who always has better things to do than answer the phone—I began to worry. The thing is, Jim only has a land line with an answering machine. He doesn’t own a cellphone or a computer (he still writes on a manual typewriter). He doesn’t have an email address. He isn’t on social media. In a very real way, for Jim it continues to be the sixties, when he and I were both growing up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where he still resides, in his phenomenal museum of a house on the edge of his artistic masterpiece, the Rock Garden, which surrounds his Temple of Tolerance.  I wrote about both, and, indeed, about Jim, in a book titled The Rock Garden and Other Stories (available on Amazon, and at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta). As that book reveals, Jim lives in an analog world of his own making. It’s as if his entire environment were the contents of an enormous time capsule.

He does have a website, created by his friend and collaborator Scott Bruno. But other than knowing what content goes into it, Jim is completely estranged from that technological process. He’s incurably old school. But google his name and the references to him on the Web go on and on, references from Wapakoneta, from Ohio, from all over the United States and from around the world. So, Jim doesn’t really have to go to the Web. The Web comes to him.

Anyway, after three or four tries I finally get him on the phone—Jim seldom if ever calls somebody back even if they leave a message. And even though he is a dedicated writer—who is a disciplined keeper of the old rule, “Writers write every day”—he also discourages epistolary contact. Long ago I once offered to write back and forth via snail mail. “It would be a waste of your time,” he told me. “I’m a terrible correspondent. You’ll write me, I’ll read it and enjoy it, and I’ll never write you back.”

At the time, I said okay and left it at that. Now, however, when things are as finite as they’ve always been, but with my awareness of that fact heightened, I’m thinking I wish I’d written him anyway all these years, even if I’d never gotten an answer. It was selfish and lazy of me. I offered, he said don’t bother, and I didn’t. Such is life. Such is ego. 

“Jim! Finally! So glad you picked up.” I shout into the phone.

“Yeah, I heard your messages and was listening for the phone. So how are you?”

“I’m fine. I mean other than a few old-man issues. The more important question is, how are you?”

“I’m doing great. I continue to be a medical phenomenon. Nobody can understand how I’m doing so well. I mean, I’m a dead man walkin’, but I’m just fine. The thing is, I’m so busy, I keep forgetting I’m dying!”

Dead Man Walkin’—the term used for a condemned prisoner on the walk to execution—is what some of the little hoodlums that hang out in Jim’s yard will sing out when he emerges from the house. A lot of these troubled kids have been mentored by Jim. Some he has accompanied to juvenile court or visited in the reformatory. They, more than anyone else, will surely miss him when he’s gone. The dead-man-walkin’ thing is a private joke between them and Jim, which they both find amusing.

“The other day,” says Jim, “there was this really nice lady visiting here. She knew about the cancer and wanted to stop by.” So, we walk out into the yard and one of the kids goes, “Dead Man Walkin’!” really loud. Well, you should have seen that poor woman’s face!” says Jim. “She goes, ‘Oh my god, how awful!’ And I say, ‘Oh no, it’s fine. It’s just a joke between me and the guys. It doesn’t bother me, really, don’t worry.’ I’m like trying to comfort her,” Jim laughs. 

Jim's house on Wood St. in Wapakoneta

Later, he tells me about the advancement of his historical framing project. All of his energy right now appears to be going into that, and into creating a foundation to ensure the continuation of his permanent art installation (the Rock Garden) and his local historical research project after he is gone. Every stone, item, artifact, picture and clipping in Jim’s divinely and eclectically cluttered house and yard has a story behind it. He refuses any item that doesn’t. Somebody comes to Jim with some interesting and/or vintage doodad, Jim says, “What’s the story behind this?” If the person says, “I have no idea. It’s just something I picked up at a flea market,” Jim will say thanks but no thanks. “What’s important is the story. If you don’t know the story, why have the thing?”

It appears that it wasn’t until very recently that Jim began to realize he was mortal. That was when Scott Bruno began to collaborate with him, taking on the daunting job of photographing each of the tens of thousands of items in Jim’s story-artifact collection, as a means of documenting this unique historical inventory.

Out of that gargantuan task grew Jim’s “framing project”.

“So tell me more about these frames you’re doing,” I say when we’re talking on the phone (a call between Jim and me never lasts under an hour or so).

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he says. “I’ll show some to you when you come. I’m taking pictures of everything and framing them with their stories. You’ll see. You are still coming, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it!”

“Good, it’ll be great to see you.”

“So how’s treatment going?”

