THIS IS WHERE I’VE BEEN…AND WHERE I WAS BORN

 Hopefully, some of you will have noticed that I’ve been missing in action for a while.  There’s a good reason for it. I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new anthology of non-fiction stories (some people would call them memoir essays, but in the end, memoirs are just stories you don’t make up).

For anybody who’s not a regular reader of this blog, let me tell you what to the regular readers is already obvious. I’m from a small town in the US Midwest called Wapakoneta. Despite having been an expatriate former journalist living in South America for the past fifty years, I’ve written a great deal about the people, idiosyncrasies and history of Midwestern smalltown life. The stories I tell appeal (I’m told) to anyone brought up in smalltown America, and most especially to people of my own generation and the generation after. In other words, boomers and Gen Xers. But they are also apparently appealing to anyone interested in how folks lived before the Internet, before cellphones, before social media and even before television. Those are quite often the memories I relive and share with anyone willing to listen.

You needn’t remind me that, as I mention in one of the stories in this new book, I can write authoritatively about all of this because I am “older than dirt.” I cop to it and have even embraced it in my latest writing. Although I do recall what it felt like when I was one of the youngest foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires back in the seventies, and when I was the youngest general news editor in any newspaper in that city (which boasted a dozen daily and evening papers back then, plus a number of weeklies).

I guess nearly everyone would like to be young again. But as a writer, I’d only like to be young again if I were to know everything I know now. It’s not that I don’t still wrestle with doubts the way I always have. But my doubts now are experienced and educated doubts, not the scary existential and ignorance-based doubts of my youth as a guy who didn’t know nearly enough in jobs where you really had to know a lot.  

Anyway, mine, in general, is literature of broad appeal. But I also have specifically written a great deal about my town as sharing these common qualities of the Midwest, but also as being its unique Midwestern self. To start with, a town with a name no one will confuse with any other. Not a Springfield (there are thirty-five towns with that name in the US, plus the one on The Simpsons), a Lebanon (thirty-five), an Arlington (thirty-eight), a Centerville (thirty-eight), a Clinton (thirty-nine), a Franklin (forty-five), or a Washington (ninety-one), but Wapakoneta.

If you say you’re from Wapakoneta, some people might not know the name—"Wapaka-whosis?”—but surely no one will ask you “Which one?” And a lot more people know the name now than did when I was a kid growing up—even my ophthalmologist (a private pilot and aerospace buff) in Patagonia knows it—because Wapakoneta native son Neil Armstrong put us on the map. You would practically have to be a hermit, or never have opened a history book, not to know that Neil was the first person to ever set foot on the surface of the moon back in July of 1969. So, Moon Town is my town. Still, he’s not the only local boy (or girl) of certain widespread renown, even if he is indeed, and by far, the most famous.

But that’s not all that makes Wapakoneta unique. Like each person, each town has a story all its own. A story that usually includes beauty marks and ugly warts, proud moments and others you’d like to forget, moments of outright joy and contented happiness, and moments of tears and tragedy. 

In my latest book, A Place Called Wapakoneta, I strive to capture this essence. Sometimes the task is a little like trying to bottle lightning, but you go at it little by little, memory by memory, quirk by wonderful quirk in order to paint a portrait of a town and a story that you’ve never stopped loving, beauty marks, warts and all.

 This book could be loosely described as “a sequel” to my first two—The Rock Garden and Other Stories, and, Visions of What Used To Be—but is, by far, the biggest anthology yet. It contains a total of twenty-five non-fiction stories in a two hundred-fifty-page-plus book. And each story is accompanied by a related photo depicting the town and its history. The book also includes related portraits of other towns, specifically, Lima and Saint Marys, Ohio.

 The e-book and hard-cover editions are already on Amazon for pre-ordering (with deliveries scheduled for the first week of August). The paperback will go live on Amazon as of Sunday, July 28, the official launch date for this new book. 

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003ZWKVEK

From a Place Called Wapakoneta will also be available for purchase at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta as of the first week of August. And I will be holding a book-signing event there in September. Check with the RAC for details.

I only hope all of you enjoy reading this book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and that you too will feel the emotions and identification with it that I have in attempting, from my own point of view, to set part of my home town’s story down in order to share it with others, and to keep these memories alive after I’m gone. Because the only true history we have is the one those who lived it can share with us. The rest is pure revisionism.

     

BOWSHER UNIQUE – UNIT OF MEASURE FOR SINGULARITY

When I was a kid, and my mother would see my little brother and me trying to lasso each other with a jump rope, she would warn us that we should stop before we ended up “like that poor little Bowsher kid.” Everybody knew who Jim was in school, whether they actually knew him or not, because he was “the one-eyed kid,” and there weren’t all that many of his kind in town.

Jim Bowsher - Photo by Scott Bruno

Jim and I weren’t friends as kids. In fact, as I wrote in my book about him entitled The Rock Garden and Other Stories, I don’t think we ever spoke a word to each other throughout grade school, junior high or high school. That wouldn’t have been strange in a big city, but in a town of fewer than ten thousand souls, and we being only a grade apart, that sort of distance was an oddity. 

The fact is, we didn’t meet until ten years ago, when we were both in our mid-sixties. It wasn’t a chance meeting. It was carefully planned by a mutual friend, Victoria Smith, who had long insisted that Jim and I “just had to meet each other.” She more or less trapped us both into dinner at her place, without telling either of us that the other would be there. 

Well, the connection was immediate, and the two of us ended up keeping poor Vicki up until 4am, sitting at her kitchen table trying not to doze off, while Jim and I continued to drink wine and talk endlessly. When I finally glanced at my watch and said I had to go because I had a breakfast date at eight o’clock, ever-enthusiastic Jim said, “Great! So we have another four hours!”

Ever since then, we have been close friends. We’ve only grown closer over this last decade and have often regretted that we wasted so much time getting to know each other, because we could have been life-long friends from the outset. But like so many other things, that’s just life and its random nature, I guess.

