Bob Lebzelter columns

Blogger Bob back

2014-01-22T12:43:00.001-08:00

Life is a series of changes.

It's inevitable.

Take email addresses for instance. Back when Internet first came to Conneaut in the mid 1990s, I became a beta tester for Suite 224, the Conneaut Telephone Co.'s Internet provider.

It would be nearly two decades later that I would actually work for the company. But it needed a group of people around 1995 with some technical knowledge to try out the service for free for a month or so and report any problems.

So if the browsers froze regularly or a certain site gave me problems, I was to report.

The Internet was so new a Suite 224 employee came to my house to install needed software. I couldn't download my own software because I had never been on the Internet.

I believe the guy remarked how dirty the keyboard was.

Anyway, I did my testing and eventually subscribed to the service, as a paying customer. Here's a fun fact, for $20 per month, you could be on the Internet 25 hours a month. Unlimited was $30. Except the software to track time didn't work well. When tons of people complained of overage charges, the company decided on $25 per month for unlimited service, dialup, of course.

My email address at the time was bobleb@suite224.net. Believe it or not, spam was actually worse then, at least for me. I couldn't get rid of two places that inundated me with garbage.

One was a company, or companies, who thought I was another Robert Lebzelter, who lives in the Bronx in New York. I was promised savings on my taxes for my property in the Bronx. I was told I could get top dollar for my property in the Bronx.

I remember writing back, stating if they sent me $10,000, they could have all the property I own in New York. They didn't respond.

I also got email from the New York State American Automobile Association. They used my email address but addressed me as "Ann Marie." I got newsletters, I got advertisements but could not send an email complaining because in order to correspond, I needed "Ann Marie's" password.

These problems were solved when I stopped using Suite 224 Internet about 8 years ago. Good-bye Bronx Bob. Good-bye New York AAA, good-bye bobleb@suite224.net.

Actually, it was, so long bobleb@suite224.net. Because as a new employee, I was immediately issued an email address. I was asked and decided to dust off bobleb@suite224.net after all of these years.

Immediately after it became active, I got a string of Google alerts about the Rolling Stones, by far the best musical act in world history. It seems back in my previous Suite 224 days, I had signed up for Google alerts to email me about anything Stones. When I switched emails, I notified a bunch of sites of the change, but not Google about the Stones..

Somehow, I kept up with the band without the alerts. I learned when Keith fell out of a coconut tree. I knew the Stones were coming to Toronto in May 2013 and attended the concert.

I learned when new videos and CDs and digital downloads were coming out. I didn't miss out.

What is amazing is for those years, my Stones emails bounced around in cyberspace. They got swallowed up somewhere, because I didn't get 8 years worth of notifications. I only got a dozen or so when bobleb was resurrected, although I get steady stream since.

It got me wondering about Ann Marie and Bronx Bob. Well, I need not wonder for long.

This morning I got an email from Karen Roanoke which stated, "After a recent analysis I see here that we might have missed a genuine opportunity to reduce your 9.5% for property 345 Bronx River Road Bronx, NY 10704.

Karen might be good getting me "9.5 percent for property," but her prose and coma talents are limited. I get 9.5 percent of what???? A tax discount? Do I get 9.5 percent worth of pig snouts?

It did include a map to my ”property" I can get 9.5 percent on. There is a McDonald's nearby. That doesn't impress me. A nice taco place maybe.

So concerns about my mythical property have been bouncing around the Internet these years as well.

Maybe I will invite Karen of the errant commas to my Bronx abode to discuss it further.

You know what I'm thinking now. If Bronx Bob has returned, can Ann Marie and her auto club be far behind?

We did it low-tech, now we'll try high-tech

2013-12-31T05:36:00.003-08:00

Back in 1976, when I graduated from Kent State University with a bachelor of science degree in journalism news, I started sending resumes all over the country, although I must admit I concentrated on my home state of Ohio.

Being 22, I wanted to move at least an acceptable distance from Mom and Dad. So while I was happy to get an inquiry from the newspaper in my home town of Conneaut, at the time I probably would have been happier if I was on the other side of the state.