“They keep telling me I shouldn’t feel this good,” he laughs. “The other day when I went in, this oncology nurse—she and I have gotten to be good friends—she goes, ‘Jim, would you like more pain medication?’ I tell her no, that I take one now and then, but I’m really not having a lot of pain. She goes, ‘But Jim, at this stage, you’ve really got to be having a lot of pain.’” Jim’s cancer started out as prostate cancer then spread first from there to his hip. “So I tell her, ‘Look, I can drag a leg if it’ll make you feel better, but I’m doing great. No real pain, see?’”  A doctor friend whom he laughingly tells about this says he’s not the typical case, not what people in oncology are used to seeing. “Yours is all a matter of will and attitude, Jim, of not giving in to the disease.”

It’s true. Clearly, Jim is refusing to give in, refusing to become the disease.  He is refusing to become Jim Bowsher Stage Four. He is striving to remain, Jim Bowsher Phenomenon, which is who he has always been. And for now, at least, it’s working! “The other day at the oncology unit, I told one of the (baffled) staff, ‘Well, at least you’ll remember me when I’m gone.’” He said the woman answered, “That’s for sure, Jim. You’re unforgettable.”

Jim says he likes to cheer up the others awaiting oncological treatment. He finds it so depressing to walk in and see all of their sad, doomed faces. He wants to help them realize that they’re not dead yet, that any day they still open their eyes is a good day, or as Whitie used to say, “a helluva lot better than the alternative.”

“As soon as I walk in, I start hitting them with one-liners,” says Jim, “and pretty soon I’ve got the whole waiting room laughing. There’s this one guy who, when I walk in goes, ‘Oh christ! Here he is again, the stand-up comic of the oncology ward.” Jim guffaws.  It’s good, says Jim. Laughing’s good. It helps them feel better. Not so down and hopeless.

Toward the end of October, after a couple of days in Miami, where my plane from Buenos Aires landed, I fly up to Dayton, and then rent a car and drive to Wapakoneta, an hour away. I could just as easily have flown into Cleveland, where my sister Darla lives and where I have my Stateside residence, but I was really anxious to see Jim right away and see for myself how he was doing. I got there the night of the twenty-fourth, had dinner with my childhood friend—a mutual friend of Jim’s—Mark Gallimore, and was supposed to see Jim the next day, and then drive on up to Cleveland on the twenty-sixth to spend a couple of weeks.

So, the next morning, a Wednesday, I had a pleasant breakfast with a few former classmates—including Mark—at a local eatery known as the Coffey Cup, and was all set to go to Jim’s in the early afternoon. Another mutual friend, who pretty regularly visits Jim on Wednesdays, sent me a text, however, saying that Jim had told her he wasn’t up to seeing anybody. She said he was too nauseous to talk to anyone but hoped I’d get in touch and be sure and see him later.

I was worried. This didn’t sound good.  I tried without luck to reach him several times, then gave up and headed for Cleveland. Two weeks later, I was back in Wapakoneta for a week-long stay. One of the first things I did was start trying to get hold of Jim. I called three times without success and had decided to just go knock on the door. I was only staying a block away at the Moonflower Inn, a lovely little cottage for one that I rent when I’m back in town. Finally, however, I got him on the phone.

“Wow, Jim!” I said. “I’ve been worried.”

“Why? I’m fine.”

“Well, when Philippa told me you were too ill to see us on the twenty-fifth, it worried the hell out of me, and then I had to go up to Cleveland for two weeks. I left you a couple of messages.”

“Yes, I heard them. I’m fine. That thing on the twenty-fifth was just some stomach thing. Nothing to do with the cancer. Just indigestion or something. I was fine the next day! Sorry I missed you. I was really hoping you’d be back”

We make plans to see each other the following day, a Saturday. We always meet at Jim’s place and there, surrounded by his inspiring chaos of stories and things, give free rein to our imaginations and talk about everything and everyone under the sun. But this time Jim says, “We can’t stay at my place. I have all the stuff for my frames spread all over the house.”

“I don’t mind. I love going to your house.”

“Yeah, but there’s no place to sit!”

He suggested we meet as Woody’s Diner, a bar and grill on Wood Street, just up the block (between Jim’s house and the Moonflower), which he and I have always favored.  But we were also supposed to be meeting our friends Mark Gallimore, Tom Shaw (who had flown in from Charleston, South Carolina), and Mary Jo Knoch. When I mentioned Woody’s to Mary Jo, she said, “No, it’ll be hard to talk there. Just come out to my place. I’ll make a barley beef soup and some cornbread.”

Mary Jo's place near the Village of Fryburg

“What should I bring?” I asked.