Anyway, Jim once told me the story of how he had lost the eye. It hadn’t been a jump rope and he hadn’t been trying to lasso another kid. But it had indeed been with a rope with which he was trying to lasso a tree. By a quirk of fate, the end of the rope snapped him in his right eye and basically destroyed the lens.

Right to left, Larry Street, Jim Bowsher and Dan Newland
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch

Jim said he didn’t realize how bad it was until his dad got home from work and looked at the eye. He said “When I saw his expression, I knew it was bad.” Jim told me that what hurt him most wasn’t the injury, but the sadness he saw in his father’s face. He felt as if he’d somehow let his dad down and wished he could make it up to him.

The doctor who tended Jim’s wound took it on himself to explain the situation to him. It was a lot for a little boy to take in. He would, the doctor said, never see out of that eye again. The doctor looked very sad, and wanting to buck him up, the precocious little six-year-old with the big vocabulary said, “Well, I guess that’s just one more thing that will make me unique.”

Jim left us yesterday at 6pm after a long struggle with cancer. I’ve thought a lot about him lately. One of my thoughts last night after I heard the news was of what I would say if someone were to ask me what Jim was like. I came to the conclusion that the word little boy Jim had used to describe himself to the doctor was perfect. Jim, I would have to say, wasn’t like anything or anyone. Jim was unique. He was a guy with a different vision, a singular path, and the stubborn grit and optimism to forge it daily, without doubt or pause.

Anyone who has ever heard Jim’s name—and, incredibly, people have heard of him around the world—immediately associates it with his incredible Rock Garden and Temple of Tolerance. This is a work of such extraordinary size and topographical profile that an Air Force fighter pilot out of Wright Patterson Air Base in Dayton once showed up at Jim’s door after overflying it and recording the coordinates. He told Jim he just had to come and see for himself what sort of amazing thing Jim had in his backyard. That said, however, this monumental permanent art installation is merely a symbol of Jim’s real work.

According to Jim, it was first manifested in him as a vision, which only he would have had the enthusiasm and wherewithal to materialize. Jim built his monument to tolerance and its surrounding Rock Garden for children, but especially for wayward teens and pre-teens. This was to be their safe place, where violence, racism, drugs and religious intolerance were the only things not tolerated, where they could avoid the bad influences of the surrounding world, seek sanctuary from often troubled home lives and be free from bullying and lack of understanding. No matter how busy Jim was pursuing his own goals, he was always there for them. And not just in the yard, but also in society, where he coached them in baseball, spoke at their schools, accompanied many of them to juvenile court, counseled their parents and even found many of them jobs and homes as they reached the appropriate ages.

Jim involved “his” kids, encouraging them to take part in the construction of the garden and temple. He explained to them that if you built something, it became, in a sense, yours. He inspired in them a vision of the future when, as often successful adults and parents, they would return to the garden with their families and would be able to proudly say, “I helped build this.” He taught them the value of hard work, of creation, of belonging to a team, yet of being your own person, unassailable individuals capable of resisting peer pressure, and of pursuing their dreams.

In that sense, Jim was a constant mentor, and he had the good luck to live long enough to see the fruit of his gargantuan efforts to make his world a better place than he’d found it. In recent years the Rock Garden has been visited regularly by people in whose childhood lives he made a difference—a couple of generations of them, in fact. To a man and woman, they are eternally grateful for the part he played in their lives, for often pulling them back from the brink. In fact, one such man, a one-time troubled boy whose life he had changed, was with Jim’s wife, Kazuko, by his bed when he took his last breath.

That in itself could have been the sole focus of his life’s work, but it wasn’t. Jim’s boundless energy and curiosity made him a collector of people’s stories from the time he was nine, when, for the first time, he started visiting senior living facilities and interviewing the elderly, as a means of compiling the real history of our town and the surrounding area, not the one told in textbooks. He was an avid historical researcher, an expert on Wapakoneta history back to long before local native tribes had ever seen a European.

Besides getting the skinny on every major personality in our town’s history, Jim also spent a great part of his youth traveling on the cheap and seeking out the writers and other major figures that he had most admired. When Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out in his kitchen, one of the few things pinned with magnets to his refrigerator door not to be spoiled by the blood spatter was a haiku that Jim had sent him, after having met him personally and befriended him in New York City.  He also tracked down Eudora Welty, collared her in her front yard and talked her into letting him into her home for a two-hour interview.

And then too, Jim had one of the last interviews ever recorded with Isaac Asimov. As a result, he ended up inheriting Asimov’s 1924-model manual typewriter, on which he himself would write for many years.

Jim owned Trotsky’s ink well. The story of how he got it is fascinating, but suffice it to say that he lifted it from the then-abandoned house in Mexico where the political ideologue had had his office in exile—the very office where an assassin murdered Trotsky with an ice axe. He once, too, proudly showed me a t-shirt that he’d had with him when he met Nelson Mandela in Manhattan. He had handed Mandela the t-shirt and a red marker and told him, “I’m not as interested in having your autograph as in asking you to write the one word that you think is the most important in the English language.” Without hesitation, Mandela printed “Freedom!” in huge letters on the fabric.

And these are just a few of his traveler’s anecdotes.

The Rock Garden has been visited by numerous celebrities whom Jim consistently treated with the same humanity and self-confidence that he would have any other visitor. One was Johnny Depp, who decided to go and meet Jim personally after a bitter telephone argument they had over how Depp should play his future role as John Dillinger. Jim had told a colleague of Depp’s to tell Johnny not to go making a hero out of a coldblooded killer like Dillinger, whose henchmen had murdered the sheriff in nearby Lima, Ohio when they broke the bank robber out of the county jail in the nineteen-thirties. After his visit to the Temple of Tolerance, Depp left thinking of Jim as a friend.