But instead I got a phone call from Herb Thompson, general manager of the old News-Herald in Conneaut, on the morning of graduation. Actually, I was relieved I had at least some prospects for work.

I went to school to major in journalism during the era of Watergate and the Washington Post's investigative team of Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I think I would have gone into journalism even without the Watergate hype and the fact journalism brought down a president.

But it made the job situation tighter. I also had a wife, Louise, who had a degree in education.

So after making an appointment with Thompson, I slipped on cap and gown, did some pomp and circumstance, drove to Conneaut and drove to the News-Herald offices and promptly walked passed the paper to Carl Vendetti's barbershop to get a haircut. My long, curly locks had to go.

Whether is it was the haircut or my sparkling personality, I got hired and promptly started a long journalism career in Ashtabula County.

Now Louise was looking for work as well, probably in elementary education. She was certified in grades 1 to 8. But she subscribed to a magazine, the Arithmetic Teacher, because she was interested in math.

And that automatically made you a member of the National Association of Arithmetic Teachers. It's sort of like if you subscribed to Playboy, it made you a member of the American Playboy Foundation.

Louise listed the membership on her resume and the superintendent at the time, Eugene Galiffo, noticed it and offered her work not at a grade school, but in junior high math.

And that solidified our stay in Conneaut.

Now I like to stay up on technology, not that there was a lot in the mid 70s. But the News-Herald was decidedly low tech. We wrote on black, upright, manual typewriters from the 1940s. Today, they would be worth something.

We used cheap newsprint for paper. There was no Internet, no email.

My editor at the time was Pat Williams. Pat now hosts a cable TV / radio talk show in the studio adjacent to my office in the wilds of East Conneaut.

The old News-Herald did a lot of things correctly. It listened to the community. It published local news and photographs. While we had the lowest Associated Press service for national and world news, virtually all of our photographs were taken locally.

And because it was a small paper, reporters took their own photographs. Down the road in Ashtabula, our sister newspaper, the Star Beacon, was just big enough to have a photographer or two.

But the News-Herald had community ownership. Our circulation reached the saturation point. It was difficult to find a home in the city that did not subscribe. When someone said, “I read in the paper....” nobody asked what paper. Because the News-Herald was the community's paper.

Also, it was an afternoon paper with presses in Conneaut. That meant we had a deadline of midmorning. Once production was complete, the paper was run off. If all went well, with 45 minutes of the paper being completed, there were copies available for sale at City News and other outlets.

Now that wasn't as fast as uploading to an Internet site and having it ready to be read by potentially millions. But for 1976-79, it wasn't bad.

When News-Herald production moved with new owners to Ashtabula, the time between when the paper was complete and people got their newspapers increased to roughly five hours, partly due to the newspaper switching from afternoon to morning. Presses were also a dozen miles away.

When the News-Herald closed, I switched to the Star Beacon and for a short stint, the Jefferson Gazette.

Today, I am switching gears, working for the new news outlet for the Conneaut Telephone Co., a firm which encompasses telephone, Internet and cable television.

My goal here is to give the community some ownership in this new outlet, like they did at the News-Herald years ago.

Also, I hope to give you immediacy as well. News-Herald was low-tech, but it got its product out to the people quickly, like no product I've worked at since. Until now.

When D-Day arrives, we want to Tweet what is going on, we want to get our video on our web site as fast as possible. We want to keep you updated on our Facebook page.

And if you are at, say, the D-Day event too, maybe you can send us a message about an aspect of the story we may not know about.

So hang on as the adventure begins. Also, let us know how we are doing.

Fan page at www.facebook.com/suite224internet

Join us on Twitter @suite_224.

