Lights, Camera...Ohio

 

Over the years, I tallied up the number of references to Ohio in movies and television shows. If a TV show wants to portray the average middle-of-the-road American setting Ohio seems to be the default. Alternatively, Ohio is used as an unsophisticated foil to the glamorous setting of the coastal elite. My hometown of Sandusky seems to get more than its fair share of references. Satirist P.J. O'Rourke's comical short story, The King of Sandusky uses the plain settings of north central Ohio towns and landmarks as a contrast for his plot of medieval intrigue. I once met him at a book signing and asked him, "why Sandusky?" He said it was because he couldn't use hometown of Toledo and Sandusky was his next best stand-in.

Here’s a partial list of my tally of TVs and movies set in Ohio. There's plenty more out there, feel free to add your own.

Television Shows

• Family Ties - suburban Columbus, OH. A 1980s sitcom starring Meredith Baxter, Michael Gross, Michael J. Fox, and Justine Bateman, contrasting the conservative son with his liberal ex-hippie parents.
• Third Rock from the Sun - fictional town of Rutherford Ohio outside Cleveland. Sitcom that ran from 1996, to 2001 about four extraterrestrials who are on an expedition to Earth.
• Hot in Cleveland - Cleveland, OH. A sitcom staring Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, Wendie Malick, and Betty White about three best friends from Los Angeles on their way to Paris when their plane makes an emergency landing in Cleveland. 
  
• Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman  - Ohio. Satirical Soap Opera from the late 1970s starring Louise Lasser, Greg Mullavey, Mary Kay Place, Graham Jarvis. 
• Fernwood Tonight - Fernwood, OH. A spinoff from Mary Hartman with Martin Mull, Fred Willard.
• The Drew Carey Show - Cleveland, OH. A sitcom that ran from 1995 to 2004 set in the office of a Cleveland Department store and focused on the life of "everyman" Drew Carey.
• WKRP Cincinnati - Cincinnati, OH. A sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982 with Gary Sandy, Loni Anderson, and Howard Hesseman and their attempts to keep a struggling Top 40 radio station running. 
• Twilight Zone - various locations and episodes (for a full discussion, go here):  
• "Nick of Time," Peaksville, OH, starring William Shatner as a superstitious young newlywed.
• "It's a Good Life," with Billy Mumy
• “A Game of Pool” - starring Jack Klugman who is called back from the afterlife to defend his title in a pool hall in Sandusky, OH
  

Movies

• Swan Song - Sandusky, OH. A 2021 drama written, directed, and produced by Sandusky native, Todd Stephens. It stars Udo Kier, Jennifer Coolidge, Linda Evans,
• Heathers - Sherwood, OH. A 1989 American black comedy staring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty,
• Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael - Sandusky, OH. A 1990 American comedy-drama film and starring Winona Ryder and Jeff Daniels.
• Tommy Boy - Sandusky, OH. A 1995 comedy starring Chris Farley and David Spade who return to Sandusky to try to save the family business, auto-parts company.
• Some Like it Hot - A 1959 romantic comedy staring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk, Marilyn Monroe’s character, is from Sandusky, OH.
  
• The Out-of-Towners - A 1970 comedy about a husband and wife starring Jack Lemon and Sandy Dennis. They travel to New York City where Jack Lemon's character is interviews for a possible job promotion and they return broken and battered to their home town of Twin Oaks, OH.  Remade in 1999 with Steve Martin and Golde Hawn. 

Guaranteed Thoughts

 

 

Storm Spiders

 

At night

after the storm 

broken branches

litter the road 

like giant tarantulas.

 

My Grandfather's Gun

I have my grandfather's gun, a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. I don't know if he ever fired it. I also have my other grandfather's gold deputy sheriff's badge for Kent County, Michigan. Both enlisted in the Army in WWI. By WWII, they were in their 40s. As the younger men went off to war, both served as volunteer Deputy Sheriffs. Both had John in their name. Named after their fathers. 

 

Reading About Jack Kerouac

All the life put into him: the books, the trips, the loves, the seasons. And then one moment. like everyone else, it's gone.

 

Expiration Date

 

Time arrives in crates

from a far off distributor

unloaded in the back room

and sold retail.

 

The Optimist Creed

The green light is always waiting for you at the busy intersection.