Nor was Jim’s social work confined to helping wayward kids. He also worked in prisons helping career criminals—including a few death-row murderers—to tell their life stories. Jim had an at times infuriating empathy with and sympathy for these men whom society had locked away. But Jim had the advantage of having collected their childhoods on paper, and while he couldn’t condone their horrific acts, he knew that in nine out of ten cases, what they’d done was the direct result of the trauma they had suffered as children.

Jim gained unsought recognition for his incredible efforts on a local, state and national level. One he could be truly proud of was his Jefferson Award. For the past fifty years, the Jefferson Award has been granted to not only renowned national figures, but also to unsung heroes whose works “have represented the good that is happening all around us, in every community across the nation.”   

Jim was an extraordinary public speaker and shared all of these stories and more with his audiences, ever seeking to help people focus on how we are all connected in the fabric of humanity, and how love and empathy are the only emotions capable of saving us.

Last November was the last time I saw Jim in person. He, some mutual friends and I had spent a lot of time together during my stay in Wapakoneta, but it was time to journey back to my home in Patagonia. That last evening, four of us, Jim, Mark Gallimore, Mary Jo Knoch and I, met at the now-iconic La Grande Pizza.

The choice was no coincidence. The building occupied by the pizzeria for the past half-century was built under contract for my grandfather in 1945, and, from 1946 until 1969, housed the Teddy Bear soda fountain and grill, a business first owned by my father and two of his brothers and later by just my father and mother. In his eclectic collection of objects with stories behind them that Jim had in his incredible museum of a house, there was a chrome and leather counter stool that had once formed part of the Teddy Bear décor. So we both—along with a couple of generations of other Wapak folks who had grown up in the forties, fifties and sixties—had an intimate connection with the place.

That night, we enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. We had a great time despite the fact that Jim was already visibly ill. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from our formative years in 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. There is 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. 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.

Sorry you couldn’t keep that promise, my friend. But, hopeful agnostic that I am, just let me say, perhaps I’ll see you on the other side.

 

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX…OR DIDN’T

 As a writer and long-time journalist, I’m one of those guys who, when faced with a hole in my knowledge, I try to find out everything I can to squelch my ignorance. That means I spend an inordinate amount of time digging around in reference material of all sorts. It also means I used to squander many an hour in libraries or rooting around in whatever musty reference books and sundry printed materials I could lay hands on. But that was admittedly a restrictive activity, simply because, back then, learning everything you always wanted to know about a random topic could have ended up consuming most of the rest of your adult life, to the detriment of all the other random topics of which you might have hoped to glean a measure of knowledge.

Still, it had the virtue of one’s having to exert tremendous effort in the search for knowledge (meaning objective facts), which made you appreciate it all the more once you had it. And it also meant you would probably remember it a lot longer than today, precisely because of the effort you had to make.

In recent years—since the nineties, which, to someone like me, born slightly less than halfway through the previous century, seems like “only yesterday”—I’ve learned a whole new way to do research. Despite being rather an “old dog” by the time the Internet appeared on the scene, I didn’t consider myself above learning new tricks. And almost by accident, I found myself being something of a pioneer, within my limited circle, of the “working at home” culture of the Internet Era.

I’ve been doing precisely that since 1995, when dial-up Internet connections first appeared in Patagonia, a region to which I had moved less than two years before that. In doing so, I came face to face with a self-fulfilling prophecy that I myself had made nearly a decade before, when, writing a communications sidebar to a cover story that Apertura magazine of Buenos Aires published on “The Future”, I said that, in the not so distant future, guys like me, who made their living researching and writing, would be able to do both from the comfort of their own home, even if they lived in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains, in one of the most remote places on earth.

At the time I wrote it, I still lived in a mid-town apartment in Buenos Aires, and it had seemed like a pipe-dream. I mean, I didn’t doubt that it would happen eventually—just not in my lifetime. But suddenly, there I was, a decade later, in my mid-forties, in my Internet-based studio—in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains, in the remote Argentine Patagonia—researching, writing and translating for a variety of clients scattered everywhere from Buenos Aires to Miami, from Madrid to New York, and from Houston to Patagonia. And although, in the beginning, even people in the US had qualms about doing business through the World Wide Web, I hung in there and convinced them there was no need for my presence in big-city offices, or for material to travel by snail mail, or for us to use faxes and teletypes when the Internet could do it all.

What it meant for me personally, was that I had gone from being a stodgy old-school newsman whose manual typewriter they had practically had to pry out of my cold, dead hands, to being among the earliest advocates of the Internet, as much more than a clever novelty—as, indeed, an incredibly useful tool for communication and research.

I was just thinking about that again today when, in some reading I was doing, I came across some information about a French actress who said she identified as “sapiosexual”.  Well, I was stumped. I mean, although I am a very open-minded and liberal person, as someone who grew up in rural Ohio in an era when sexual orientations were obtusely considered to be two—please check one box only, M or F—and anyone who complained about it was sent to therapy, if not to jail, I’ve had to practice to be able to memorize and pronounce the initials LGBTQ. And while I’m a great believer in people doing whatever they want to with their bodies, and particularly with their genitalia, as long as their partners are willing, as long as there’s no pedophilia or unwilling subjugation involved, and as long as I don’t have to watch, it’s okay with me—although watching’s okay too, if that’s what turns you on—I have to admit that a lot of definitions of distinct sexualities have escaped me entirely.

Indeed, I had no idea how many were escaping me until I decided to quickly research sapiosexuality. Looking the term up, I immediately came up with numerous explanations. The best definition was, in short, being sexually or erotically aroused by intelligence, no matter what the physical sex of the other person was. I actually found that a pretty cool idea. A sort of highly cultivated sexual orientation. I mean, I’m far too intellectually inferior and hopelessly hetero for it to be an appealing idea to me personally, but I thought, hey, good for them, these “sapios”! Brains turn them on.

Then, of course, seeking an objective definition, I also read that some sexuality snobs said that while sapiosexuality might be a preference, it certainly wasn’t an orientation. I thought, now wait a minute, why not? What was that saying? That the brain is the most powerful sex organ? In fact, it is the master sex organ because without it, all sexual activity would be moot. So why not be sexually oriented toward intelligence?

