UP ALL NIGHT—DIARY OF AN INSOMNIAC

 I’ve never thought of myself as an insomniac. But I suppose that, clinically, I am. I mean, the definition of an insomniac is “a person who regularly has trouble sleeping.” If I looked into a mirror just about any time of the night and asked myself honestly if I fit into that pigeonhole, I’d have to say, “Yep, that’s me.”

Problem is, if someone were to ask me if I’m “a morning person”, I’d have to answer yes to that item too. I hate “sleeping in”, as they say, and missing the morning. I don’t think I’ve ever slept until noon even as a teenager. And ninety-eight percent of the time, I’m up before eight no matter how late I’ve gotten to sleep.

Now that I’m older and no longer have such a pressing and demanding schedule—except the one that I obsessively impose on myself—you would think that I could just say, “Phew, finally, I can get some decent rest.” But I guess that, just like everything else, sleeping peacefully through the night takes practice, and I apparently have no talent for it.

For one thing, for males my age, “getting eight hours straight” is usually problematic. For that sort of glorious, almost “hibernative” journey, most of us male septuagenarians have to make several pit-stops along the way. I never was one of those people who could make it all the way through the night without having to get up at least once. And the older I get, the oftener the technical layovers in my nightly flight to dreamland seem to get. So, for anyone watching me—seriously now, who would want to?—their first observation about a night spent with me would be that it involves a helluva lot of comings and goings.

I admit that I’d love to be able to sleep six hours straight—or even five. But after all these years, I am, at this late date, learning to take it all in stride. Lying awake after one of my various trots downstairs to the facilities and back up to bed, I’ll listen to the wind in the trees outside, or the rain on our galvanized metal roof, or the cackle and screech of a great horned owl that sometimes frequents the big branches of a centenarian live beech just outside my window on bright moonlit nights. I’ll lie there and think about things I need to do around the house, or blogs I want to write, or stories I’m working on. And if that doesn’t work, I eventually sit up, turn on the light and read from whichever author I happen to be courting at the moment, or write notes in a journal I keep next to my bed, beneath my Kindle.

Obviously, this sort of behavior would be disturbing to anyone trying to get a good night’s sleep in a bed next to me. Couple that with the fact that when I do finally go to sleep, I quite often snore, and it’s not hard to understand why I long ago transferred my sleeping quarters to the guest room, so that my wife, at least, can get a good night’s sleep, in the company of any or most of our half-dozen cat friends. Otherwise, I seriously doubt we’d ever have made it to our silver anniversary, let alone our golden one.

I suppose my having sleep disorders is only natural. When I reached puberty and no longer had a “bedtime” imposed on me, I found plenty to occupy my time until midnight or so. I shared a room with my brother, so I carried out these activities in the basement, half of which had been remodeled as a “family room”. That was a misnomer, as it turned out, because nobody used but me—well, and my mother, to store everything she couldn’t cram into the hall closets upstairs. I mean, we were never the type of family that liked to get together and talk about our day—asking my dad that question could open up a whole can of worms that could drag on endlessly—or less still, to engage in “family activities” of any sort.

Indeed, Reba Mae, my mother, could never coax Whitie, my father, into the basement that he’d spent considerable money having paneled in Philippines mahogany and the concrete floor tiled, the ceiling finished in acoustical panels and lighting put in, to say nothing of the furniture purchased specifically for that part of the house. She couldn’t even get him to go down there when there were imminent tornado warnings.

Why, I even recall once when her clothes dryer—located on the unfinished side of the basement—caught fire and she came barreling up the stairs screaming bloody-murder, trying to prompt Whitie to go down and help her put out the blaze. He was smoking a cigarette and watching Walter Cronkite on TV, and instead of responding to her alarmed coaxing, he just said, “Well, call the goddamn Fire Department.”

When the big red truck showed up, siren blaring, one of the firemen burst in and said, “Hey Whitie, where’s the fire?”

Always cordial, my dad said, “Hey Dave, how’s it goin’?” pointed to the floor and said, “In the basement. Reba’s down there. She’ll show you.”  

Anyway, since no one else claimed that space, I did, and it became my “studio”, where I had my writing desk and typewriter, my books, my records and stereo hi-fi, my drums, and even a separate electric coffee pot for myself. As of high school, I also used it as a place to give drum lessons, so it became my business location as well. There I would—as seldom as possible—do my homework, but mostly, I read and wrote stories and played my drums and generally lived in my own world. Often by the time I emerged at night to go to bed, if anyone was still up at all, it was Whitie watching late-night TV with an enormous bowl of ice-cream on his lap—a nightly ritual for much of his life.

By halfway through my sophomore year in high school, I had further expanded my nocturnal activities. I was, by then, not only working part-time in a music store and giving private percussion lessons there and at home, but I’d also started playing with a jazz trio. This meant not only were weekends almost always occupied with playing gigs from ten to two at night, but that at least one and sometimes two weeknights found me in one nightclub or another in neighboring Lima, Ohio, playing jazz and fusion music from nine to one.

So, starting in my high school days, I seldom got six hours of sleep at night, and far less on the weeknights when I played a gig, got home at two or so in the morning, and had to be up getting ready for school at seven.