A TIME OF GIFTS

An all time favorite travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who wrote among other things, a trilogy of books about his walk from the hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was 18 at the time and crossed through Europe in 1933-4 as it was slowly moving toward a war footing. Fermor is a favorite because of his gift with language -- his travel narratives descriptions are more like poetry than prose. Later, he fought in WWII in a British commando force conducting raids in Germany occupied Crete, including the kidnapping of a German General. He was later knighted for his services. Fermor's writing is truly one of a kind by combining adventure and his gift for language, he keeps you turning the page to see what person or village he would encounter next. I even wrote a Cento poem derived from the first book, A Time of Gifts that was published.

Sharing a random sample of some phrases I like (this is about a tenth of what I underlined):

I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and separated by the sea from the tangles of the past; and all this combined with the wild and growing exhilaration of the journey, shed a golden radiance.

...a hangover from early anarchy.

He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness, which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.

...napkins were half mitres and half Rajput turbans. 

...terrifying glamor.

...steaming rustics. 

...vanished from the scene but deep in the bloodstream nonetheless.

Moody and unbalanced, he lived in an atmosphere of neo-plantonic magic, astrology and alchemy.

a vagabond full of random learning.

... all prospects glowed.

... irredeemable pumpkins.

... fast and ugly deeds.

 

 

BLACK FRIDAY AMUSEMENTS

Every few months I clean out miscellaneous scraps from my journal and set them on the back porch. Offering these up on Black Friday for your minor amusement. 

 

World Travel

 

If I'm sitting at my local coffee shop

it's everday.

If a person from Mongolia is sitting at my local coffee shop

it's world travel.

 

Band Name Generator

 

The Papal Snoods

The Terrible Suggestions

The Eckington Dump

Leper's Squints

Popskull [19thC slang for cheap whisky]

 

Shopping Blahs

 

Low fat 

this and that

 

Memory Climate

 

The cold ember 

of a hot memory

Cento from The Third Coast, Thomas Dyja

It was a voluntary madhouse

a museum of expired vices

a final cry 

for ruined lives.

 

Night Time

 

Sometimes midnight is not 

late enough for midnight thoughts

Maybe 3am or thereabouts

When I can hear the flag rustling 

in the cold wind. 

 

Memorable Names from the book, Journey to a War, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood

Agnes Smedley

General von Faulkenhauser

W. Fitzhugh Brundage 

A Naked Advance

No one never not noticed the nudist.

Cheer Up

His soup was lumpy

which made him grumpy

and his family jumpy

A While Back

 

The sharp dark

of the old park

and a youthful lark.

WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?

If there is a theme for this post it's information, knowledge, and memory. As we're still struggling with the early growing pains of the Information Age, we're trying to understand what effects technology have had on humans changes  and what changes it have on us in the future. We take for granted that the information at hand is correct and easily accessible. But easy access to information is only a recent phenomena. There is an irony here in the Information Age, we are more challenged in understanding whether information is true and correct. It's nothing new that political powers have always sought to control access to information and even to control its existence.  

Here's a short collection of books from the last year or two of reading on the topic.

 

1. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch (2021). In the Information Age, it's hard to believe that we have to go back to basics know how we know things about the world. Philosophers call this area of study Epistemology. Rauch explores how political power is engaged in information warfare. In particular, he focuses on how the digital age of the internet no longer values truth. Democracies, he says, much have a peaceful method for groups to settle disagreements to move forward. He examines the 2016 and 2020 elections as case studies. Bought new.

 

2. When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future, Abby Smith Rumsey (2016). As a former librarian at the Library of Congress, Dr. Rumsey is my kind of person--she is a champion of books. Her book highlights the importance the creation of books and the printing press had on building civilization. This accelerated the need to build libraries, archives, and museums to tell our story. She takes us up to the digital era where the information explosion has overwhelmed our limited resource -- attention and our ability to understand what's important. She calls for a cultural and digital strategy to determine how to manage the ever growing torrent of information. Bought new. 

 

3. Freedom, Sebastian Junger (2021). This may seem likely an unusual book to include but Sebastian Junger has been exploring big questions of human behavior since Into Thin Air and his several books about soldiers in Afghanistan, Restrepo, War, and Tribe. In Freedom, Junger and three friends walk railroad lines of the mid-Atlantic and into remote areas of central Pennsylvania. Along the way, he uses his encounters as a backdrop to explore competing ideas of freedom and community. His short book, divided into three sections: Run, Fight, and Think. He leads up to a central question: how do governments share power with people you disagree with--may even hate? Bought new.