“Pie,” she said. So I went and bought an entire three-berry pie at Bob Evans.

When I called Tom and he asked what he should bring, I said, “Beer.”

So we were set.

When I went to pick up Jim to take him to Mary Jo’s, he wasn’t quite ready, so he invited me in. I immediately saw what he had meant about “nowhere to sit.” Everywhere there were picture frames and stacks of content to mount in them—pictures, cards, carefully-typed texts, drawings, etc.  Stuff everywhere, on tables, in chairs, on the couch, up the stairs…everywhere.

I got out my phone to take a picture.

“Don’t take any pictures,” said Jim brusquely.

“Why not?” I said. “This is great!”

“Please don’t, Dan,” Jim said tersely. This was one of those moments when Jim Bowsher would suddenly become a stranger, an enigma, even to his friends. This was when, in his own words, he was “at the service of his muse.” This was Jim Bowsher the writer, the historian, the collector. This was the Jim Bowsher who was friends with no one—Jim in Jim’s own world, a world to which no one else had passage.

I looked disappointed and said, “Come on, Jim. This is me. I can’t help myself. I’m a journalist.”

He squirmed and said, “I’d rather you didn’t. I never let anybody see the process when I was creating the Rock Garden. And I don’t want anybody to see the process while I’m creating the frames.”

I put my phone away and sulked while he went off to finish getting ready to go.

In the car, he said he was worried about his brother Walt, that he’d been calling him and Walt didn’t answer. Walt was only very recently widowed and still trying to cope with his wife Aida’s death.

I said, “Oh, don’t worry. Mary Jo said she’d invited him out to her place too, and that he said he was going.”

Jim looked relieved. “Oh, great, so he probably went out there already.”

Walt Bowsher

Sure enough, when we get there, Walt is already ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the living room, and is chatting with Gallimore and Mary Jo.

It was a beautiful autumn day—brisk, with azure sky contrasting with the last of the brightly changing foliage. Mary Jo’s place is a quarter-mile off the road, just past the Village of Fryburg, a few miles south of Wapakoneta.  It’s a little old shingled farmhouse with a good shed and a tumbledown old barn on a few acres of land, surrounded by rolling fields and a nice woodlot. It’s a lovely, peaceful place, and on this bright fall day it seemed utterly idyllic.

At first, in Mary Jo’s comfy living room, we chatted inconsequentially and took turns spoiling her three cats, Fred, Bill and the venerable old Captain Jack. Over beer, however, we entered into more controversial territory—small towns versus big cities, Israelis versus Palestinians, conservatives versus liberals. The tone rose occasionally, and Jim, far from presenting the profile of a dying man, held his own and gave as good as he got.  But in the end, it was a civilized discussion of issues among intellectually sound individuals who understood the value of different points of view and respected each other’s conclusions even if they might not agree with them.

Tom Shaw and Jim debate small towns v big cities

Walt, through all of this, sat smiling quizzically while he petted a very contented Bill. He occasionally offered some contribution, but mostly remained attentive, moving his gaze from one debater to the other, as if watching a ping-pong match. He was the first to leave, because he had a jam session with a group of other amateur musicians. But he was sure to let us all know how much he had enjoyed the afternoon, and thanked Mary Jo profusely for the invitation.  

Mary Jo’s wonderful, nutritious soup overrode debate, as did her cornbread and warm butter.  We then switched from beer to coffee and pie and later sat contently together, playing with the cats again.

Jim had brought along a few of his frames and passed them around, waiting to see our reactions. For me, it was like a light had suddenly been turned on. I got it, understood the dichotomy that Jim was seeking to project with each frame. One story on the front, the same, but another, story on the back. The frames were a stroke of genius, the projection of a voiceless debate between two opposing points of view, or between fact and legend, reality and fantasy. Once again, as in the past when I was writing about him, I was blown away by the profound yet simple messages with which Jim was striving to imbue his widely varied audience.  It was a didactic, thought-provoking idea, and nothing short of analog brilliant.

In the car, as I drove Jim back to his home in Wapakoneta, I half-expected him to revisit the issues debated. Instead, he said, “Wow, did you see Walt’s face? He was fascinated! With his friends, who are mostly of like mind, he doesn’t get a chance very often to hear this kind of debate. He really enjoyed it! I could tell.”

Jim explains one of his historical frames

Any thought of the issues had flown the coop. Jim was entirely focused on his brother, his best friend, and on the great afternoon he’d had, at a time when he was in pain. A time when it was exactly what he needed.