The Army was probably where I got the most regular sleep of my life, though not always either. In basic combat training at Ft. Bragg there wasn’t much choice. Lights-out was at ten, and the DI had your feet hitting the floor at five. Most of the time you were so exhausted and over-trained that all you thought about was getting into bed and going to sleep. But during my seven-month first tour at the Army Element of the Naval School of Music, in Little Creek, Virginia, I went back to my nocturnal ways, and would be out long after lights-out carousing with my buddies in the bars of nearby Norfolk, or drinking at the enlisted men’s club until the Shore Police cleared us out at last call.

Uniformed for the evening in LA

My next assignment was a year in Los Angeles with the 72^nd Army Band at Ft. MacArthur. Army lifers considered Ft. Mac a country club. It was commanded at the time by a young colonel, who, upon accepting the post, had to have the aging chaplain reassigned because he was also a colonel and outranked the commander in time in grade. The chaplain went somewhere else and the new chaplain assigned was a young major. This was the post where veteran field grade officers drew their pay and got their untaxed booze and smokes through the PX. The LA area seemed to be a favorite retirement venue for high-ranking military officers, so Ft. Mac was where they touched base with their people. I even recall playing an event for General Omar Bradley, the last living World War II five-star, at the posh Beverley Hilton—where one of the other band members, who had more guts than brains and was perpetually half-drunk, used one of our percussion trap cases to spirit a silver coffee service out of the Hilton to take to his mom for Mother’s Day. He figured the Hilton insignia on it made it all the more classy.

Anyway, what being with the “country club” band meant was that while we might play a lot of parades and awards ceremonies in the daytime, at night we often turned into nightclub musicians, playing at the Officers’ Club, military balls or evening parties for field grade officers and their wives. So again, it wasn’t your normal “in the Army now” schedule. And the first three months I was there before I eloped with my rather reluctant bride, I lived in a barracks in the port of LA and spent most free nights with whichever group of fellow barracks rats happened to have a car, guzzling up my meager pay in local dives and eateries.

My wife Virginia and me on tour in Europe

My next assignment was in Germany, with the 30^th Army Band, and there we did a great deal of entertaining at night and playing for parades and beer tents during the day. We also toured parts of France and Luxembourg. And when we weren’t touring or rehearsing we had a great deal of comp time off, which allowed my new bride and me to live a singularly bohemian life, traveling, usually on night trains through several European countries and hungry to see everything we could see and do everything we could do. Who had time to sleep? 

So, it’s not like I formed healthy sleeping habits or anything like regularity in my youth or early years of adulthood. That said, I wasn’t always as successful in navigating my insomnia as I am now. And later on, my sleepless nights weren’t because I was out on the town, but because I had some serious preoccupations that were capable of keeping me up night after night.

First among these was how to make a living, when I first decided to make my home in Buenos Aires, my wife’s home town. Early on, while I searched desperately for a way into journalism, I had to take what I could get. And my first job in that sleepless metropolis was as a night bellhop in a traditional downtown hotel. So, again, I found myself going to work when everybody else was going to bed, working the graveyard shift from eleven at night until eight in the morning.

I would finish my shift, take the A-line subway to its terminal station and then take a bus the rest of the way home to my mother-in-law’s place on the west side of town, eighty blocks away. I would arrive after my wife had already left for her job as a secretary downtown, just a few blocks from the hotel where I’d spent the night.  I would have some coffee and a chat with my mother-in-law, and then catch a couple of hours of sleep at best before getting up to write or to get out for a walk around the neighborhood until lunchtime. Then I might work in a nap of a couple of hours before getting bathed and dressed for when my wife and her sister arrived home from work and my brother-in-law from the university.  We would have supper together as a family and that was the very best time of the day for me before I took leave of them at ten, when I wanted nothing as much as to stay right there talking until bedtime and then trundling off for a good night’s sleep.

Instead, I got a jolting, noisy ride on the bus to the midtown Primera Junta Station, where I was greeted by the hot stale breath of the subway tunnel and the creaking rolling stock of the A-Line’s vintage trains, which I shared with other members of the walking dead, headed downtown when everyone else was heading the opposite way, to take up our posts on our respective nightshifts.

Night "crowd" on the old A-line.

When I finally did break into journalism, it was at an English-language daily, a morning paper, which meant that most of our actual writing, translating and publishing work was done by night. I reported and researched during much of the day, arriving at the paper between four and six in the afternoon and working, more often than not, until well past midnight. So I often found myself having supper at midnight or one in the morning and going to bed at two or three, only to be up again at eight or so in the morning, working on my own creative writing, or making plans for research and interviews for the rest of the day.

It was only on my days off—one day one week and two the next—when I could even think about getting to bed early, but that usually didn’t happen, simply because I wasn’t used to “going to bed with the chickens,” as Reba Mae used to say. Sometimes I worked on my days off, since I was also a freelance correspondent for numerous US and British publications. And back then too, there were movies and shows to see and friends to dine with and cocktail events to attend, so hey, who needed to sleep?

Life catches up to you, though.  At different times in my life I’ve had what might be described as “night terrors”. During the era in which I was a news editor, reporter and editorialist, this was entirely understandable. They were dangerous times in Buenos Aires, which was “my city” for two decades. My early years in journalism were during the violent last presidential term of General Juan Domingo Perón and his wife and vice-president (later president) Isabel Martínez, and during the bloody military dictatorship that followed it for the next seven and a half years. I was working for the only newspaper in the city that was in frank and open opposition of the regime and aggressively pro-democracy. And I was also reporting on these eras for some high-profile newspapers and magazines abroad.

During the day, I usually—and stupidly—felt somehow invincible. Democratic ethics and the fight for human and civil rights were the armor I wore. And I entertained the romantic—and also stupid—notion that if I were killed for what I believed in, it all would have been worth it.