 

4. Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up? Joshua Fairfield (2021). From a legal perspective, law seems to fall behind the ever accelerating change in technology. Laws on technology on 20 and 30 years old are obsolete. Joshua Fairfield, a professor at Washington and Lee College of Law, believes law can keep up but it's a question of language. This involves more conversation in a community setting and not in the courts. Bought new.

 

5. Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz (2021). An example of the adage, knowledge is power, is where those in power try to control information and ideas. Berkowitz takes us back to classical Rome where Roman Law allowed for the politicians and generals to be subjected to damanatio memriae ("condemnation of memory"). All memorials and writings would be destroyed as a way of "un-remembering" a public figure. In 213 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, ordered the burning of books and burying of scholars and supposedly ordered the live burial of 460 Confucian scholars so that history might begin with him.  Modern China now tries to manage the public's memory by removing certain stories within its control on the Internet. Berkowitz finds many examples through history up to current time where lethal outrage is used to obliterate the mere mention of a book. Bought new.

Old West Postcards

In 1917, my maternal grandfather enlisted in the U.S. Army as the U.S. entered WWI in Europe. He was sent to Camp MacArther, Texas as part of his basic training. Traveling by train, he sent a series of postcards to his mother, my grandmother (not yet married), and friends. He died in 1958 after a series of strokes, years before I was born. Among his artifacts were journals and postcards of his travels. Here are a few postcards from 1917-1918:

Midwest Innovation with a Dark Tangent of Fiction

Before there was the digital world wide web there was the analog web or what I like to think of as libraries. One book leads to another. You read about a person mentioned in one story and want to know more about them and pick up another book and so on, not knowing where it will lead. Perhaps your subliminal is leading you down a path where you start to develop themes. I had this experience over the past year and I’ll call this theme, "Midwest Innovation." I suppose it came from the fact I'd grown up in a rust-belt town that had gone through it's own cycle of build, boom, bust, and transformation.

 

The journey started with Robert Laceys book Ford: The Men in the Machine focused on the extraordinary rise of Henry Ford and his automobile dynasty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ford took his inspiration from Thomas Edison the great inventor who held more patents than any other American in history.  Ford met Edison when he was a young man working in one of Edison's electric dynamo plants. The connection lead me to read Edison Inventing the Century a Biography by Neil Baldwin. 

 

 

 

 

Both the Ford and Edison books mentioned a series of ten-year of road trips the two took across the United States that included Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, a renown naturalist, the occasional President, and others. They called themselves the Vagabonds that lead to next read book by that title, The Vagabonds by Jeff Gwynn.

 

 

 

 

 I knew little about Firestone and the rise of the rubber industry, I turned to Wheels of Fortune The Story of Rubber in Akron by Steve Love and David Giffels.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I circled back to read a very concise and useful little book called How Detroit Became the Automotive Capital of the World a self-published book by Robert Tata.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since Edison and Firestone were both Ohio natives and innovators, I couldn't leave the state without reading about Dayton's most famous residents in the book, The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Was there something special about Dayton that fostered the two bicycle mechanics to inspire their innovative spirit? I turned to an academic study of Dayton Ohio: The Rise, Decline and Transition of an Industrial City by Adam Milsap.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sixty miles down the road from the Wright Brothers was Eddie Rickenbacker, born in Columbus, and an early fan of their airplane. In Ace of Aces, by H. Paul Jeffers, he tells Rickenbacker's story as the successful fighter ace in WWI as well as his career as a race car driver, automotive designer, military adviser and head of Eastern Airlines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For balance to the inventors and industrialists, I looked to a voice of poetry and literature in Poems of the Midwest by Carl Sandburg and a biography, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works by North Callahan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I couldn't leave Sandburg without reading about Chicago in The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thomas Dyja. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a present day perspective, I read a collection of contemporary stories from The Best of Belt Magazine Vol. III with stories from Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and everywhere in between. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 At this point, I thought I'd give the Midwest Innovation theme a restbut over the summer, I read One Summer America 1927 by Bill Bryson, who profiled among other historic events that summer, Detroit, Michigan native, Charles Lindbergh in his historic solo trans-Atlantic flight. 