Onetime Cleveland editor recalls goodwill growing up in Conneaut

2013-12-26T08:08:00.003-08:00

N.R. HOWARD

NOTE: The following was written by N.R. Howard, editor of the Cleveland News, for the Conneaut News-Herald on July 2, 1946 and was provided by the Jefferson Historical Society. The Cleveland News published from 1905 to 1960, when it was absorbed by the Cleveland Press. The Press ceased publication in 1982. Howard was the last editor at the News and died in December 1980. He was also listed in Who's Who for his work in journalism and was first vice president of the American Society of Newspaper editors. This story details his boyhood days in Conneaut.

Between 1909 and 1914 (which was my residential experience), Conneaut, Ohio, was the greatest town for boys in the whole United States. I do not know just why that should be so, but I will be forever convinced there was no town like it, for size, for opportunity for boys to grow and have fun, for genuine good living and live-and-let-live terms to everybody.

In these years, I grew from 11 years old to 16, which are formative years. The experiences of work, play and good nature must have firmly fixed a large part of what might playfully be called my character. A good many times I have thanked Providence for having got those experiences in the boyhood of Conneaut.

It was a town of utter democracy, to start with; and yet a town which held its head a little higher than most other towns in that region, as if we had something unusual to be proud of, in our town. One day I remember, I went to the excellent Public Library during the regime of the sprightly

and smart Miss Marie Brown, to whom every library called was a visitor and guest – even the small boys – and crew out. We read William Dean Howell's “A Boy's Town,” the account of his adolescence in another Ohio community like Conneaut. It was a good book, but the town didn't sound half as attractive as Conneaut, which I remember every principal selection. Conneaut was THE town.

In my time, the boys of Conneaut were companionable to the ultimate degree. It seemed impossible not to be friends with everybody. We had hot quarrels, but they subsided as rapidly as they arose and, at least in my experience, they rarely blossomed into fights. A fight was a rarity. I remember one on the graveled playground of Broad Street School, which had been in the making for months between two boys who lived on the same street and were in the same classroom. The encounter took two hours, was witnessed by 50 or 60 of us without partiality and resulted in no really damaging blows being struck by either. They fought like two puppies whose feelings had been hurt, if you know what I mean.

We tended to groove between gangs, but we called our groups athletic clubs. North of the railroads, with Harbor Street as their axis and Harbor Street School as their playground, were the Blue Ribbons, who had the best all-around schoolboy teams in town. The best of their football teams, circa 1910, 11, 12, included Dick Wyman, Bob Loomis, Lee Brebner, Bert (Brownie) Holden, Orris Barber and Charlie Sua. One autumn, when our gang had somewhat disintegrated, I caught on with the Blue Ribbons as a guard or center and played in two battles against the West End kids, a redoubtable lot. The Porter brothers, Willie Petrie and Harold Crombie, are the only players I remember of their crew.

Our crowd played baseball and football and high-jumped and pole-vaulted in the pasture on Liberty Street at the foot of Buffalo, next to our house. We called ourselves the Athletic Athletic Club, which redundant name my cousin Bob Richardson, my brother and I forced on the less imaginative minds of our gang by argument that the Philadelphia Athletics were the greatest ball team of all time. In the News-Herald accounts of our games, we were termed the ACS, pronounced Ax, by those News-Herald readers who noticed the items. Wilbur Jacobs, a southpaw, was our baseball star and pitcher; my brother, Ed, caught him. Others of our “squad” were Bob Richardson, occasionally Tom Smith, who was the best juvenile athlete in Conneaut; the Davis brothers, Paul and Carlton; Frank Stone, Fred Lovell, Calvin Rankin, Ed Zack, Hall Kurtz, Liscom Cox, Charlie Eades and I have forgotten the rest – to my shame, for we were all blood brothers.

There were two other competitive gangs, the boys from St. Mary's School, headed by Fred Raynor (we borrowed Fred, who was a swell pitcher, for some of our games) and Charlie Silva; and the Red Ribbons, whom we considered second-rate Blue Ribbons' “farm club.” Their best performers were Leon Harden and Don McKee.