Me on the Night Desk with Robert Cox

In hindsight, I wonder how my convictions would have fared had I been targeted more than I was. What if, instead of being killed outright, I were abducted and bludgeoned with batons or pipes daily for weeks on end, or if I were strapped naked to some bedsprings in a Proceso safehouse somewhere and introduced to “la máquina”, with more high voltage than blood running through my veins. Clearly, it wasn’t an unlikely scenario. Over a hundred opposition journalists and writers disappeared or were murdered directly during those seven-plus years. And three of our own top journalists at the newspaper—including my mentor and editor-in-chief Robert Cox, who left after a twenty-year career there when his family was targeted—chose exile over continuing to ignore the threats that we all, at one time or another, received.

So I can’t help wondering, would my convictions have survived even if I didn’t? Or would torture have made them all seem miniscule and futile in comparison to the urge to survive, or simply for the torment to stop? Guess I’ll never know. Like I say, during the daytime, I seldom thought about these things. I just oiled my courage with whisky, wine and cognac—not usually all together—and concentrated on the work, and on being the best team member and friend I possibly could be to Cox, perhaps the most courageous and human newsman I’ve ever known.

But at night, or better said, in the wee hours of the morning, when I’d drift off and these lurking terrors could take me by surprise, the panic could be devastating. Violent dreams, cold sweats, tachycardia, and difficulty returning from the images dreamed.

A recurrent dream was of swallowing a block of wood with the edge of a razorblade protruding from it. I’d need a shrink to tell me the significance of that one. But in the dream, I would be in bed, as I was in real life, and awake to find the block and blade in my mouth. I would try to seize it between my thumb and middle finger and pull it out before it could do any damage, but it was always too late. It was on its way down my gullet, but would then stick at the back of my throat, in my craw, as it were. I would try to bring it back up, but it would go up and down to the rhythm of my adam’s apple, sawing back and forth, the gleaming blade slashing my throat—suicide by a thousand cuts.

I would awake from this nightmare and sit bolt upright in bed gasping, one hand on my throat, the fingers of the other shoved inside my mouth seeking to get hold of the block and jerk it out. Sometimes I’d realize what was happening, wait for my breathing and pulse to slow down, and then flop back down on my pillow, my t-shirt soaked with sweat, and simply relax and try to go back to sleep. But other times, I’d be stuck between waking and sleep, and my wife would have to wake up as well, talk to me and convince me that I was “just” having a nightmare. Sometimes I would even argue with her, only half-awake, and say, “No, this time I really did it. This time I swallowed it!”

This led to other recurrent nightmares, always finding myself in an unsafe place, enemy territory. They were dreams of persecution, of being chased by faceless thugs who meant to capture or murder me. My writer’s mind and earlier military training rendered my subconscious unwilling to simply accept being made a victim, and I began to invent devices to try and save myself. Among them, obviously, were handguns I’d forgotten I had, usually a .38 Police Special or a Colt .45 automatic, that I would immediately remember as being mine from a previous dream. And for a time I might fight valiantly, holding off my attackers, but I was always outgunned and my ammo running low. Death or capture were inevitable.

It was during these times of high stress, in my late twenties and early thirties that I first started having bouts of arrhythmia. At the time, I had no idea what they were, but I would awake from a nightmare in a sweat, breathing hard, dizzy and chest pounding crazily, out of rhythm, out of time, and sure that I was having a heart attack. An emergency room doctor who was also a close friend had me do an EKG and pronounced me healthy as a horse. When I had a waking panic attack at work, he prescribed a bottle of Russian vodka he happened to have as a remedy for my stress. We drank it together, him in his underwear, since I’d gotten him up in the middle of the night when I went knocking on his door.

Even once those dangerous times were over—once I began to realize I might actually live to be over forty—it was like some spring had snapped inside me and my clock kept on running way too fast. I worked obsessively, constantly bit off more than I could chew, but chewed it anyway, and swallowed it into the bargain. It seemed like I was always breathlessly busy, never saying, “No, sorry, I won’t have time for it,” when yet another assignment was offered on top of whatever else I was doing. So for years on end, I was on a fast-moving merry-go-round that demanded all-nighters and weeks on end without a day of rest. And when my head finally hit the pillow, I quite often found I was incapable of relaxing.

This went on for years while I was obsessively trying to “make a career for myself.” And the night terrors that had once been reasonable (because there were very real things to be terrified of in my life back then) were now illogical yet uncontrollable panic attacks, from which I continued to awaken in a state of agitation that felt like nothing as much as a heart attack. So, I got so I was actually afraid to go to bed and developed a habit of staying up until I was too exhausted not to sleep. And even then, just when I would think I finally had my problem licked, I would once again awake a couple of hours after going to sleep in the midst of an arrhythmia attack and feeling like I was going to die.

But I didn’t. And eventually, I reached a stage in my life in which I realized that any “career” I hadn’t “made for myself” up to then, I wasn’t going to achieve. That was an incredible load off my mind. I no longer was afraid of saying “no” to assignments I didn’t want to take on. I specialized in those I did, and set my own schedule. And I was finally relaxed enough that I could also tackle the chronic arrhythmia that I’d lived with for more than a decade. I found a doctor who knew how to solve it, and following his treatment has changed (and saved) my life.