 

 

 

And then, thinking I would finally be safe by retreating to fiction, I read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth a dystopian novel that portrays an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the United States in 1940 as part of a secret plot by the Nazis to take over the country. 

 

 

 

The web of course goes on and I could keep making connections but I'll end here. The web is endless.

Some Word Play and Desolate Doggerel

Sweeping more fragments out to the curbside blog

Combos Where I Couldn't Make Up My Mind

 

Heat and Stupidity

Heart and Stupidity

 

Comic Dance

Cosmic Dance

 

Honor a Horror

Horror of Honor

 

Maniacs Ate Grapes

Great Apes Ate Grapes

 

Dark Hoses

Dark Horses

Dark Houses

 

Unclaimed Baggage (fragments left in my notebook)

Reach in the falling rain and

descant that drink 

in your easy jeans

***

 

A child raised on maps

sits on the crust of the earth

***

 

The cat uses silence as a weapon

***

 

We've Never Been Here

 

Do you ever wake up and think,

"I've never been here before."

Here being this point in time; and

neither has anyone else. 

Every moment is unknown

for everyone.

Infinite Questions

 

Does infinity have a map

Does infinity have a tail

Should I call it Mr. or Mrs.

Where does infinity send its children to school

Does it have a handicap

Does infinity envy any other fact of nature

It's What You've Been Waiting For

 

Unfold the paper

read the words.

Just Unrelated Pieces

 

I loved you before it was allowed.

As an Illuminati
I defiled my illicit llama

The kids play in the dirt

and pick their scabs

The heart of my hell.

I returned a memory to a friend
that tastes like Italian rain.

END ON A JOKE

My Mirror Jokes

What did the cynic say to the mirror?

Yeah right

What did the passive-aggressive say to the mirror?

If you say so.

The Rouge (A Cento)

Every so often when I finish a book, I try to write a poem from it, this one is a Cento from Robert Price's Ford: The Men and Machine

 The Rouge

One of capitalism's alters
a vast satanic cathedral
All night the Rouge growls
its fires and flares
casting flickering shadows
its furnaces glowing dull red
around the base of its brooding bulk
The industrial guts of America
Europe has its palaces
but America celebrates her native genius
with monuments of a rougher sort.

—A Cento with credit to Robert Lacy, Ford: The Men and Machine

Historical Highways

I mentioned I liked roads. It's a recurring theme of this blog starting with my cross country drive of my own. I've collected a lot of books on roads. Here's one category of books on the history of roadbuilding and of particular American highways.   

1.  First Highways of America: A Pictorial History of American Roads and Highways from 1900-1925, John Butler (1994). A history of the dirt-rock-to-pavement of America's early roads.  Fantastic black and white pictures of early cars, road construction and landscapes.  Bought new.

2.  Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908, Curt McConnell (2000).  A collection of early automobile adventures across the the U.S.  The appendix includes a great chronology of early automobile trips. Bought new.    




 

3.  U.S. 1: America's Original Main Street, Andrew Malcolm, Photographs by Roger Straus III (1991). Sometimes called America's original Main Street running from Main to Key West. First half stark black and white photographs; the second half a narrative of short histories.  Bought new.  

4.  The National Road, Edited by Karl Raitz (1996).  A history of America's first federally planned highway.   Orginally established by an act of Congress in 1808, the road originates from Maryland, crosses the Appalachians into the Midwest.  Based on Indian trials and pioneer tracks.  Provides a full history back up my maps and photographs. Bought used at the Raven bookstore in Amherst, Mass.  

5.  U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America,Thomas Vale and Geraldine Vale (1983).  More on the National Road but a specific slice in time.   Thirty years well contrast by black and white photographs from the same locations--sometimes with the same tree in the shot. Bought used at State Department book store. 


 

6. Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis (1997).  In 1919, Colonel Dwight Eisenhower lead an Army convoy cross country.  Over thirty years later, as President, he lead the effort to build the largest engineered structure ever built--the U.S. Interstate Highway system.  Bought new. 

 

7. A Pictorial History of Roadbuilding, Charles W. Wixom (1975). Commissioned by the American Road Builders Association, this book is filled with hundreds of photos from Native American trails to interstate highways and the equipment and engineering that went into their construction. Bought used but forgot where.