The next time Jim and I met, it was for breakfast.  I picked him up and we went to the Coffey Cup. The weather was accompanying me for my stay. A beautiful blue and gold morning with a light frost. I had asked Jim the day before when he wanted to go.

“You tell me,” he said.

“I can go whenever you like.”

“How about nine-thirty? Too late?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

When I arrived and knocked on door at nine-thirty sharp, it took a while for Jim to answer. When he finally came to the door, he said, “Sorry, I slept in. I’ll be right with you.” And he went off again upstairs to finish getting ready. I spent the time to once again browse among the extraordinary collection of items that cover every surface in the house—walls, tables, shelves, everything crowded with vintage pieces, but more than anything else, with countless mementos of life in Wapakoneta and its environs for the past two hundred years and beyond, clear back to the lives of its indigenous peoples before Europeans had ever heard of America.  You couldn’t get bored waiting, especially if Jim had told you the stories of some of the pieces. And in my case he had already, many times, in the past.  

By the time we reached the Coffey Cup, the place was burgeoning with the breakfast crowd. It was the kind of place where breakfast diners weren’t the type to eat and run. They had time to dawdle over eggs and meat and potatoes and pancakes while drinking hot coffee and engaging in neighborly conversation.

The Coffey Cup from the inside.

Fortunately, Jim and I found a great table by a window near the cash register where someone had just cleared out. This table wasn’t going to be much of a money-maker this morning. More than occupying it, we were taking it hostage. And Jim, who said he no longer had much of an appetite in the morning, only ordered whole wheat toast and butter, while I decided on the cinnamon French toast with maple syrup. We both ordered black coffee, but that was going to be a losing proposition for the proprietor as well, since we never said “no” to refills, every time someone passed by with a fresh pot.

 This time the meeting was one on one. We were, as we say in Argentina, “in our sauce,” talking about the things of interest to the two of us—his yard, his house, his projects (didn’t it seem astonishing that a man with stage four cancer was still awash with projects for the future?) I talked about my books and blogs. We talked about writing and writers. He recalled anecdotes about his youthful adventures when he traveled far and wide making a pest of himself until he could meet some of the writers he most admired. I couldn’t help but recall that when Beat Generation writer Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out, one of the items pinned with a magnet to the refrigerator in his kitchen where he did the deed was one of Jim’s haiku poems, in Jim’s own hand.

And we talked about his poetry—his haiku. Earlier, during one of our long-long-distance phone calls he had told me that he was finally considering publishing them. During the reorganization of his house, he had decided to see if he had enough for a book of haiku poetry. Turned out he did…more than enough, in fact: approximately ten thousand haiku by James Bowsher. He told me that he was now writing haiku about cancer. “You write what you know.”

He had tried one out on his oncology nurse friend. In the waiting room, she saw him scribbling in the notebook he carries in his hip pocket and said, “Jim, can I ask you what you’re writing?”

“Sure,” says Jim. “A poem.”

“What about?”

“Cancer.”

“Do you remember it? Can you tell it to me?”

“Sure,” Jim says. And right then and there, as if I were the nurse, he thinks for a few seconds, looks at the ceiling, and recites the little three-line poem. It compares cancer to a predator shark, swimming in his blood, waiting until the time is right to attack and rip him apart.

“It made her cry,” says Jim. For writer types like us, making somebody cry (or laugh, or think, or remember, or rejoice), well, that’s a bullseye. Says Jim, “She goes, ‘That’s exactly right Jim. That’s exactly what it’s like.’”

The breakfast crowd thins out. For a while we’re almost alone in the place, still drinking the coffee they generously keep offering us. Then, the lunch crowd starts drifting in. And still, we remain holed up in our corner under the window by the door. And soon the place is loaded with patrons again. But when we’re on a roll like this, it’s hard to break it, even though neither of us has the stamina we once had any more.

Finally, it’s Jim who suggests we call it a day. After all, we’ve confiscated this table for the past four hours. It’s the first time in any of our marathon conversations that Jim has ever been the one to suggest a pause. Whenever someone he enjoys talking to suggests ending a conversation, Jim is famous for saying, “Okay, but just one more story. You’re gonna love this one!” I figure he must be getting tired. It’s only natural. But then again, maybe he’s just anxious to get back to his frames.

Jim has always been a fanatical baseball fan. And if there was one thing that had become clear to me, it was that Jim’s philosophy on life had a lot in common with that of baseball great Yoga Berra, who once famously quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

In the car on the way back to his house to drop him off, Jim says, “Thanks Dan. This was great! I’m so glad we got together.”