These can be put down to the kind of rhetorical questions that assail an experienced editorial writer, I suppose. But that wasn’t the only thing I had to ponder, because I was floored by the brand new (for me) discovery that, besides the handful of sexual orientations about which I’d already reduced my ignorance, another couple of scores existed as well!

It was my own fault. This was what I got for looking up a new term. Start pulling on a loose thread, and the whole shebang came unraveled. How the heck many sexualities can there be, you ask? ¨

Here’s a little sampling. 

Allosexual: As far as I can tell, most of us are this. It means, simply, someone who experiences sexual attraction, period. Doesn’t everybody, you ask? No. Allosexuality is the opposite of Asexuality, and one helps define the other. Someone asexual either has very reduced sexual response, or simply doesn’t experience sexual attraction of any kind. That, however, doesn’t necessarily keep asexuals from feeling romantic attraction to specific people of both (all) sexes. And as such, they may even engage in sexual activity—presumably without really being into it. 

Androsexual means being attracted to all things male and masculine. That seems pretty straightforward, like a me Tarzan, you Jane, kind of thing, but it’s not that simple. It has to do with being attracted to anyone who identifies as being male or masculine—regardless of biology, anatomy or whatever sex was assigned to the object of that attraction on his or her birth certificate.

Then there’s Aromantic (as opposed to “a romantic”), which simply means people, regardless of sex or gender, who experience little or no romantic attraction to anybody. But that definition says nothing about their possibly of still having a strong sex drive and taking part in “unromantic” sex. Or maybe they just end up being Autosexual, which sounds an awful lot like what we used to call “self-abuse”, but apparently isn’t, because (it says here), “someone’s desire to engage in sexual behavior such as masturbation doesn’t determine whether they’re autosexual…” So, wait, I’m confused. If that doesn’t define autosexual, what does?

Now, an Autoromantic is a whole other ball of wax. These are individuals who are attracted to themselves. Autoromantics apparently find themselves experiencing relationships they have with themselves as romantic. Not sure how that works, but it would be worthwhile asking somebody if that’s like the amorous relationship former President Donald Trump has with himself. 

And those are just the ones on the A-list!

Later, we have the Bicurious (people who might ask themselves what their sexuality really is and, as a result, explore bisexual relationships), Bisexual (somebody who is sexually, romantically or emotionally attracted to people of more than one sexual orientation or to different genders—in other words, Bicurious folks who have made up their minds), and Biromantics (individuals who become romantically but not necessarily sexually attracted to people of more than one gender—which kind of sounds to me like a bicurious introvert, but hey, that’s not a scientific explanation, just my own speculation).

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was a gender non-conformity trailblazer.
Openly bisexual, she would occasionally dress in clothing considered
 stereotypically male, as in this family photo, in which she (center)
 is dressed in a men’s suit with her hair pulled back.  Her artwork
also reflected her thoughts surrounding identity,
gender and sexuality.

Then, there are the Closeted—as the term suggests, people who are “in the closet”, or in other words, individuals who keep their sexual identity, attractions, or gender expressions secret from the public. Some “closet whatevers” may only keep their secrets in certain publics, where they are afraid of being rejected, targeted or discriminated against, but will reveal their proclivities in “friendly” surroundings. Now, the opposite of Closeted is
Coming Out, or in other words, making the decision to reveal, or even advertise, one’s sexual identity, proclivity or gender. I’ve known quite a few outed people and have talked to them about it enough to know that it often comes after a long process (frequently years) of indecision, guilt, social ostracism and general suffering. Which is why I’ve always held those who come out in high esteem for the courage and self-acceptance that it requires. Now, things get complicated with the term Cupiosexual. These are asexual individuals who may not experience sexual attraction per se, but who still have a desire to take part in sexual behavior, or even in a sexual relationship. (Hey, don’t look at me; I have no idea how this works).

Next on the list are Demisexuals and Demiromantics. These are very similar terms in that they refer to having a sexual and/or romantic attraction only under specific circumstances. This would apply, for instance, to people who need to build a romantic or emotional bond before feeling sexual attraction. I think this must apply to quite a number of people I know.

Then there are also people who just kind of go with the flow. They are aptly described as Fluid, which has almost nothing to do with wetness as such, but rather, is a description of people who take it for granted that sexual behavior, sexual attraction, or sexuality in general can change in accordance with the times and the circumstances. Someone with fluid sexuality will embrace shifts in their attractions and behavior in keeping with the circumstances they happen to be living, or simply over the course of time.

I finally hit on one I knew—or thought I did—when I came to Gay on the list. As most of us know, gay individuals (a term that achieved popularity in the sixties) are ones who feel sexually, romantically and emotionally attracted to people of their own sex. This is sometimes so strong that a gay friend of mine once told me, when I mentioned common everyday marriage to him, that he couldn’t help me, since he had never been able to understand hetero (we’ll get to that in a minute) relationships.

I also got into a discussion with another gay friend once when I talked about “gay people” meaning both men and women. He laughed derisively and said, “Wow, Caveman, you’ve gotta get out more! Only men are gay. Women are lesbians.” Typical of my intellectual arrogance, I pressed the point, saying that wasn’t true. That, in fact, the “gay community”, as conceived of in the sixties, included both male and female “homosexuals”. That really cracked him up. He said he wouldn’t know. He’d have to get out his “gay history book” for that one.

Well, I have to say, if you’re reading this, pal, the accepted definition of Gay, according to the list I’m quoting from, stands for both males and females. But the list concedes that “some gay-identified women prefer the term ‘lesbian’, while others might prefer ‘’queer’ or ‘gay’. And, okay, to your point, it also says, “It’s also best to ask which word or term someone uses to describe themselves.” Also, I guess your crack about the “gay history book” wasn’t far off, since the report also says, “The fields of medicine and psychology previously referred to this sexual orientation as homosexual. “Homosexual” is now viewed as an outdated and offensive term and shouldn’t be used to refer to LGBTQIA+ people. (Oh man, more initials to memorize)!

