Painesville, Ohio...and my life there

After grade school, about which I wrote in my last posting, I attended Riverside High School. This stately school educated grades 7-12. We were carefully separated by grade so the seventh graders were not exposed to the more mature, and therefore worldly, juniors and seniors. I spent six years in this building.

The football field was in the back and every Friday night I either marched with the band on the field here or boarded the band bus for away games. Band buses have a reputation all their own. Within the band, each section of the band has its own reputation. The percussionists, or drummers, were the bad boys of the group. the woodwinds were the goody-goodies.

A few miles to the east nestled the village of Perry, Ohio. That's where my mother grew up and my grand parents lived until their deaths. In this house. I remember the front walk being longer and the side yard wider filled with hollyhocks and flowering bushes. In the back my grandfather had a stump with two nails hammered into it about an inch apart. One axe blow and we were well on our way to chicken dinner.

Beyond the back yard on either side of a pathway were chicken coops, one for the hens and the other for...well, I don't remember what the second one was for. It had chickens in it too but we only got the eggs from the coop on the left. Perhaps those chickens in the right side coop were dinner in the making.

Beyond the coops was the corn field and beyond that the railroad tracks that marked the boundary of my grand parents' land.

Grandpa Means was Mayor of Perry, Ohio for as long as I could remember growing up but in reality only for nine years. It seems no one would run against him in which case he would have gladly given up the post to farm and write poetry. When he wasn't mayor he was a village councilman. His weekly column for the local paper consisted of one of his poems. He liked Edgar Guest and Will Rogers, Jr. who never met a man he didn't like. I think my grandfather might have been like that as long as you were in the same political party as he was. Here is the first verse of his poem titled Perry Village:

Just a quiet little village
Beside the railroad track,
Just a quiet little village
That has what cities lack.
A friendly peaceful village
With pleasant shady streets,
Where any time from morn till night
Friendly people you will meet. 

Down the dirt lane from my grand parents' grave site is my parents'. My sister and I were surprised to see a marker placed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars for World War II in front of my father's name for he never served. If memory is correct, after Pearl Harbor in 1941, he tried to enlist. I was two months old. I had three older siblings. Dad worked in a factory that was needed for the war effort. He was rejected for service. I think he must have been very disappointed, more so especially since his brother and three brothers-in-law did serve in various branches of the military.The next summer he was reclassified to an upper grade. Still he sat out the war on the home front.

 












An interesting, to me, sidenote: on the "Notice of Classification" card my dad signed his name, two years after I was born as Laurie John Wilpakka.  I wonder what my real last name was.

These pictures are my attempt to get one shot of my sister, my niece and myself in one frame. Failing miserably, I'll just put them all here and you can kind of squint your eyes together until they all blend into one.

       

Later, after I had moved away, the Federal Government built a nuclear plant in Perry, Ohio. That's when the big bucks rolled in and the school got upgraded and relocated. The locals, including my parents, were somewhat leery about what would happen in a nuclear accident like Three Mile Island. The populous did not want a nuclear plant in their backyard and a hue and cry went up. The government countered in two ways: first, they encouraged locals to tour the nuclear plant, carefully guided by employees of the plant who assured us that they themselves lived, with their families, within a few miles of the plant. The second reassuring thing was that each household was given a specific-to-them evacuation plan. My parents' included the site where they should go immediately upon hearing of an accident at the plant. There they would be picked up and evacuated from the area. It was perfect. Their pick up point was the bowling alley they were already at two or three days a week. We all felt better. 

Why do some of these things that happened so very long ago seem like they happened last year? That's what I'm thinking about.

On the Street Where I Lived

This is the street I grew up on in Painesville Township, Ohio. I'm guessing the road is three miles long from Route 20 to Madison Avenue. I recently had the opportunity to visit my sister who lives in the area and we drove around finding remnants of my youth.

Here is the house about a half mile from Route 20 on Bowhall Road that I grew up in.

