Roots
As most of you know, I grew up near Toledo, Ohio. Every now and then, I check out the newspaper that gave me a meager income and my first frostbite when I was a middle-school paperboy, the Toledo Blade. It gives me just a little whiff of my home earth. After perusing a few articles, I almost always check out one of their columnists, Roberta de Boer. She has a light but irreverent touch about local issues and chicanery, and can scourge the Bush and recently-departed Taft administrations with the best of them.
The other day, she made a wistfully resigned reference to an NPR piece in which native (to Toledo) son P.J. O’Rourke read an essay of his that is compiled in a book called Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio. I looked through the Table of Contents available at Amazon, cringing a little at the possibility of finding someone I knew or had gone to school with among the anointed writers. I didn’t see any familiar names, actually, except O’Rourke’s, although that fact may simply illuminate my shaky literary pretentions. Sherwood Anderson must have demurred, or thought Winesburg broke the mold for this kind of thing.
A lot of what I’ve read of P.J.’s in recent years seems more lazily smug than funny, but that might simply be due to the fact that he’s turned to the dark side, politically. But during the 70s, he was editor of the National Lampoon, and while there produced two of the most brilliant pieces of printed satire I’ve ever seen, the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody and a sort-of sequel, the Sunday Newspaper Parody.
The reason I mention these parodies is because the yearbook is a dead ringer for our small-town high school yearbooks. Its setting is the Estes Kefauver High School in Dacron, Ohio (Silage County) and is rendered in intricate detail, through which you can follow several story lines. The newspaper, the Dacron Republican-Democrat, came in a plastic bag with several newsprint sections, including an advertising pullout from a big-box precursor called SwillMart. With its small-town politics and commercial boosterism, it has an unmistakable Ohio feel.
As an example of the humor, there’s a section detailing Saturday night’s rescue-squad calls. As you read them, you note that they keep returning to one citizen’s house and never quite figure out what’s wrong. Over in the obituaries on another page, you see that this same citizen has died of “incompetent rescue-squad practices”. One more: in the church ads, the Episcopal church features “you and the Trinity make a rubber for a hand of God’s contract bridge”, and touts “cocktails in the narthex after the service”.
I still possess both of these gems back in Seattle. I may have to scan some of the stuff and pump it up here when I get back.
I may have to nab a copy of the Good Roots book. Even though I’m 35 years removed from living there, I like to wander around my home town when I visit my mom, past places where Mrs. Perils and I may have shared a teenage intimacy.
Now that I think about it, there’s a book I have that was published in the 60s by a glass company in Toledo called The Roots Grow Deep that has a picture of 4 generations of my family who had worked there. I became the fifth, briefly, when I worked a couple of summers there when I was in college.
Sometimes when I go running, I set my course for these environs, in the Fort Meigs Cemetery on the far side of town:
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I don’t really have much in the way of spiritual or religious leaning, but I get something of a sense of depth, or connectedness, out of these brief visits. I don’t stay much longer than to catch my breath and (sorry, Grandpa) lean against a stone to stretch. My threadbare molecules will not reside here when they finally cease their unnatural coalescence in my body, and there are, or will be, similar broken threads throughout this cemetery. One thing P.J. had right in his essay was the breadth of the Ohio diaspora.
And, no, Mrs. Perils and I never did anything naughty in the cemetery. Did we, dear?
Of course not. Now, the old swimmin’ pool…
Here’s to swimmin’
With bow-legged wimmin!
-Burma Shave
Interesting post, Phil, and one that makes me think of my roots, shallow though they are. I’m with you on the connectedness thing; for me, it’s simply being focused on remembering the people who were with me as a child and as I grew up. Good post.
Thanks for the mention and kind words, Phil. Yeah, this business about roots — a puzzle. I’ve written often about my love-hate relationship with Toledo (which is where I mostly was raised). In my case, returning here for what was to be a temporary boomerang episode became a surprising 20 years, which in turn cultivated a kind of deep-rootedness that both annoys and comforts me. Also: Your reflectiveness (and, especially, your cemetary pix) remind me that for reasons I cannot even explain yet, cemetaries are becoming mysteriously meaningful to me in ways they never were before, in my younger years. Maybe worth a probing in a post of my own — so thanks, both for the good writing/thinking, as well as for the inspiration.
What Roberta says about cemetaries becoming more ‘mysteriously meaningful’ than in her younger years also falls to me when I think of Perrysburg, and Toledo, in general. I do find myself wanting to explore more of the area on my visits home then before. I remember that it wasn’t too long ago that I couldn’t wait to get out on my own to find my own way. I really had embedded in me that you can’t go home again. Now, I find it fun to go back, explore and remember. I probably have found out more about my ‘roots’ over the past ten years then I had in the previous decades. Now, will I go back to my 30th class reunion next year? I don’t think that I’m that curious!
Nat Lampoon’s High School Yearbook was BRILLIANT but unfortunately my copy has somehow disappeared. I still have the Encyclopedia of Humor though. I guess I will have to live with Zippy the Pinhead, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Calvin & Hobbes, and The Far Side compilations. I am weird.
I envy those who can go back to childhood haunts and still recognize any part of them.
My experience, in regard to the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, and my husband’s in Marysville, are closer to those of Chrissie Hynde (”My City Was Gone”) and Melissa Holbrook Pierson (”The Place You Love is Gone”).
My mother is now in Mentor and I find it physically distressing to drive around with her and see all the land where my dad and I would spend hours visiting acres of nurseries (including the original location of Wayside Gardens) now built out in strip malls and housing developments.
John, I agree it becomes harder to evoke the memories of the forbears that we actually knew, and we use whatever is available - headstones, photographs, heirlooms, letters to remember them, as well as to spur curiosity about those we never knew and didn’t hear much about. My people weren’t journal- or letter-writers, so their memories were at the revisionist mercy of their survivors.
Roberta, thanks for stopping. YOu’ve lived the transition that we see only in time-lapse glimpses. We used to wake up to a litany of crop prices on the radio, simply because WSPD was the only radio station we could pick up.
Brian, you got most of the way “home again” during your sojourn in Westerville, don’t you think? Except in the sense that the memory of Perrysburg we carry as “home” is as much an illusion as Thomas Wolfe’s was, because it involves a point in time as well as in geography. Also, we’ve found out a lot about your “roots” lately, too. Do the words “Officer Frank Brahier” ring any bells?
I think you only mentioned your 30th reunion in order to call attention to the fact that my 40th is this year.
Mike, whatcha been up to? The yearbook is actually available through used online stores like alibris.com, I think.
Marcia, one or our (Mrs. Perils & my) favorite “parking places” now has a 4-lane highway running through it. They paved paradise and took out our parking lot!
Officer Frank ran the Pony League. I had another officer assigned to me and, I believe, he rose to higher rank because of me! He retired just a few years ago. Now, I don’t agree that I really came any closer home with my move to Westerville. It was a different time but included different circumstances complete with two new teenage step daughters. I may agree with Wolfe in some regards, but firmly believe that one’s illusion is made up of memories, dreams and perspective that one chooses to place in it.
I often wondered what happend to PJ O’Rourke. I used to read his stuff, but he appears less and less humorous as his political barometer leans more and more to the right. I guess that follows since Republicans aren’t known for their sense of humor.