These days, I always wish my aging self could go back and tell my younger self that he’s going about life all wrong. I would tell him that the number one goal in his life should be happiness. That his “career” is whatever he truly wants it to be, not all the intermediate steps he took to try and get to that goal. I would tell him that some people know that. A handful of people, who seem to be born knowing that. And they’re the ones you hear about. The rest of us just waste a great deal of time burying ourselves in our own crap, and then all of the sudden we realize that life was what was happening while we were waiting for life to happen.

That said, I am still an insomniac. I stay up too late watching cop shows and then reading in bed. And I get up too early for the time I go to sleep. But it no longer bothers me. I take it in stride, as I say. I get in a lot of reading and thinking and jotting down notes for the next day’s creations. And when I do sleep, it’s restful and undisturbed, and capped by glorious hour-long siestas that I have in the early afternoon just because I can. I can’t help thinking it’s how I should have lived my entire life, but all things considered, there’s no time like the present.

Anyway, I’m glad we had this talk. It’ll give me something to think about when most of the rest of the world is sleeping.

Good night. Sleep tight! Tomorrow’s going to be a whole new day.

AMBASSADOR ME

 

This past weekend I was debating whether I needed to get a ticket to fly the thousand miles from my Patagonia home to Buenos Aires to present my credentials (or, perhaps better said, “rap sheet”) at the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So far I’ve received no specific instructions, but I just received word that I’ve been named “Ambassador”.

The appointment was extended in a terse boilerplate statement, but came with a badge—some would say, “of honor”. It’s a symbol of a megaphone.
I should hasten to say that this is not a federal appointment. It’s not even a diplomatic appointment from my home state of Ohio. I was named instead by my home town. Well, a segment of my home town—I know no few people there who wouldn’t mind seeing me tarred and feathered as a demonstration of their sentiments. Namely, the appointment was provided by an excellent Facebook group called If You Grew Up In Wapakoneta (Improved and Uncensored).

Specifically, I’ve been named Group Ambassador. It is my understanding that it is more honorary than anything else. The citation reads: “You and 2 others have grown membership of If You Grew Up In Wapakoneta (Improved and Uncensored) by sharing the group or inviting others to join. This badge displays for one month and only group members can see it.”

Please note that the parenthetical “Improved and Uncensored” in the name of the group is because there is another Wapakoneta site with a similar name. The whole idea of both groups is—or was in the case of the original one—to share stories and memories about our uniquely named home town. The idea of both sites is to express love for our town and our past. When the original group began, it was wonderful because it really became a place where Wapakonetans from every generation, whether they still lived there or their lives had led them elsewhere, dropped in and shared pictures, anecdotes, historical studies and current events strictly about our town.

But a number of folks who preferred a more realistic approach wanted to bend the “feel good” rules a bit and say, “Hey, our town’s great and all, but…” And the folks who went there to hear about the good ol’ days found these complaints offensive and basically argued back that they hadn’t joined the site to hear their town maligned. In particular, many of these feel-good hardliners espoused the idea that, if you no longer lived in Wapakoneta, you should keep your damned mouth shut about it.

It should be pointed out that the founding owner of the original group was very discerning and judicious in her decisions about which comments would be permitted and which wouldn’t. I learned to read her criteria and saw that, basically, she wanted to avoid having the site turn into a venue for political debate, for venting grudges or for digging into every skeleton in the town’s closet. She wanted it to be, pure and simple, a place where people could come to relax for awhile and indulge in neighborly nostalgia about our shared and, in most memories, idyllic past.

Her site. Her definition. Her decision. The group wasn’t meant to be an organ of the free press. She did a good job of refereeing arguments and of leaving in every memory that even loosely conformed to her rules. She was rewarded for her efforts by garnering a membership numbering some six thousand—an astounding number, considering that the standing population of Wapakoneta has always been fewer than ten thousand souls.   

I got it, and was more than content to share a very large series of stories that I’ve written over the years about growing up in smalltown America in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. My pieces drew a lot of comments and prompted a lot of other people to share their own memories. Because of that, the site owner was more than happy to receive my contributions, as well as all of the other interesting pieces of local history regularly contributed by other members. I simply learned to withhold any writing I did that focused on the more negative aspects of our history—undeniable past racism being the most sensitive of subjects, or, for example, a couple of pieces I wrote on the tragedy of the historic Native American removal movement that, still today, local officials do their best to cover up.

Sadly, the pandemic took the site’s owner, along with a million other Americans. And the truth is that, since then, the first If You’re From Wapakoneta group has fallen on hard times. There is clearly an administrator because things are constantly being removed without explanation after they are posted. Despite that fact, the person who seems to have considered him/herself the founder’s heir appears to lurk somewhere in the behind-the-scenes shadow where no one can contact them or learn their true identity.

I had, sometime before all this happened, joined the Improved And Uncensored group, simply posting my Wapakoneta efforts in both, so as to be able to share memories with friends in both groups. But from the time that the owner of the original site passed on, there seemed to be fewer and fewer posts of historical and nostalgic interest making their way into it. Eventually, I noticed my posts were no longer eliciting any responses and went in to find out why not, surprised to discover that it was because they were no longer there. I spoke to other regular posters on the site and discovered that a lot of their posts had been removed as well. These were people I knew to be proud Wapakonetans and to have always posted interesting stories and photos.

Little by little, it seemed to be a site dominated by announcements for pancake breakfasts and community fish-fries, or for pictures of unveilings of VFW plaques than a place to exchange nostalgic memories. I said as much in comments on my own Facebook timeline, and suggested that if anybody was still interested in sharing their memories without censorship, they might want to check out the Improved And Uncensored group. To my surprise, dozens of people who read and follow me on Facebook joined up.