The house is painted now. It was plain weathered boards as I remember. One beautiful catalpa and one flowing mulberry tree have been removed from the side yard and the blackberry bushes removed from the other side. Huge eight foot white spirea bushes as well have been dug out and taken away.

The front porch has been enclosed. It used to have a swing on it and front steps that were shaky and held one only if one trod carefully up, or down, one side of the steps. If you look closely you can see the coal chute leading into the basement. Once you've heard the sound of coal being funneled into your basement, it's a sound you can still hear in your ear's memories.

One thing remains the same. The dirt driveway has the same ruts in it that it did so many decades ago, still catching the rain and making puddles to delight the young at heart.

Thanks to modern health regulations I imagine the house now has indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water.

Regularly, trains ran on a track only six houses from ours. Loose window panes gently rattled as trains regularly ran. As kids, we would put pennies on the tracks because we had been told that a penny on a track could derail a train. It never happened, thank goodness, and we had no thoughts about the consequences of our little experiment had it worked.

Beside the track, around some neighborhood houses, was what we called the gravel pit. At the time it was a steep descent into a flat dirt bottom that abutted the tracks. From the gravel pit we could see no houses and could hear nothing of the real world. When a train was heard coming down the track we scrambled to the top of the steep dirt cliff to get out of the way. Of what, we were not sure.

Today the gravel pit has been filled in. When my sister and I drove by the steep dirt cliff was no higher than ten grassy feet, sloping gentle to a grassy plain. Major disappointment.

Across a side street from our house was a cement block garage that my dad and his brother built. It, along with everything I saw that day, is much smaller than I remember.

For six years I went to this school. The flagpole you see in the front became the May Pole every Spring. I remember that only sixth graders could dance the May Pole dance which I did as a sixth grader. Pastel dresses were a must and mine was a pink organza one with tiny white dots. Dancing a May Pole dance requires weaving the streamers in and out until braided ribbons cover the pole. On one pass, I lost my white flat shoe. On the way back around I stepped into it and kept on dancing. Story of my life.

My memories of grade school are very positive. Spelling bee success, vocal music success, winning at jacks during recess, these were good years.  I remember one huge frustration, attempting to make a paper mache giraffe. The paper kept breaking apart. I never finished that project and have stayed away from major art projects since.

There was one not-so-positive time, though, when I got into a fight with another girl on the playground and we both ended up in the Principal's office. He said that if we didn't straighten up and become friends...yes, he said that...he would make us stand in front of the whole school with our arms around each other. With that hanging over us, we became good friends.

Funny what one remembers.  And that's what I think about it.

A Soup Kind of Day

A perfectly chilled day made for steaming soup. A refrigerator filled with leftovers. How to throw it all together into something hot and hearty?

Like any good non-cook I started with a bag of diced frozen potatoes. Dumped in a half cup of diced onion and several chopped stalks of celery. A half stick of butter sounded like a good addition. And it was.

Then some salt and pepper. Left over chicken stock...in a box....along with water and three more chicken bouillon cubes. Tossed in almost the last of the Thanksgiving ham.

Let's back up a bit here, lest you think I diced and minced onion and celery. These products come that way in little hermetically sealed bags in the produce department of the local grocery store. A pair of scissors is all one needs to cut open the bags.

While that was cooking (and thawing) I tossed in a bay leaf. I don't know why. I had them. I tossed one in. I pondered what bay leaves were for.  I pondered further why I had a little jar of bay leaves in the cupboard and had I brought them with me when I moved from Ohio a decade ago? Yes, probably. I pondered the shelf life of the bay leaf. I did not google this question, not really caring about, yet in some way fearing, the answer.

Then some milk and flour for thickening and a half hour of simmering.

Probably the best thing that ever came out of my kitchen, ever. One of the few next-day food items that I'll eat.

There never has been a reasonable reason to write down anything I put together in the kitchen so now I have no record of how this tasty meal was made and could not duplicate it. This one time it would have been a good thing and not a laughable thing. But alas! The recipe is lost to eternity.

But the memories...ah, the memories.

And that's what I think about it. 

And yes, I remembered to fish out the bay leaf before serving.