Graysexual: Right, that’s not a misprint. It’s a term to describe a “gray area” (which, out of longstanding habit, I would spell as “grey area”) on the sexuality index. It is reserved for people who may not be overly sexually attracted to anybody, but who also don’t identify as asexual/aromantic. They may experience a certain level of sexual attraction or desire, but not as intensely or frequently as those who identify as completely beyond asexuality.  Similarly, someone Grayromantic might feel the occasional romantic twinge, but not as strongly or as often as someone beyond the bounds of aromanticality.

Gynesexual, as should be clear from the prefix, is all about being attracted to women, females and all things feminine. As with Androsexuality (see above) Gynesexuality isn’t just about guys who like girls. The term specifically includes those who identify as women, females or feminine, regardless of questions of biology, anatomy or birth-certificate sex.

I found familiar territory when I got to Heterosexual. But by the time I got to this term that describes Me, I would have almost modified it with “boring”, as in Boring Heterosexual. As most of you know, the term describes people who are sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to people of the opposite gender (although I have to admit, I’m getting pretty confused about what “opposite” means). This heading is more commonly known as “Straight”. But that doesn’t take into account that trans-gender people (someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth) can also be heterosexual, as can cisgender folks (someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth), which is pretty much the majority of people. People like us aren’t included in the initials LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex—a general term to describe people born with sexual characteristics that are not typically male or female, including sex chromosomes, external genitalia, or an internal reproductive system—and Asexual), with the plus being added, I presume, to symbolize “whatever else might crop up in the future.”

And the list goes on:

Labidoist Asexual (people who are ostensibly asexual but who have sexual cravings satisfied by other means, such as masturbation), Monosexual (typically, those who feel attracted only to people of one gender—meaning people who are exclusively heterosexual, gay or lesbian), Non-Labidoist Asexuals (people with no sexual attraction or sex drive at all), Omnisexuals (people with an indiscriminate sexual appetite that spans the entire spectrum of sexual possibilities), and similarly, Pansexuals/Panromantics (people who can feel sexual, romantic or emotional attraction to anyone, regardless of their gender, sex or sexual orientation).

Which leads us to Polysexuality (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual and queer people, among others). Passing is when a person of any other sexuality is assumed to be hetero or cisgender.  Queer is a term we heteros were told we weren’t allowed to use anymore because it was insulting to homosexual folks. This makes it a lesser cousin to the N-word, which some African Americans use pretty regularly in vernacular conversation, but which is vile and discriminatory when it issues from the lips of a white person. In the case of sexuality, it is the Q in LBGTQIA+, and is a term used in that community to describe anyone who is not strictly hetero. It’s a word given to grey areas that don’t fit neatly into the gay, lesbian or bisexual categories. As such, it has no dependence on sex, sexuality or gender. There is also, however, another Q—namely, Questioning. This describes the process of becoming “curious” about exploring nuances in one’s sexuality. And it also applies to people who are currently exploring their sexuality or gender. 

Sex-Averse is not so much a choice of sexuality as exactly the opposite—people in the “asexual” classification who are utterly disinterested in or even violently opposed to sex and sexual behavior and activity in general. Sex-Favorable is the term reserved for usually asexual people who can, in certain situations, be positive toward or even favorable to sex. Then there is Sex-Indifferent, in other words, asexual-leaning people who are, nevertheless, indifferent to or neutral to sex or sexual behavior issues. Sex-Repulsed, meanwhile, is, as the name implies, the term that describes asexuals who are, directly opposed to and repelled by anything to do with sex. Skoliosexuality is the word for those who are attracted to others who do not identify as cis-gender—for instance, non-binary, genderqueer, and transgender individuals. Spectrasexuals are sexually or romantically attracted to people of multiple or varied sexual and gender persuasions, but not necessarily to all of them.

From what we’ve seen in the contents of this list, it would appear that the only way to quickly differentiate in polite conversation between the sexual majority and others would be by describing them as either “straight” or “queer”.

But in the end, why describe, classify, or pigeonhole others at all? Why not just accept everyone as another human being like you or me, with all of our doubts, dichotomies, preferences, proclivities, quirks and idiosyncrasies? But in the end, nevertheless, all children of the Earth, just seeking to get through this life the best way we know how. What business is it of mine what lifestyle you embrace? What business is it or yours whom I fall in love with, or what we do behind closed doors to express it, and in the intimacy of private lives?

AN INDIAN LAKE HOMAGE

Ohio’s Indian Lake super-tornado is already old news on national news schedules, but for many of the residents of the villages of Lakeview and Russells Point, the nightmare continues. It’s one thing to hear about one of these super-storms that are an ever more frequent consequence of global climate change—to see the news coverage and pictures of the wreckage in a place you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint on a map without the help of Google—and entirely another to be able to picture the location in your mind, smell the air, hear the sounds, remember the buildings and some of the people, recall the curves in the road leading to a place that you’ve visited many times since childhood. No matter how much you might empathize with and feel sorry for people who aren’t your neighbors who have been caught in a natural catastrophe, it’s not the same as when it strikes so close to home.

Lakeview and Russells Point are villages in Logan County, located six miles from one another on US Route 33, along the waterfront of the Indian Lake Reservoir. Indian Lake is just twenty miles southeast of my hometown of Wapakoneta, which is also on US 33—a road that connects towns all through the central part of the state with the capital in Columbus. The two villages have similar demographics and stable populations of about twelve hundred to fourteen hundred people each. Both are best known as summer resorts. But of late, the two towns have also become retirement communities and places where people from larger surrounding towns and cities have vacation homes and cottages.

Russells Point takes its name from James Russell, the original owner of the land around which the village was to grow. It officially became a community in 1913, when a post office, which is still in operation today, was first opened. Some of the stores and restaurants in the downtown Main Street strip of US 33 along the reservoir can be accessed from either the road or from the lake, with docks having been built to allow patrons to tie up their small craft.

