Close window [X]   

_Finally!

ONE WAY: There are several streets around Vermilion that I'm very partial to. Ohio Street in the blush of summer is one. And Exchange Street at any time of year is another - it's just pleasant. But Edson Street is (or has been) one of the most picturesque.

Geo and I purchased our home on Oakwood Drive in abt. 1983. For those unfamiliar with Vermilion streets, Oakwood Drive is a cul de sac (a fancy way of saying it's a dead-end street). To get to Oakwood in a vehicle - which runs north and south - one must take Edson Street - which runs east and west. The same year we moved into our home Edson Street was re-paved.

During the ensuing years a significant number of new streets and, therefore, homes have sprung up in the vicinity. Consequently, traffic has also increased. So 26 years later Edson had fallen to ruin. And that's not over-stated.

But finally, after nearly four years of arguing between the Vermilion Mayor's office and city council Edson Street is being constructed (pictured above).

Note that I say that it's being "constructed". Because this street was never really intended to be a street. It was a path. The men of the village built a footbridge across Edson Creek so youngsters could walk to school, and grandmothers could walk to the store without getting muddy or hit by a car on the very busy Lake Road.

_{The evolution of the bridge of Edson Creek}

At one time it was known as Thompson Street. The name was changed somewhere in the 1960's to eliminate confusion between it and Thompson Road in Vermilion Township.

Having evolved rather subtly from a path through the weeds and wood the street was never really built to handle a great deal of traffic. This time around it is being built - with a good base and proper drainage - to last a hundred years instead of 30.

So right now it's a mess; a one way street that some folks think they can ignore - to their own consternation and peril. But in the end it'll go back to being one of the most charming streets in Vermilion.

That's-the-truthly,

David and the Family Studebaker
at the Buell homestead.

THE BUELL FAMILY OF VERMILION: After running the story of "Alf Buell's Pufferbelly Railway" last week I received an interesting communique from a "Viewer" that I can very well empathsize with. This person wrote:

"Rich,

You will never be able to talk about the Buell family without bringing tears to my eyes. You just bring back many good experiences I had with David and Leon and the Buell family as a child growing up in Vermilion. The Buell family was truly the Walton TV family living in Vermilion..."

O-yeah. Were there ever family of very distinct individuals who stood out in the crowd it is the Buell Family from parents, Alfred and Margaret, to each one of their children; Leon, Kathleen, David, Alice, and Dana. What a plethora of talent and good humor.

If you were ever over at the Buell house and weren't invited to stay for dinner there had to be some major travesty in the works. And always - always - there was something going on there that would gather everyones utmost attention.

The piece about the "Pufferbelly" was but one thing. Leon sent me a communique about another contraption that was fashioned in the backyard of the family home at the end of South Street that I, unfortunately, missed as a youngster.

"Puffer was put away for the winter and the car was fitted with a home made aircraft engine and propeller hand carved from white pine 2"'x8".It flew around the tracks pretty good. Father took me to the bone yard at Sherwin Williams Co with his old hand made trailor. We loaded up with 2"pipe. After bringing the pipe home we went to the Pickle Works at the E. end of South St.and loaded the trailer with wood olive barrels. The barrels are made of 2"wood staves,held together by steel bands. Break the bands and voila,you have dozens of curved oak boards. Take the curved oak boards and nail 1"x2"x10' long boards and you have a convex 10' wood section. Now you build a 10' tall tower on top of the 300'sloping back yard. Next you put hundreds of feet of pipe,with supports along the steep drop. Tower was built, rails running down the yard, now you put the barrel stave sections over the pipe. Apply water to the wood on a frosty night, voila a frozen sled run that sucked you breath away going down. At the far end ,the property swung east to Ohio St. There he and I built a banked curve with more pipe and staves. Part of my job was test plot on all the gadgets. Father had built flood lights so we could play ball at night. Sledding the original demon drop at night was very thrilling. Especially the first one. Leon" Buell

Leon also had (I think it was) an old Oldsmobile convertible that he kept at the very end of the back yard where (as he said in the piece above)"the property swung east to Ohio St." He had installed a newer, more powerful, motor in the vehicle and it sounded like an Army tank when it came to life.

When we were juvenile delinquents (i.e.Jon Smith, Al Crozier, Jake Boone, Tom Boone, Rich Friday etc.) Dave used to take the vehicle in the dark of the night and go blasting around the countryside. Looking back after all these years we're lucky we're all still alive. But, Cheese and Crackers, that car was fast.