ON THE ROAD

Every so often you return to a book that influenced you growing up.  Maybe it's a clique but On the Road by Jack Kerouac was one such book for me.  I read it soon after I finished law school and it pushed me to do my own frenzied road trip— and Odyssey representing freedom and the unknown. The book is now sold over 3 million copies since its first printing in 1959. During the pandemic, I've returned to the book, waiting for that moment when we'll have freedom to move again. To get in the car and drive. Here's my short list of On the Road books that includes a couple others who attempted to retrace and re-kindle Kerouac’s spirit.

1. On the Road, Jack Kerouac (Penguin 1986). I can see how much of an impact made on me since it’s heavily annotated with my pencil markings. I suppose the high points and stay with me always are when he describes is the most fun cross country ride of his life on the back of a flatbed truck with a cast of characters from Iowa to Wyoming and the closing paragraph.  Likely bought at a college bookstore at the University of Pittsburgh. 

 

 2. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, Paul Maher, Jr.  (2004). A thoughtful and complete biography that details Kerouac’s triumphs and struggles with a seal of approval from Kerouac’s family. A birthday or Christmas gift. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.  Jack Kerouac‘s American Journey: A Real life Odyssey of On the Road, Paul Maher, Jr. (2007). Maher provides narrative history of Kerouac's different road trips and friends and how they translated into On the Road. Bought online. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.  Paradise Roadhouse: Jack Kerouac‘s Lost Highway in My Search for America, Jay Atkinson (2010).  Loose retracing of some of Kerouac‘s journeys by journalist Jay Atkinson. 

FRAGMENTS FOR SALE

 

 

Do you need a good, clean, unused fragments to complete a poem or maybe

as a spare part in case you run into unexpected writing trouble?  Our 

inventory has grown and we need to make room for next year's models so 

we're holding a clearance sale. We've got fragments for every budget--from

a single sentence to a full stanzas, some complete with metaphors. No 

reasonable offer refused. Trade-ins considered. Test drive for thirty days 

and if not completely satisfied return for a full refund. Check out these models:

 

***

You keep whispering to me 

but you don't say why.

`

***

I got paid in diamonds and dynamite.

***

Out in the void

secure in his ship 

sails an off-course astronaut

...when will he know?

***

After the last leaves fall

unfed ghosts hang

one or two from a tree

waiting for what the wind brings them.

***

She was not measured on the ordinary scale of gods.

***

I would like to catwalk among the parapets wearing 

a cravat and epaulets 

not because I look good doing this 

but because of how it sounds.

***

The public relations firm I hired keeps sending me memos 

instructing me to "act more like myself."  

I keep trying but make too many mistakes... 

***

Her neighbors unaware 

the girl who walked out her front door

cascaded into happiness.  

 

*** 

Up North

Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains - a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. 

                    --Marcus Aurelius

Everyone has their happy place. Mine is "up north" on Michigan's Leelenau Peninsula where I've gone since I was six to meet up with Aunts, Uncles, cousins, and annual friends. Here's my small collection of books on the area. 

1. Above the North: Aerial Photography of Northern Michigan, Marge Beaver (2006). Beaver captures a four season, bird's eye view of the Peninsula, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Lake Leelenau and the lakes of of Crystal, Roch, Elk, and Glen. Gift.

2. Leelenau: A Portrait of Place in Photographs & Text, Ken Scott & Jerry Dennis (2000). Extraordinary collection of timeless pictures around Leelenau County.  A gift from my sister July 2003 after our largest family reunion up north.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Letters from the Leelenau: Essays of People and Place, Kathleen Stocking (1990). One of my favorite all time authors.  Letters is the first of a trilogy by Kathleen Stocking on a sense of place. She provides an small gems profiling small town life, local artists like Jim Harrison and New Yorkers, and personal reflections including her father Pierce Stocking, a lumberman who helped preserve much of Sleeping Bear Dunes and constructed what is now Pierce Stocking Drive. We may be cousins through my paternal grandmother's people who were also Stockings from the Grand Traverse region.  Cover painting Manitou Dreams by local artist David Grath. Bought new and later met the author at Van's Garage in Leelenau who inscribed my copy.   

 

 

 

 

4.  Lake Country: A Series of Journeys, Kathleen Stocking (1996).  A series of journeys to the islands of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.  Bought at Leelenau Books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale, Kathleen Stocking (2016).  The final series in the trilogy and is less about Up North but the final chapters return to a trip to South Manitou Island.