I remained a member of both groups, but no longer posted on the first one—it was futile if everything I posted was going to be arbitrarily scrapped. Today, after my diplomatic appointment in the newer group, I wanted to see what was up in the first one. I found that it was no longer on my Groups list. And when I ran a Facebook search, I could no longer find the group, which leads me to one of two conclusions: either the original group has been shut down entirely, or whoever the Wizard of Oz behind it is, he or she has banned me definitively, which leaves me scratching my head, since no one in recent memory has written and published more about our home town than I have.

The spin-off group (Improved and Uncensored) is precisely that: people who enjoy sharing their memories of our town, but not always seen entirely through rose-colored lenses. This site still seeks, however, to trigger the best memories of our townspeople’s shared past. In its “About” section, the legend reads: Everything Wapakoneta—mostly sweet post cards and pictures from days of old. Also stories about Wapak for example: I love Auglaize Street. It smells nice. But in practice, the range of what we can recall there is considerably broader than in the original group.

Anyway, I had already earned a badge that looks like a tiny steaming cup of coffee next to my name in the Improved and Uncensored site as a “Conversation Starter”. That was kind of at the top limit of my expectations for Wapakoneta peer recognition. But I have to say that my being appointed Group Ambassador is really above and beyond. An honor I hardly take lightly.

That said, and on second thought, I fear I’ll have to forget about traveling to Buenos Aires to present my credentials as Wapakoneta Ambassador-At-Large in Argentina. It seems Wapakoneta ambassadorial postings are quite brief. According to the appointment, one month. Argentine bureaucracy is notoriously and glacially slow, so it stands to reason that, by the time I can register my papers with the Foreign Ministry as a member of the diplomatic corps and have them approved, my ambassadorship will have long since ended.

I’ve been thinking, though, once you’ve been an ambassador, the title is yours for life. So can I insist that people call me Ambassador Newland for the rest of my life? Hey, it’s worth a try!   

 

DOWN AT THE COUNTY FAIR

 

Down at the county fair

Excitement everywhere

Cotton candy, rides and fun,

Looking for some magic there

Down at the county fair.

—County Fair – The Sun Dogs—

 

There are memories that hang around in the backroom of your mind and only come to the fore when something reminds you of them. For instance, when I change the calendar at the end of July each year, my first thought is, “August—won’t be long until the Fair opens.” Despite the fact that I’ve lived abroad for the past forty-odd years, the Fair I’m thinking of is the Auglaize County Fair in Wapakoneta, Ohio.  This past week, somebody posted a vintage piece of film of the Fair from the time of my childhood, and suddenly it all came back so strongly that I even thought I could smell the gamey, smoky, greasy, sugary, leathery, sawdusty, canvassy fragrance of the midway.

If you were somehow clueless about the Fair—say you were from another county, state or planet—then one sure way to know it was in town was that the horseflies usually showed up with it. These weren’t any little messing-around deerflies. They were our large, brown, Ohio, “B-52” variety that looked like vastly magnified houseflies and bit like badgers. If the weeklong Fair was childhood heaven, then the horseflies were a sure sign that “heaven on earth” would never be as perfect as what we’d been told the real thing was going to be.

But there wasn’t a lot of preaching going on at the Fair. It was a place where everybody just wanted to go to let their hair down and have a good time. The kids to play and ride the rides, to pet the animals and stuff themselves sick on carnival junk food, the teens to “cruise” and flirt and dance, and maybe stumble onto a late-summer romance on the midway or at one of the several live-band dances that the Fair hosted, the homemakers to get out and have some fun for a change (even if at the cost of pies baked for the food tents or cakes baked for the cakewalk), the farm implement and machinery salesmen to hawk their merchandise to a captive audience, the town movers and shakers to make political and commercial points with the local population, and the farmers and their families to show off their produce and livestock, and to talk shop and share gossip with other farming families that they only saw from time to time.

When I was very small, the Fair seemed like a huge world, a place with more attractions than you could count, without even taking part in any of the events that took place in front of the tall wooden grandstand. I attended back then with my mother and her mother. My Grandma Myrt had been a farmer’s wife for decades before they moved to town, and my mother, Reba Mae, the second-oldest of four siblings, had also thus spent all of her childhood and early teen years out on the farm.

It was fun to go with them to the Fair because they knew things—rural things, things we town kids hadn’t a clue about. And they knew rural people. At the time, my knowledge of the world pretty much began and ended at the Wapakoneta city limits, so, curious child that I was, I was always asking, “Who was that?” when Reba Mae and Grandma Myrt would exchange warm and friendly greetings with people I’d never seen before, ladies in homespun calico dresses and men in their newest and carefully pressed work pants, or some of the older ones in bib denim overalls worn with a white shirt underneath for the occasion, and the vast majority of the men over forty breaking in a new farm-style straw hat after a year or two of sweating into their old ones.

These were salt of the earth people like my mother’s family, the Webers and the Cavinders, descendants of the German and Scots-Irish immigrants who had first farmed the land here, or, some of them, the older ones, immigrants themselves. My mother wore “town clothes” but Grandma Myrt fit right in here in her calico dress that she’d sewn herself—always in her same favorite J.C. Penney’s or G.C. Murphy’s pattern.