The week in Wapak goes by like a lightning flash. Suddenly, it’s my last day. Again, a gorgeous autumn day. Cold, but clear and windless. There’s thick frost on my rented car when I get up. I go in the morning to have breakfast with a friend and former employer, Leslie Rigali. I worked for her for a year as a consultant in nineteen-ninety, when she was the owner of Davanti Media in Lima, an industrial city twelve miles north of Wapak. We created some interesting media projects together.

Moonflower Inn, "my home back home" in Wapakoneta

We haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but when we meet at the Harding Highway Panera in Lima, it’s almost as if no time at all has passed. It’s a relaxed, newsy conversation that lasts a good hour and a half.  Toward the end, it occurs to me, as we’re talking about my books, that this is precisely the person—a crackerjack businesswoman with years of public relations and advertising work behind her—who might be able to help me improve my book circulation in the Lima area.

I self-consciously bring the subject up, explaining that I had no intention of doing so, and she is immediately all over it, with ideas and suggestions based on her long experience and impeccable contacts. She says she would be more than happy to help me. We both come away from our breakfast happy to have renewed our friendship.

It’s a great start to my last day back home in Ohio.

As the hours tick by, I try to pack as much as I can into one day. Mary Jo and I meet up for coffee in downtown Wapak. We go to Winans, a place with great coffee and even better chocolates, both of which I try. It’s still such a lovely day, if chilly. that we decide to sit at the single table that Winans has on the sidewalk. A chance for me to revisit my home town at street level. Mary Jo knows a lot of people in town and a few of them stopped to chat a while at our sidewalk table. A little later, after we had finished our coffee, we also stopped a little further up the street to talk with the two amiable ladies who run Macky’s Health and Hemp. The store is a medical cannabis dispensary. Had you told me a few years back that someone would be selling cannabis on the main drag in Wapakoneta, I would have said you were crazy. Later, one of the ladies approaches us again while I am taking some pictures and holds up my book, Visions of What Used to Be, and says, “I just realized…this is you, right?”  I nod. “Would you sign it?”

She made my day. So did seeing that my books were once again in a brick and mortar store, and right in the front window of the Riverside Art Center, a Wapakoneta cultural venue, where I had earlier left ten signed copies of each book.

Mary Jo and I walked around town some more, acting like tourists and taking pictures as if this were the first time either of us had ever set foot in downtown Wapakoneta. Eventually, however, it was time for me to go back to the Moonflower and pack. It was about four when I got back.

Meanwhile, Mary Jo arranged with Gallimore to meet her at six at La Grande Pizza, and then she arranged with Jim Bowsher to pick him up and take him as well. I was to get there as soon as I could.  My packing and straightening up of my quarters at the Moonflower finished, I arrived just after six at La Grande and met my three friends at the door. We sat, fittingly, in a place that was once occupied by what was then known as “the front table”, back when this same building was my father’s place of business for a quarter-century from the mid-forties to the late-sixties.

The Teddy Bear, with Whitie at the head of the front table

Back then, the place was called the Teddy Bear, and for many years, the “front table”, a long, Formica-topped table with eight chairs, was where some of the town’s movers and shakers met for breakfast and to exchange gossip. My grandfather, Murel Newland, had hired local contractor Walter Stinebaugh to build the building toward the end of World War II, so that his three oldest sons would have a place of business to come home to when they returned from military service. In the early years, Whitie was in business with his older brother Red and his younger brother Chuck, but they both eventually moved on to other activities and the Teddy Bear became our family’s business, which my father and mother operated.

The gang at La Grande
Jim, Mark, Dan and Mary Jo

It was only the third time I’d been in that building in more than fifty years since my father had sold it. It was greatly changed. But in my mind’s eye, I could visualize it exactly as it had been. The typical diner, all chrome, Formica, glass blocks and fifties colors. I could remember the cigarette machine beside the door, the jukebox just behind where Mark was sitting and the cigar and candy case at the far end of the counter against the kitchen wall. I could see the old kitchen too, and the backroom and storeroom, the booths along the side wall of the dining room and the tables in the middle, the wrap-around glass-block counter with two stools at the end—one of which now formed part of Jim’s eclectic collection of Wapakoneta memorabilia.

We enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from the town, this town, where we had all grown up.  Eventually, however, it was time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them, a lack of certainty, a sense of hope without expectation.

Outside in the street, we all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you next time.”

When I hugged Jim, I couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. Light as a cat. I said, “Jim, it’s been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”

Jim said, “I’ll be here.”

I believed him.