For many years, Russells Point was famous for its amusement park and ballroom. It has been closed for many years now, since the seventies, I believe, but I still remember it well, even though the ballroom—better known as the Minnewawa Dance Hall—had already closed by the time I was a teen. The only remaining vestige of that one-time entertainment Mecca is the old steel-girder Sandy Beach bridge that crosses a section of the Indian Lake harbor.  

Before much bigger Ohio parks, like Cedar Point and King’s Island existed, the Russells Point Sandy Beach Park was a pretty big deal. Even more famous than the amusement park, however, was the dance hall. When my mother and father were dating age, some of the greatest big bands in America played there—among them, the swing bands of Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Billy May, Gene Krupa and many more. In its heyday, Russells Point was known as “the Atlantic City of the Midwest”. And the Minnewawa Dance Hall was billed as the largest in Ohio, with capacity for a hundred dancing couples and with two separate bandstands.

The Minnewawa was a venue for some major contests, during the Great Depression Era, when marathon dancing was a fad. The rules of the marathons included a requirement for couples to dance forty-five minutes out of every hour, until all but one couple had been eliminated. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, the Minnewawa Dance Hall hosted the National Endurance Dance Marathon. The competition ended up lasting an absolutely legendary eighty-eight days and two hours.

From my teen years in the sixties, I have vivid memories of going there with friends, walking along the old boardwalk, visiting the penny arcades, going through the funhouse with its crazy mirrors and scary nooks and crannies, riding the thousand-foot long rollercoaster and viewing the star-studded night sky from the summit of the Ferris wheel. It was a magical place, but by then on its last legs, a shadow of its former glory, a bit run down and seedy. But all of that seemed to us to give it an even more exciting carnival-like thrill.

The Minnewawa, when the house was jumpin'

The Village of Lakeview pre-dates Russells Point by a few years. It sprang up on land owned by a settler named L.T. Dysert, who lived there with his wife Sarah. The town was actually plotted as a settlement as of 1881. Dysert and his wife ran a small trading post, and the village quickly grew up around it. By 1895, Lakeview had enough residents to gather the two hundred signatures necessary to officially incorporate the village.

The boon to Lakeview’s birth as a tourist destination was construction of a new section of the Toledo and Ohio Central Railway, which arrived simultaneously with the village’s founding in 1895. Traffic on the rail line was intense, with four passenger trains a day making whistle stops there, carrying both passengers and the mail. Freight trains kept Lakeview well-stocked with vital supplies and coal, and also helped the town build its commerce by picking up the lumber, grain, fruit and vegetables produced in the area around Indian Lake. And by 1899, Lakeview had further advanced with the advent of telephone service, and later, electricity.  

Early on, Lakeview boasted a sawmill and lumber yard, as well as a barrel-making operation. A tile mill and a grain elevator would be the next additions. Both the elevator and lumber yard were set up close to the tracks for easy shipping to other parts of the country.

But again, it was rail services that bolstered the village’s tourist industry, as 1908 brought the arrival of the “Interurban”, an electric train service run by the West Ohio Electric Railway, which also operated out of my hometown of Wapakoneta, one county west. In Wapak, there was an Interurban station next door to the site of what would eventually be my own family’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear. Back then, the lot my grandfather would buy in 1945 was still occupied by an eatery known as Zint’s Cabin, which was right across Blackhoof Street from the Zint family’s sweet store known as the Candy Kitchen.

Cottonwood Resort, Lakeview.

In 1913, a concrete retaining wall was built between Lakeview and Russells Point, which further deepened and expanded the lake and would eventually help integrate the Lakeview tourist community with the Sandy Beach Amusement Park. It’s interesting to note that the site of Indian Lake was originally a Native American settlement. The basin for the lake was a six hundred-forty-acre area that featured a series of ponds, lagoons and marshes. It was best known as a good hunting ground and fishing spot. But in the 1850s, the basin was damned up to create the Lewistown Reservoir, a six thousand three hundred-acre feeder lake to provide water to the Miami and Erie Canal, a mule-driven barge transport system that ran the entire length of the state from the Ohio River in Cincinnati to Lake Erie in Toledo.

As rail services advanced in Ohio, however, the canal system was rendered obsolete. The Lewistown Reservoir, now called Indian Lake, became more and more a playground for boating enthusiasts and anglers, as well as a popular beach resort. Lakeview, like Russells Point, grew along with the popularity of the lake as a vacation spot. By the thirties and forties, it was a bustling town with several bars and restaurants, rental cottages and hotels as well as a healthy downtown area where, among other businesses, there was a Farmer’s Bank, a Western Auto Store, a car dealership, an ice cream shop, grocery and clothing stores, and, oddly enough, a furrier’s shop.

Then as now, the Lakeview and Russells Point communities were known for their solidarity. This was largely thanks to a united farming community in the surrounding area. Collective memory can still recall when the local Farmers’ Association owned a large community barn in nearby Stokes Township, where area farmers could store equipment and machinery. But it also became a meeting place where local farmers and their wives socialized. It was always a potluck affair in which the farm wives would cook up washtubs full of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and would make gallons of lemonade, so that friends and families could get together and share a meal and a chat.

Al Capone, angler

During the Prohibition Era, famed Chicago gangster and bootlegger Al Capone was rumored to have a hideout on one of the lake’s islands. He was also rumored to make a regular stop at the now locally iconic Alpha Bar, then a speakeasy, in Wapakoneta, to have a few drinks with his “boys” on the way to Indian Lake, since, so the legend goes, the Alpha was a customer of the Capone organization’s illegal booze operations. But like I say, that’s all part of local folklore and I have no way of confirming it. It’s part and parcel of the rich storytelling tradition of my grandfathers’ generation.    