My Grandpa Vern, who, before he moved the family to town when my mother and her older brother reached high school age, had worked as a well-thought-of tenant farmer on three spreads owned by well-known local landholder Charles F. Herbst, but by this time, he had been the superintendent at Wapakoneta’s Greenlawn Cemetery for many years.   He still knew just about everybody in the farming community. Knew them so well that he and my uncles and cousins and I often hunted on their land in the fall. Indeed, he’d buried a lot of the older ones. So it would have been natural for him to spend a lot of time at the Fair each year. But no.

A tight-lipped, stubborn old kraut—hey, I can say that because I’m stubborn old half-kraut myself—Vern was wont to hold grudges. For example, he didn’t speak to his sister Clara—I didn’t even know I had a Great-Aunt Clara until I was in high school because no one dared mention her name—for twenty years. And by then both of them had forgotten what they’d quarreled about.  So anyway, one of the people Vern had a mortal grudge against—no one including my grandmother knew why—was the Auglaize County Fair’s secretary-general, Harry Kahn.

Whatever the grudge against Mr. Kahn might have been, it ended up passing through the racist social filter through which Vern sieved anybody and everybody who wasn’t a white Christian. And since Mr. Kahn was part of the infinitesimal community of Jews who had been brave enough to make their homes in homogenous Wapakoneta, it hadn’t taken much for Vern to put him on his rather ample blacklist. (Moon Man Neil Armstrong would also have the dubious honor of making that list, since Vern was the first person I ever heard espouse the conspiracy theory that the whole moon-landing was “cooked up by Hollywood,” adding that “everybody knew that Armstrong kid was a damn liar”). But since Mr. Kahn was a very popular and influential member of the local community—he was also secretary of the town’s Chamber of Commerce—there was very likely some point at which Vern had felt himself slighted besides, and therefore, mortally and permanently offended.

Anyway, when asked why he didn’t go to the Fair, which was right next door to the cemetery, and where all of his old farming buddies were sure to be hanging out, his curt response was that “while Ol’ Picklenose was running the place,” he’d be damned if he’d be caught dead in there. Speaking of being caught dead, it would be the fate of poor Mr. Kahn for my grandfather to be the last person to look down at the lid of his coffin before shoveling dirt into his grave, when Harry passed away at the age of seventy-seven in 1968.

A decade later, my grandfather himself would pass away and in a further irony of local history, would be laid to rest forever at the feet of his former landlord, Charles F. Herbst. Indeed, there too now lie along with Vern my grandmother, father, mother and brother, who passed on in that order.

Being where it is, you really can’t miss our little family plot next to a tree, on the sunny south side of Mr. Herbst’s tomb, because the monument that marks his grave is a veritable landmark. The Charles who was the originator of the gargantuan monument was the father of the man whose farms Vern had worked, also called Charles F. Herbst, like his father before him. The tomb’s first occupant died in 1910. The second, Vern’s former boss, Charles F. Herbst III, in 1947.

There’s a 1917 newspaper article that accurately describes the enormous tomb marker and provides some interesting historical notes. Turns out it is an exact duplicate of a monument erected in Toledo, Ohio’s Woodlawn Cemetery. At the time, that first one was boasted to be “the largest polished stone monument in the world.” Meaning the one in Wapakoneta was the runner up for that title back then. Whether that boast is accurate or not, I have no idea, but the Herbst monument is indeed monstrously huge.

Nearly sixty feet tall (about the height of a five-story building) and crafted in solid granite weighing more than one hundred sixty tons, the oversized tombstone was constructed by stonecutters in Barre, Vermont. Representatives of the Toledo cemetery monument company that had installed the one there traveled to Greenlawn in 1917 to oversee the Herbst monument’s installation. The sections of the monument were so huge that they had to come to Wapakoneta from Vermont by rail, on a special railway car constructed to carry such oversized loads, on tracks that would be acquired that same year by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. 

The railroad also had to build a special rail spur to get the sections to the edge of the cemetery from the main line. Two carloads of hauling and hoisting machinery and specialized tools had to be brought in to negotiate the last fifty feet to where the monument stands today, more than a century later. And even then, the wrought iron arch over Greenlawn’s entrance as well as grave markers and tombstones along the path between the cemetery entrance and the grave site had to be temporarily removed to allow the massive cut and polished stones to pass.

The site for the monument had been prepared in advance for its erection. Those preparations included the creation of a fourteen-square-foot concrete platform that extended eight feet underground.

I have always found that unquestionably monumental, all solid granite structure daunting to say the least, and not just a little creepy. Its three massive base sections, mounted one on the other, are topped by a singularly funereal dais with four columns, one at each corner and covered by a stone canopy. Installed amidst the columns and under the canopy is an enormous armchair, chiseled from a block of sheer granite to resemble a finely upholstered piece of furniture. The chair’s immutable presence clearly represents the ghostly absence of its owner. Above the canopy rises a church-like polished hexagonal spire topped by a large urn-like granite ornament. Not surprisingly that lugubrious structure has been the subject of no few Wapakoneta urban legends.

It always seemed strange to drop by the usually serene cemetery to briefly visit Vern at work, as I sometimes did, during Fair Week and, amid all that silence, to be hearing the sounds of tinny music, noisy attractions and grandstand loudspeakers carrying through the still summer air from next door. On those days my grandfather always seemed even more on edge and out of sorts than usual.

When I went with Grandma Myrt and Reba Mae, we always got stuck just inside the entrance to the Fair. That was where the so-called “industrial buildings” were. Mother and daughter always had a keen interest to meander through those buildings and take their time viewing plants, crafts, garden vegetables, giant pumpkins and squash, and chatting with old friends while I sighed and groaned and nearly died of boredom, wanting to move on up the Midway to the rides and treats.