I really can't think of any other family in town that loved kids more than the Buells. They are truly unforgettable.

_{"...A 200 pound catfish indeed."}

"IT WAS THAT BIG!": My late father-in-law, George Diener, was truly a great sport fishermen. Frequently he would tell my wife and I about a two hundred pound catfish that used to hang out and Vermillion River. And just as frequently I would bent over laughing at the thought. A 200 pound catfish indeed. It would’ve looked like a mini submarine scudding up and down the stream. Diners at the old McGarvey’s restaurant would’ve loved it. It was absurd. But now-after all these years - I’m not so sure he was jesting. For if I were, say, just 20 years old today and some aging balding guy with bifocals told me about a time when he saw fish tug in the harbor loaded to the top of its gunwales/gunnels with walleye and/or perch I know what I'd think he was full of - and it wouldn’t be fish.

Fortunately, this snapshot provided by Vermilionite Tom Neiding serves both to prove and underline the claim. I might add that the catch pictured was not all that unusual in the yesteryear.

Pictured are Tom Neiding on the right, then 15 years old, and his brother Bryce, then 10 years old, on the left. It is the early spring (April) of 1956. Their father, Harold, owned and operated Vermilion’s Lake Erie fishery now occupied by Vermilion’s gorgeous boat club. The tug is the Mary H. - a trap netter owned by the Hosko Brothers of Toledo, but fishing out of Neidings Lake Erie Fishery. The catch is 7.5 tons of netted Pickerel (Walleye). And as this plain from the fish Tom is holding up for the camera it is a good-sized catch.

As the years turned Mr. Neiding (Harold) moved from the commercial fishing business into the restaurant business. This was, apparently, not much of a stretch for him. I do recall stories of his being well-known preparing and selling smoked fish for various folks as he attended to his commercial fishing pursuits.

In any case, sometime in the late 50s are very early 1960s he built a small restaurant just to the east of the lake Erie lanes bowling alley. It was called, appropriately enough, the Lake Erie Drive-In. Also, appropriately enough, the main food on the menu was Lake Erie fish. And were I a retrospective food critic (if there be such a thing) Harold meetings Lake Erie Perch sandwiches would receive a five star rating.

This restaurant, as has been said, was a drive in. In some respects it was similar to the one known as “Arnold’s” made famous by the television series “Happy Days”. It was, for some area youngsters a place to hang out before and after high school games and dances. Pretty teenage girls service served as car-hops. The jukebox was seldom silent. And the parking lot was seldom empty. But it was always, first and foremost, a restaurant. And a reasonably good one at that. Today it is the home of Martino’s international buffet.

But back to the photo. Behind the boys on the tug, and across the river, are the willows that once lined the river bank along Park Dr. in the vermilion lagoons. There are no houses on that street visible in the photo, although there may have been a few beyond the range of the camera lens. Bryce who was, incidentally, a school chum of mine appears to be fishing in the river. It may be that he was looking to hook the 200 pound cat my father-in-law always talked about. If nothing else it always made for a great story, and will always be something for every young fishermen to dream on.

_{Ref: Lake Erie Fishermen - Work, Tradition, and Identity; Lloyd and Mullen; University of Illinois Press, 1990; Special Thanks to Tom Neiding and his late brother Bryce; Published in the Vermilion Photojournal on 1/18/07; Oral transcript made at 1041 Oakwood Drive in Vermilion on 10/28/09 @ 1:10 PM.}

_{When Dreams Die}

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: I, unfortunatly, do not have a copy of the original poster being held by Vermilionite Ann Rini Maiden in this pic - but I wish I did. At one time a group of interested citizens had great plans for Vermilion's Opera House atop the former Vermilion Township Hall. The poster was a product of those plans.

Unfortunately, that party of interested people didn't own the building when they made their plans. And that - by iteself - didn't sit very well with whomever the township trustees were at that time.

But set all that aside, it was a good plan. And the trustees would actually have done everyone a great favor had they considered it - instead of viewing it as an affront and rejecting it outright. Far worse than that the township trustees eventually sold the building for a pittance to a private buyer when the ownership (at least from my view) should have remained public. [Note: You can find the history of the building with my harsh criticism of the public servants who sold it at my Vermilion Ohio Historic Pix page.]

I sincerely had visions of this building being renovated and used by the community of Vermilion, Ohio as a very positive asset. But that ain't never going to happen. And it does't matter that the funds to renovate this facility - to bring it into the 21st century - exist (even during these difficult economic times). The opportunity has been lost.