In the three or four years I remember, before we all got to high school age and drifted out of boy gangs, we played basketball and football pretty even with the St. Mary's boys, we could lick the Red Ribbons and the Blue Ribbons were too much for us. The last game I remember, after we had cleaned up the other football teams around town, the Blue Ribbons beat us 67 to 2, and there was a somewhat cold-blooded account in the News-Herald about how one-sided the game was.

There was a small but fraternal association of the boys who were News-Herald daily carriers, in which job I was initiated into the mysteries and delights of newspaperdom. In my time, the carriers included Ed Horne (now a prelate and intellectual of the Roman Catholic Church), who had the West Main route; Walter Hagan, who had the northwest corner of town; Walter Raynor, who had West Liberty and midtown Main Street; Leroy Hause, who had part of the harbor route; and Fred Rich, who had the other part; the Meinke brothers, who carried the North and West Conneaut routes; I forget one or two others, but think Frances “Buster” Work had a route. We spent an hour or two at the News-Herald plant each day in advance of getting our papers, skylarking, comparing notes about sports, girls and teachers, sometimes making noisy nuisances of ourselves.

In those days, between athletic seasons and in the early evening, the gay blades of the high school brethren, to the number of 30 or 40, used to congregate at the Risley Red Star Cigar store at Broad and Main; in nice weather to hold up the Broad Street wall of the building, in winter to crowd into the shop and make it difficult for customers. The everlasting good nature of the proprietor, I will never forget. All the best wisecracks and the words of new, popular songs could be learned from these daily and nightly sessions; also, I am afraid, some rather gossipy classifications of the girls in town.

Baseball scores and election returns were chalked on the blackboard of the Red Star store, which gave the site an urbane quality we hankered after.

Dancing was frowned on for grammar school and high school parties, but became more respectable, when Miss Julia Weston opened the first dancing school of our era, with Elaine Martin as pianist. Mrs. H.B. Kurtz, my Sunday school teacher, succeeded to this class, which was one of the town's ultra-social activities. At school parties, which the teachers seemed to enjoy as much as we, such games as post office and winkum were played and heavy suppers invariably served by whomever was hostess.

The last good high school football team of my day was in 1913, when Hughie Buchanan was captain. The very best team of this time did not win more than half its games, but cleaned up everything around the county, then lost to the Youngstown, Erie and Meadville schools, out of our class in hard-fought games. That was Clyde Smith's 1910 or 1911 team and I still can see him coming through the line like a tank. The spirits of the entire city rose and fell with the success of the CHS football teams, a condition which I doubt exists today. I remember a game with Youngstown Rayen high, at the old league park out West Main Street, where Rev. James H. Rankin of the Congregational Church (who was adored by every one for his shining and humble Christianity) smashed an umbrella, pounding it into the frozen ground in the “pull” for the tying touchdown.

One Saturday night in the spring of 1912, the whole town turned out to parade for the CHS track athletes unexpectedly winning the county field meet at Jefferson fairgrounds. It took only five or six Conneaut athletes to win enough events to triumph, and they were Sajito Leach, Jay Keidel, that big Blanchard boy, Orris Barber, Hugh Bechanan and perhaps Frande Goode. Almost every one of them won first in one or two events. We never again came close – in my time.

Another unscheduled parade was held one night in the fall of 1910, after a day of announcement that Edward Payson Weston, the famous distance walker, would “come through” Conneaut on his way from Cleveland to Buffalo. The crowds began to line the downtown Main Street about 7 that evening and were just fidgety enough by 9 to provide a cheering section for a tall man in a white duster and silk hat who came striding down Main under the arc lights with a group of boys whistling and yelling at his heels. The tall man was Lloyd Buchanan, who had noticed that the stage was set for a good gag and achieved it. The crowd, feeling itself “sold,” mostly melted away after that and only a dozen of us were still up about midnight when Weston himself strode through town.

I think of Conneaut with tremendous affection (as most boys do of their boyhood scenes) and am sure that part of the feeling is one of the thanks that it was an upright town without any visible meanness in it for small boys. Everybody you knew, in those days, was a person of good will. Everybody was more than willing for everyone else to live and grow and enjoy himself or herself. I haven't lived any place else where this wholesale goodwill has been so evident.