The only thing there that I always remember being impressed with was the incredible variety of maize on display. In the US, we use the word maize to describe only the primitive, non-hybrid coarse grain that we also call “Indian corn”. The now common yellow variety we refer to as corn, and even-rowed, yellow roasting ears are what we tend to think of when somebody pronounces that word. 

It was while working with a mostly British or British-rooted staff at an English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires that I first discovered all corn is referred to as maize in England. So what was with the sixteenth-century nursery rhyme that went, “Little Boy Blue come blow your horn / The sheep's in the meadow the cow's in the corn…”? What was that about? I mean, it wasn’t like they said, “The cow’s in the maize.” Well, an erudite British colleague, gleefully informed me, barely able to contain his delight at having caught me out, “In sixteenth-century England, the generic term for grain, but especially for wheat, was corn.”

So, wheat was actually corn? Or was this just a clever Brit “taking a piss” with a gullible Yank? Better not ask.

Anyway, there in the industrial buildings, there was always a vast array of the ancient varieties of maize. Knowing only the tidy yellow roasting ears that my mother served with plenty of butter and salt a few cherished meals each summer, or the delicious ivory-colored sweet corn that my Grandpa Newland harvested from his garden each year, the multi-hued Indian corn looked like something from a storybook. I found it gorgeous—every color of the rainbow, and then some, and its kernels a chaotic crazy-quilt that refused to conform to rank and file.

Once I could finally usher the two women out of there, I would grab my grandmother’s hand and seek to hustle them further along to where things got interesting. When I was still small, I had no interest in the “scary rides”—I was a pre-teen when, for the first time, I accepted my cousin’s challenges to ride the Ferris wheel and the Round-up. It wasn’t so much my fear of the motion itself as it was of the kind of vertigo that might cause me to throw up (I was rather readily puky as a kid), especially after we started hitting the food tents and snack wagons.

But I loved the merry-go-round, back then a stunningly vintage if shop-worn work of art. It boasted a variety of beautifully hand-painted wooden horses mounted on brass poles, these last polished to a buffed natural glint by thousands of children’s hands from several different generations. There were also white-painted bench seats adorned with elegant book-end swans on either side of them where mothers could sit if they decided to go along for the ride. The music the bright-colored, canopied carousel made when it ran wasn’t the ta-ching, ta-ching recorded pop music of today’s cheaper, static imitations. Rather, it emanated from a mechanical “band” in the central core of the machine, a sound akin to a circus calliope, accompanied by a pneumatically operated bass drum and cymbals that played wheezy, jaunty carnival tunes to which the horses rose up and down in a simulated canter.

My other favorite ride was no less equestrian. In fact, it was more so. It consisted of a sort of large mechanical merry-go-round with a series of spoke-like, vertical hitching posts to which a number of Shetland ponies were tethered. Each wore a saddle, harness and bridle of well-maintained black leather with fancy silver trim, and, once the operator mounted up a batch of kids on them, he would set the string in motion and the ponies would walk slowly and obediently around in circles until the operator decided the ride was over. The kids, town kids, none of whom had any riding experience but this, would sit in the saddle clutching the pommel and imagining they were Roy Rogers or Dale Evans for five minutes or so before being unceremoniously pulled off of the ponies’ backs and placed on the packed and rutted ground again to return to their mothers.

Shetlands are hardy little ponies bred for endurance and hard work. Their history as beasts of burden in the coal mines of Britain and the US is a sad one. But in our neck of the woods, their lives were usually as saddle ponies for rural kids. Indeed, Reba Mae had often ridden one to the one-room schoolhouses where she got her grammar school and junior high education before moving to town.  This, then, was, literally, a walk in the park for them.

Still, if I today saw these stocky, beautiful little mounts being subjected to this boring, humiliating and exploitative task day in and day out while the concession owners took them on the rounds of the different county fairs all summer long, I’d be outraged. Back then, however, not knowing any better, I delighted in the ride, feeling like a cowboy hero and wishing that my mount and I could break away, jump the railings that surrounded the attraction, and ride off together to parts unknown.

For a few happy moments, this was my little steed, and I didn’t waste any time in trying to let the pony know I loved it, caressing the soft, brush-like bristles of its shaved mane, petting its small, velvety ears, and patting its sinewed neck. The warm smell of the pony, the fragrance and squeaking of the saddle-soaped leather, the solid feel of the animal beneath me and the gentle clomp of its steel-shoed hooves on the packed dirt would stay with me all year until Fair time came around again. And every time we walked past that ride on the Midway during Fair Week, I would want to stop a moment and see how “my pony” was doing.

Noon found us at the Methodist food tent for lunch. It was a large, re-purposed World War II mess tent. Cooks and servers congregated around serving counters and grill in the center of the tent, while seating was on long picnic benches pulled up to oilcloth-covered wooden tabletops that lined the tent’s outside perimeter. It seemed strange to see men who ran the stores downtown and ladies whom I only saw in church on Sundays sporting aprons and posing as servers and preparers in this ad hoc eatery.