The point of the matter is that folks should think twice about selling their heritage (private or public). Because once it's gone it's very unlikely that you'll get it back. What might have been doesn't matter.

THOSE WACKY HIGH SCHOOL KIDS

Maybe this is why some people decline to teach music in high school. Following are actual answers from students on music tests...

- The principal singer of nineteenth century opera was called pre-Madonna.

- Gregorian chant has no music, just singers singing the same lines.

- Sherbet composed the Unfinished Symphony.

- All female parts were sung by castrati. We don't know ex- actly what they sounded like because there are no known descendants.

- Young scholars have expressed their rapture for the Bronze Lullaby, the Taco Bell Cannon, Beethoven's Erotica, Tchaikovsky Cracknutter Suite, and Gershwin's Rap City in Blue.

- Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel; if they sing without music it is called Acapulco.

- A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.

- Contralto is a low sort of music that only ladies sing.

- Probably the most marvelous fugue was the one between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

- I know what a sextet is but I'd rather not say.

- Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a great many musical com- positions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic.

- Rock Monanoff was a famous post-romantic composer of piano concerti.

_{“Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.”}

DEJAY VU AND RULE #62: Rummaging through the micro-files of the Vermilion Photojournal at the Ritter Public Library some time ago - flipping through events that took place in our town from about 1962 through 1966 and - Déjà vu - I began to relive my past.

It was a rather unsettling yet, eventually, a positive, experience.

I stumbled upon the accompanying photo of myself when I had hair and wrote a rather strange column for the Vermilion High School newspaper, The Compass, nearly 50 years ago called "Sing Along With Rich". The name of the column was adapted from a hit television show of the era called “Sing Along With Mitch”.

In that column I would take the titles of current hit songs and relate them to a particular student (e.g. I would take the 2008 hit number called “Low” and say it was by someone like, say, Bernie Madoff). It was, obviously, a sophomoric enterprise. But so too was the pre-photoshop portrait that appeared with the column. I had carefully darkened each lens of my glasses in the photo using a black marker to make them appear to be sunglasses.

The years 1965-67 were years I spent in the U.S.Army - much of which was in the Republic of Vietnam. Ergo, some of the news through which I was browsing happened while I was gone. And I was taken aback.

There were many faces and names there I easily recognized. But I'd forgotten about them because they had, more or less, disappeared by the time I returned. I really didn't realise so many things had happened during (what, at least to me, seemed to be) my rather brief absence.

More than a few of my classmates (VHS 1963) had married. And more than a few others, like myself, had also found themselves touring the tropical paradise of Southeast Asia. There also seemed to have been a plethora of automobile mishaps during that time. I don't believe that that many happen today. There must have been at least one or two newsworthy accidents every week.

I also espied a remarkably unremarkable news photo of local authorities carrying what appeared to be pinball machine out of the Favorite News Stand (where J.A.Berk and Associates is currently located). It was apparently deemed to be an illegal gaming device. In a later edition of the weekly I read that J.A. Berk and Associates had purchased the building and was in the process of remodelling it for the firm.

Other items which caught my eye were: An architectural rendering of a new face for the Elberta Inn; and a report announcing that the Baumhart Drugstore on Division Street was going out of business; later there was a huge sale/auction held on the inside of the store that attracted large crowds.

I certainly found my foraging through those yesteryears to be a rather disquieting experience. Because looking back - especially at my high school days - it’s hard to consider myself to have been anything other than a very competent knucklehead. There is, however, a human ordinance I’ve heard about that thankfully places all of these things into proper perspective. Some may already know of it. It’s called “Rule #62”. And it is simply this: As you go through life, “Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.”

_{Ref: Published in the Vermilion Photojournal 11/15/09; Written on 1/11/09 @ 9:30 AM}

>

_{Looking South on Washington Street}

AN INTERESTING SNAP ETC: This is an interesting snapshot taken on the east side of Washington Street looking south toward Ferry Street. It comes from Vermilion artist Frank Homitz. And while it is, perhaps, a rather unremarkable snap it has its merits.

For one thing the house visible just across Ferry Street on the left side of the pic is the first photo I've ever seen of it when it sat on that corner. Vermilion's Ritter Public Library currently occupies that space. When the original library was being constructed this house was moved by Dick Parsons from that corner to a place on the lakeshore just west of F.W. Wakefield's Harborview home / the Great Lakes Historical Society museum.