My own memories of Indian Lake are many, rich and lasting. But these are a few flashbacks that immediately spring to mind:

A NEWLAND FAMILY REUNION on a Fourth of July, in the early nineteen-sixties. Everybody was there, my cousins, aunts and uncles, even Great-Grandma Maude. The most colorful character by far was always my Great-Uncle Dale, Grandpa Murel’s younger brother. I only saw Uncle Dale at the occasional family get-together, some years for Thanksgiving, others for the odd Newland family reunion, still others for the Fourth of July, like this day. The weather failed to cooperate that July Fourth. It ended up being unseasonably chilly with a steady drizzle.

Dale Newland was born in 1900, and when he was a young man in the nineteen twenties and thirties, there was nothing cooler for a streetwise guy of his ilk growing up in the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, than to emulate the gangsters that were his heroes. Dale, even then, in the sixties, always dressed the part in his Mafia-style suits, dark shirts with light-color ties, two-tone shoes and finely styled fedoras. The look was accented by vintage Ray-Ban sunglasses and a pricey twenty-five-cent cigar with a green tobacco wrapper. He was always a sort of marginal character, walking a tightrope between righteousness and criminality. The most “honest” thing he did was sell used cars, and was so good at it that his name was known up and down the Dixie Highway. He could go to just about any used car lot from Michigan to Florida and immediately find a job.

Dale’s only claim to fame as an actual gangster was, legend had it, his sale of a hijacked truckload of new tires to the Allen County Sheriff’s Department for a bargain basement price, without the sheriff’s ever being the wiser.

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

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

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

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

A WEEKEND WITH MY FRIEND, Tom, whose grandfather kept a small cabin cruiser at the lake, and docked it in what I found to be a delightfully crazy invention called a “boatel”—like a motel, but for boats. The “garage” was a shed built over the water, with a private dock for each unit where boats could be tied up. The dock, in turn, led up to the entrance to the living quarters. I was impressed!

Sandy Beach Bridge, Lakeview Harbor

Tom tried to teach me how to get up on a pair of water skis, but I mostly skipped along the surface of the water on my chin behind his grandfather’s boat. Another friend, Mark, later also tried to give me skiing lessons at Indian Lake, behind his father’s speedboat, but that didn’t take either. I drank a lot of lake water, but could never rise to a standing position.

I RECALL CHILLY AUTUMN MORNING Indian Lake fishing expeditions with a fellow called Bill Benzing, who, with his wife Greta, rented a five room apartment we had in a big house where we lived on West Auglaize Street in Wapakoneta, when I was ten or eleven. Bill was a nice and very pleasant man, who was good and incredibly patient with kids. Even the names of the places we went to fish I found intriguing. He would show them to me on the map and pronounce their names—places like Turkey Foot and Blackhawk—so that to me they sounded like Shangri-La. I remember, in particular, standing with him and fishing from a wooden pier at one of several landings along the lakeshore. It was a foggy morning with a persistent mist. Bill shared the sugary coffee from his Thermos with me and the homemade oatmeal cookies that Greta had sent along. We stood there snug in out jackets and jeans fishing from that pier, and it seemed to me to be the happiest morning of my life.

AND THEN THERE WAS a foggy, rainy Saturday morning one autumn when I was about six, and my Grandma Alice called, told my mother that she and Grandpa Murel were going over to the lake to do some fishing. Did she think I might want to tag along?

That’s the first outing I recall in which I had my Grandma and Grandpa Newland all to myself—no siblings, no cousins, just me. And it turned out to be a memorable day. Just the trip alone was exciting. It was the first time I had ever gone to Indian Lake, and at that tender age, the twenty miles over on two-lane road seemed like quite a journey. The countryside between Wapakoneta and Indian Lake was all new to me and I relished every minute of it, kneeling on the back seat of Murel’s Studebaker, facing the passenger’s side window. But the rain was persisting and, a worrier by nature, I was also afraid that, at any time, my grandfather might turn the car around and take me back home.

“Dang rain!” I complained.

But Grandpa Murel said, “Why, what’s wrong with a little rain, bud? Rainy days are the best days to go a-feeshin’. That’s when they bite the best. When it’s a-rainin’ a little.”

I was relieved. I knew that if it had been my mother, Reba Mae, and it was raining when we arrived at our destination, she would have said, “Okay, it’s raining, everybody back in the car.” But seasoned fisherman that he was, Murel wasn’t cowed in the least by a little precipitation. When we got to the lake, Grandpa stopped near a concrete pier, then he retrieved his see-through nylon raincoat from the back seat of the car and pulled it on over his white sports shirt and cardigan. His battered, felt fishing hat—a faded, sweat-stained, dark green Mallory of Fifth Avenue that had once been a dress hat—was already on his head. His fishing shoes were scuffed old two-tone wingtips and his fishing pants the bottom half of a dark suit he no longer wore as such.

Meanwhile, Grandma Alice broke out her long-billed fishing cap—the one with the marlin emblazoned on the front—and pulled it down over her blue-white perm. Then she dug through the trunk for her faithful green men’s cardigan, the one with the black suede patches on the elbows, and slipped it on over her sober cotton housedress. She handed me the canvas windbreaker Reba Mae had sent along for me and I put it on, along with my red baseball cap.

I sidled up beside Grandma. We were the cane-pole fishermen. We left Grandpa to his casting further down the quay. This was his fishing spot and the lake was part of his life insurance sales territory. He knew people here and they knew him, so while he fished, he chatted with others on the pier. And they only moved to “try their luck” further one way or another, or drove off to find another fishing hole altogether when he started hinting that they might want to talk to him about expanding their insurance coverage.

Eventually, Grandma Alice laid her cane pole on the pier and, keeping close watch on her bobber, dug into the picnic basket. She never brought anything boring like apples, celery or carrots. Today it was pressed ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread, slathered with butter, crunchy, salty Mike-Sell’s potato chips, hot, sugary coffee with Half-and-Half in the Thermoses and peanut butter cookies for dessert. And as an added treat for later, Milky Way candy bars, her own personal favorite.