Please like the Suite224 Facebook fan page as the multi-media service sets to provide a news web site serving all of Ashtabula County beginning in February 2014.

A few life changes in the past year

2013-12-26T07:44:00.004-08:00

Ben and Marcus Lebzelter play with a kitchen set on Christmas Day 2013.

Life has changed for me since the last Christmas holiday.

A year ago we were still shaking off the wonder of three weeks in Europe, viewing the Eiffel Towner, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Big Ben, Swiss Alps and the overly strong “American” style coffee that is brewed in Europe.

Thanks to Europe, I still cannot stand the thought of eating a scrambled egg.

And while we saw grandsons Henry and twins Marcus and Benjamin often, they lived three hours away near Rochester, N.Y. Facetime is OK, but it ain’t nothing like swinging them by their feet in person.

It was rare we saw them on Christmas Day. We had never seen them at Halloween, except in photographs posted on Facebook.

Another change from a year ago: I landed a new position in a company that is actually looking at expanding in several areas, rather than looking at areas to cut and departments to outsource.

It’s also the year I became an orphan. My dad’s long illness, which took a huge toll, came to an end in November. My mother died in June 2011. This was the first year both wife Louise and myself were parentless.

Not only did my dad die, but so did Louise’s mother.

My grandkids lost no less than four great-grandparents during the year.

But the fact that they were nearby comes in very handy for all sides. When a child is too sick for day care, neither son Derek nor daughter-in-law Jess need stay home. Louise, as a one-time government employee, got to retire a few years ago and can care for coughing, feverish toddlers at a moment’s notice.

The family moved to North Kingsville (one of those places with a Conneaut address) and that puts the drive time to about 12 minutes, rather than 190 minutes. There is also a corresponding savings in gasoline.

There are also some unexpected advantages. When I buy retired Louise a bigger gift for Christmas, I just store it in Derek and Jess’ basement until Christmas Eve.

And in the summer, their new home has a pretty nice above-ground swimming pool. Of course, it being northeast Ohio, it is at its optimum warmth for 2 hours, 18 minutes on a magical date in early August.

I took advantage of the pool a few times. One day I rode the bike to the Animal Protective League in Kingsville Township to run the dogs and decided to take the long way home and stop and see the kids. They were in the pool and before I knew it, I was in my running shorts only, hosed off the sweat and was nibbling on grandkid toes in the water. What was even better was I could tell Louise I got to see the kids and she didn’t. There is a big competition between us in that way, largely manufactured by myself.

There are a few disadvantages. When visiting them in Rochester one day, my iPad stopped working. Fortunately, they are 15 minutes from an Apple store, unlike an hour and 15 minutes here. It also came in handy when I wanted to take a couple of free classes on using the iPad. I Could have gone to Cleveland two days in a row, or I could visit Rochester, see the grandkids and take the classes.

So all I had to do was call and say get ready, here we come.

Another up side was often Derek and Jess would go out to dinner or a movie while we were there. The fact they had zero family there meant when some family did make the trek, they were about to warm up the car to leave as we got there.

Besides getting out all of the kiddies’ toys and helping them play, with their parents away we let them stay up later. And when they did go to sleep, I would slip out and buy dinner at Moe’s, the best fast-food Mexican restaurant ever.

We still babysit, but visiting Moe’s now means a 30-minute drive to the nearest restaurant, across the way from the Millcreek Mall near Erie. Not as easy to “slip out.” Plus it is actually a shorter drive if we babysit at our house.

I suddenly realized with the grandkids so close, we have slipped in to the roles my parents had with our kids, educating, nurturing and letting them get away with murder.

It’s not exactly the same. WREO is no longer playing easy listening, which is what my parents listened to in the car when they babysat our kids. I don’t think I would listen if WREO was anyway.

But I have had an oldies station on and we crank it up for “Surfin Bird” by the Trashman or “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” by Loudon Wainwright III which we would sing to with the grandkids in tow.