The reason for this particular pic is that the home just to the left (on the northeast corner of Ferry and Washington Street) was then the home of the Myers Family. Mr. Myers was an optomitrist in Vermilion and Cleveland. Herb Myers, the son of the doctor, is Frank's father-in-law.

This pic - to the best of my ability to date it - is probably c.1939. Ironically, Vermilionite Margaret Worcester who researches many of the older homes in town, had just asked me about a family who occupied the home in the 19th century: "I researched the house on the northeast corner of Ferry and Washington Street (5696 Ferry) which was built by Charles Lumley in 1874..."

Checking around I gathered the following: Charles Lumley was born in Upper Canada abt. 1840 and worked in Vermilion as a ships carpenter. He was married to an Irish gal named Grisaley (what a name - huh?) - and they had (by 1870) two daughters. One named Mary Ann, and another named Catherine.

As may be obvious, what appears to be a nondescript snapshot is actually of some value. Perhaps not in terms of dollars and cents - but historically.

Thanks Frank and Mari-Lyn.

_{Podcasts - "forever under construction..."}

PODCAST #152: This week the Vermilion Views Podcast #152 diverts thee from the moving footage of the Lake Shore Electric and is, instead, an informative slide show beginning in Cleveland that traces the history of the railway. This is something that, for whatever reason, was invisible to me on my main computer but popped up when I transferred the video to my laptop. (Go figure.) In any case, it's worth watching. Again, the original production is courtesy of interurban hisorian Dennis Lamont - and it's great stuff. So enjoy.

Also, please note that all the video (MP4) podcasts (when used) are done in the "Quicktime MP4" format. If you don't have "Quicktime" it's easy to find and free to download.

NOTE NOTE:Past podcasts are not available in the on-line archive. They just take up too much disk space. But if one really, really, really wants to acquire a copy of a past cast it can be had by contacting me and I will place it on a disc and send it to ye for a minimal fee.

LOCAL ANNOUNCEMENTS: After giving it much thought this link has been "put-down". During the last year most of the folks who used to use this page as a bulletin board have acquired their own and, consequently, no longer need this forum from "Views". I have, however, kept links (in the links section) to Larry Hohler's "Hope Homes" in Kenya - and to Bette Lou Higgins' Eden Valley Enterprises sites. They are historically and socially relevant projects. I suggest that you visit these sites on a regular basis to see "what's shakin'".

The Beat Goes On: The page is generated by the dreaded Macintosh Computer and is written and designed by (me) Rich Tarrant. It will change weekly ~ usually on Saturday. Bookmark the URL (Universal Resource Locater) and come back at your own leisure. Send the page to your friends (and enemies if you wish). If you have something to share with those who visit this page, pass it on. And if you see something that is in need of correction do the same. My sister, Nancy, is a great help in that respect. It only takes me a week to get things right. And follow the links. You might find something you like. If you experience a problem with them let me know. Also, if you want to see past editions of this eZine check the new archives links below.

If you're looking for my old links section (pictured) I've replaced it with a pull-down menu (visible in the small box next to the word "Go"). If you're looking for links to more Vermilion history check that menu.

_{How the old links menu looked}

Links to additional Vermilion Ohio pages: Vermilion Ohio Historic Pix History of Linwood Park Vermilion Visitor's Advisory (Satire) Gore Orphanage History The Lester Pelton Story The Wreck of The Niles #152 The History of Crystal Beach Vermilion Views Archives Vermilion's Pioneer Woman; Charlotte Sturges Cloudy; Vermilion's Ferryman The History of Vermilion's Congregational Church Dedication Sermon of Jotham W. Goodell, 1843 The Last Time I Saw Charlie Hope Childrens Home Kenya A Profile of Rich Tarrant Vermilion Biographies Vermilion - Village of Lake Captains Vermilion's Youngest Minstrels Don Englebry's "Growing Up In Vermilion" "Views" Podcast Archive The Story of Vermilion's Education System Eden Valley Enterprises VHS Class of 1959

For Persons who would like to donate to the cause (to keep these "Views" on-line you can send whatever you would like to me at the following address. And THANKS to everybody who has already donated to the cause. I doth certainly appreciate it): _{Rich Tarrant
1041 Oakwood Drive
Vermilion, Ohio
44089
Telephone: 440-967-0988 - Cell: 440-522-4459}

or you can use PayPal:

"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt."
-Joseph Heller

Vol.7, Issue 33, October 31, 2009

Archive Issue #346

_{Vermilion Views Search Engine}

advanced

© 2009 Rich Tarrant