Strangest of all was to see my dad’s mother, Grandma Alice, so completely out of context there instead of home in her own immaculate kitchen. There was not a great deal of love lost between her and my mother. There was always a polite formality between them, as if my mother was seeking to uphold certain boundaries, despite calling her “Mom”, just as she did her own mother. More formal still was the relationship between her and Grandma Myrt, who barely knew each other except by sight. They exchanged friendly greetings, each asking the other how she’d been, but that was about the extent of it, with Grandma Alice always calling my other grandma “Myrtle”, and Grandma Myrt calling her “Mrs. Newland”. But Grandma Alice and I had a close relationship, so it was always a celebration when we saw each other.

Reba Mae had already made her contribution to the church tent with two of her renowned rhubarb pies and a lemon merengue for good measure. Grandma Myrt’s dessert donation had gone elsewhere, since she was a Lutheran, as my mother had been before she married my dad, who was from a staunchly Methodist family—well, except for his father’s sister, my Great-Aunt Mame, who, to Whitie’s chagrin, was a Christian Scientist.

The food was hot and delicious and delectably homemade. My choice was usually the shredded chicken or roast beef sandwich, both dripping with their own gravy, accompanied by Grandma Alice’s scrumptious potato salad. When it was time for dessert, I was sure to want a slice of my mother’s rhubarb pie, but she’d subtly let me know I should choose someone else’s. I invariably chose my Grandma Alice’s wonderful peach pie, made with fruit from her own tree and syrupy with sugar.

In a state of post-luncheon lethargy, we would retire to the tree-lined yard behind the industrial building. This was the area where John Deere, Ford and a host of farm implement dealers parked brand new tractors, combines, spreaders, seeders, disc harrows, plows and sprayers among which members of the farming community could browse while they were relaxing and enjoying the Fair. It was a good opportunity to get their ear and maybe sell them some new gear for the coming harvest. 

For me, this area was as interesting as the Midway. I loved tractors and combines, and here at the Fair, nobody bothered the kids who climbed all over the machinery. While Reba Mae and Grandma Myrt sat a while on a bench in the shade, I left behind my cowpoke fantasy and became an Ohio farmer, taking advantage of the opportunity to sit in the sky-high driver’s seats, grab the big wheels at ten and two, and pretend for a time that I was plowing or harvesting the back forty. Though the towering green and yellow John Deeres were always an attraction, I also fell in love with the smaller, more compact, sober grey and red Fords. They seemed more like a tractor that, given the chance, a boy could handle.

When I was about fourteen, I one early autumn got to indulge this fantasy for a couple of Saturdays, when my cousin Mike and I rode our bikes out to the spread of a young farmer he knew and the man let us take turns driving a Ford tractor pulling a hopper next to a combine to catch the grain it was harvesting. When I think back to this, it seems incredible that the farmer would trust two town kids to do this with only minimal instruction, considering that we were involved with thousands of dollars-worth of farm machinery. But he did. We evidently did a good job, and it remains a pleasant memory—the dry itch of the chaff on the skin under my shirt, the sunshine beating down and the sweet fragrance of the harvested grain—that is still with me today.

Once my mother and grandmother were ready to move on, it was off to the animal barns where pampered livestock competing for blue ribbons was kept. I envied the older farm kids who worked the Fair, some of whom got to sleep on cots in the barns and stay on the fairgrounds all week long. There were common animals my mother had taught me the names of—Jersey, Hereford, Holstein and Guernsey milk cows, Hereford and Angus beef cattle, spotted Poland-China hogs, Rock Island Red and Leghorn roosters, ponies, quarter horses and sleek Standardbreds, and so on. But there were also breeds that townsfolk only saw at the Fair. In the poultry barn, for instance, angora rabbits and silver chinchillas, ebony Ayam Cemani chickens that laid black-shelled eggs and the Onagadori variety with their elegant and colorful plumage, Bantam roosters and Cornish hens as well as geese and ducks of every kind.

But of these rarer animals my attention always went to the extraordinary draft horses that had once tilled the fields and hauled wagonloads of grain to market, but that now were impressive equestrian show breeds. They were like the classic horse on steroids—Belgians and Clydesdales and Percherons, towering animals weighing a ton or more and as tall as a full-grown man at their withers, their powerful backs so wide no rider could straddle them. They were sleek and shiny, brushed to perfection, many of their tails and manes carefully curried, braided and festooned with bright, tiny ribbons. Their hugely-muscled legs and incredibly broad chests and necks were impressive, and as a little boy, I remember the daunting sensation of feeling that I could walk under them and barely have to bend.They always brought to mind the stories my mother had told me about her days back on the farm, when Vern still used horses to cultivate the fields. At the end of the day, she would run out to meet him as he was leaving the fields and he would lift her up and set her on the work-lathered neck of the draft horse so she could ride it back to the barnyard.

Throughout the day, my sister, brother and I badgered Reba Mae to spring for every sugary treat the Midway had to offer—by order of priority, cotton candy (the split-second fuzzy sensation of it in my mouth before it dissolved away to nothing was irresistible), perfect, shiny, cinnamon-candied or sticky butter-carameled apples, broad, flat ribbons of multi-flavored saltwater taffy (we always had to make sure we procured a large supply of taffy to take home to Whitie, since it was one of his all-time favorite candies), and greasy, sugar-powdered waffles.

We had to wait and dream a long time between visits to the Fair as small children because my mother and grandmother were busy ladies who could usually only spare a day or perhaps, if we were very lucky, two days out of the entire week that the Fair was in town. So as the afternoon drew toward a close, a kind of desperation set in when I thought about the sights and activities I’d missed out on.

That was back, long ago, when summer, and especially Fair Week, were an almost magical time.