We were sitting there munching on our snack when the drizzle turned to a light steady rain. And true to Murel’s prediction, the fish started to bite—everywhere, apparently, except where he was casting. Grandma Alice was the first to pull out a nice-sized bluegill. Then I snagged a nice crappy. Grandma snaked in a crappy as well. Murel, who’d been bragging about how he was “casting out where the big ones are”, moved over our way and started trying to toss his line in between Grandma’s and mine. We each pulled out another fish while his bobber just sat there in the water with never a twitch. He was fit to be tied, until finally, after Grandma and I had brought in a third fish each, his bobber jerked once and then got pulled under. It was clear from how his rod bowed that it was something heavier that a bluegill or a sunfish. He finally reeled in a nice-sized bass.  He gloated, good-naturedly, saying things like, “Now this is what a real fisherman goes for, not them little minnows.”

Grandma said, “Shut-up, Murel,” put the fish she’d caught on a stringer, and re­-baited her hook.

By the time we were chilled and soaked enough to be ready to head home, we had a nice mess of fish to fry, and I had a memory of a day with Murel and Alice that I would never forget.  

DECADES LATER—last year, in fact—I spent another pleasant autumn day near and at the lake. I had discovered that the cemetery in the village of Alger, Ohio, was a veritable genealogical goldmine if I wanted to track down my Newland family roots. In the company of my friend Mary Jo Knoch, we searched the little cemetery in Alger and found Newland family members dating back to 1812, including my great-great grandfather, some of his siblings, one of his two wives, and other members of his immediate family.

It was only after making these discoveries that I realized how close Alger was to Indian Lake, an area where the Newland name was well-known. Mary Jo and I ended up driving the nine miles to the lake, turning off the highway onto Newland Road, and visiting Newland’s Landing. This all convinced me that members of our family who had always said that the Indian Lake Newlands and the Wapakoneta Newlands weren’t related were wrong. And I promised myself that on my next trip back to Ohio, I would go to the lake and try to talk to some Newlands to try and find out if they were related to the Alger Newlands, and, therefore, to me.  

With the tornado and terrible devastation in Lakeview, I was fondly recalling the pleasant days I had spent over the years in the Russells Point-Lakeview area. I watched the lists to see if the people I knew had checked in as being safe. When I messaged one of them, a Lakeview resident who hadn’t checked in, she said, “We’re fine, but this place will never be the same again.”

I suddenly not only felt sad about the people who had lost their lives, their homes and their businesses, but also about the loss of those two communities as I had always known them. I suddenly was confronted with the reality that those two picturesque villages would never be the same, even once they were eventually rebuilt. The Lakeview and the Russells Point that I knew as a kid and as a teen would be no longer.

I couldn’t help but strike a parallel in my mind with the big old barn of a house on Van Horn Street in Wapakoneta, where my maternal grandparents once lived. I could only imagine the pain and emptiness the people in Lakeview and Russells Point must feel when faced with their disastrous loss. I felt it must be like when I would travel back to visit Wapakoneta and would go to that corner where my Grandpa Vern and Grandma Myrt’s home only exists now in my memory.

My brother Dennis and me at our Grandpa and Grandma
Weber's house on Van Horn St. Wapakoneta

But as long as I’m alive, I’ll be able to park on the opposite side of the street, gaze at the desolate parking lot that replaced it and still picture that house--the sunny country kitchen, the narrow cellar stairs, Grandma Myrt's canned goods and muslin-wrapped fruitcakes on the shelves down there and her wringer washer and tub on the other side, the linoleum-floored living room with couch, armchair, old black and white Admiral TV and Grandma's treadle-operated Singer, right under the window with the lace curtains she had made herself, and next to the little desk, under a cuckoo clock where Grandpa kept important papers and other treasures, like his German father's gold watch that he would give to me when I was twelve. I recall the front room, that they called the parlor, and that was off limits to children, the narrow mill-style stairs up to the three bedrooms, only one of which was in use now, but how the other two were kept fully made up anyway, with hand-sewn quilts on the beds. The little hall closet up there, cornered under the gambrel-roof eave, with its ever-locked door because it was where Grandpa Vern kept all of his guns--all but one, the over-and-under that he stowed loaded behind his armchair in the living room, "just in case". I remember the downstairs bedroom that had doors that entered it from the kitchen and from the parlor. In winter they slept upstairs because it was warmer, and in the summer, downstairs because it was cooler, since the house had no central heating or cooling system, just a big oil stove in the kitchen and another one in the living room. I remember the closed back porch where there was usually a bushel basket of pears, apples or walnuts, their sweet smell mixing with the kerosene stink of the glass-globed coal oil lamp on the shelf by the window and the barn lantern hanging from a nail on the wall, and all of Grandpa's work-outerwear, jackets, coats, rain and sweat-stained hats and wash-faded engineer caps, all hanging from hooks on the wall, a disused window that gave onto the living room and that was now painted over. I recall the summer kitchen, the spicy smell of homemade sausages still penetrating the walls even though the little building had long-since become a store room. The three, splintery, homemade steps down from the porch, always carefully painted in matte grey. The one-time woodshed that now was kept locked and that served as a garden-tool shed. The big old clapboard barn where Vern parked his Galaxy 500 and homemade trailer. There too was his workbench with the tool-board above it and a vice at one end, the former hay loft that by then was stacked with lumber and auto-parts. The little white picket fence around Grandma's flower garden and what she called her "back-forty" beyond--an incredibly productive vegetable garden that produced everything from tomatoes and cabbage to spinach and from rhubarb to turnips and kohlrabi. The carefully-manicured square of lawn that reached the sidewalk on Van Horn.

For now, it's all still there for me, but my perception is that when I'm gone, so it will be too, forever, unless there is still someone interested in the stories I tell. Sadder still, it won't mean a thing to anyone but me, unless I can effectively pass those memories on. That’s why it’s so important for those of us who have memorable stories of the past in communities like Lakeview and Russells Point to share them, record them, and commit them to collective memory, so that what no longer exists physically can still be brought to life in the minds and imaginations of generations to come.