And I taught the kids that when I say, “Look at me,” they reply, “I am shattered,” from the Rolling Stones song. I even told them a tiny fib that they would not be able to get into Kindergarten without answering Rolling Stones lyrics questions.

My dad, who made a career out of educating kids, probably never said such a thing.

I got to see and photograph the kids in their Avengers outfits at Halloween and hear Ben unexpectedly invite a neighbor while trick or treating to “smell my feet.”

I saw the twins go crazy over the toy kitchen set we brought over on Christmas day. We had the luxury of being able to take two cars to their house because there were too many toys to carry in one vehicle.

What would we have done if they were in New York, considering we would have had to squeeze our suitcases in the lone vehicle we would be taking?

I shutter to think.

And I don’t think we would have considered buying fewer gifts an option.

And now I have the “Dead Skunk” song running through my head. Curse you Loudon Wainwright!

Another disadvantage to having the grandkids closer.

Check out Suite224.net Facebook fan page, keep up as we ready our new news service.

New job dates to previous century

2013-12-23T08:54:00.001-08:00

I don't want to beat around the bush, but even though I am a new employee of the Conneaut Telephone Co., I really have a long relationship with the firm.

In fact, I may be the only person who has literally beat the bushes in front of the phone company. More on that later.

Let me start at the beginning of the saga.

We must go back to another century, to 1995.

The Internet was new to most people in Ashtabula County. The Rolling Stones were in the European leg of their Voodoo Lounge tour. Gasoline cost between $1.05 and $1.19 a gallon, cell phones were the weight and size of a brick.

Pagers and fax machines were high-tech.

The Lebzelter clan got its first computer in 1992, an expensive machine with DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 (sounds like a baseball score.)

It cost something like $2,500 but interestingly enough, had no modem. It was an option.

But a year into the experience, I got an external modem and logged onto private computer bulletin boards that could handle one to four calls at a time, depending on the number of lines an operator had.

One of those operators was Dave Bucci, who had Happy Hacker. Bucci keeps those BBS days alive by hosting an Internet site, happyhackerbbs.com, which still fields local discussions.

Anyway, I worked for the Star Beacon and because of my dabbling in the modem-enhanced computer world, I was given the task of coming up with a web site for the newspaper.

It may be hard for 20-something's to realize, but the Internet was a mystery. Various firms were trying to cash in to this murky world of the Internet.

The national firm America On Line was virtually synonymous with Internet, just as a decade earlier Betamax meant VCR.

But AOL stayed away from much of Ashtabula County because there wasn't a big enough population. Some people kept accounts anyway, but this was dial up and that meant staggering long instance fees. (For younger people, I will tell you about long distance some other day.)

So I was asked to create a web site without having ever seen a web site.

Fortunately, the folks at the Conneaut Telephone Co. were getting into this upstart Internet thing at the same time and I was asked to be a beta tester.

The service was called Suite 224, after the street address of the phone company. A guy from the phone company came to my house and installed the software to allow the Internet to enter our home.

Still trying to get the Beacon web site started, I met with Ken Johnson, now CEO, and worked out a plan. Initially, I used an HTML editor to add content. It was a slow and laborious process.

Surprisingly, the newspaper had no Internet at the plant.

I would copy content to old floppy discs and upload from home.

Except I was still having problems and I talked to Ken. I learned suite224.net had a CD of utilities good for Windows 3.1 for Workgroups and Windows 95.

I couldn't get the disc, that had a file transport program, web browsers and stuff, until after the phone company closed for the day, way after it closed, like midnight.

So Ken or somebody from the staff left the disc out in the bushes in front of the business, being careful it bounced on top and didn’t fall to the ground somewhere in the prickly part.

And at midnight or so, I was beating around the bushes, looking for that disc. I was hoping a police car wouldn't cruise by. I'm not sure why, but I still have the disc. I found it one day when I was looking for something else.

I've worked with the phone company since then, often spotlighting its Oscar coverage. Ken helped me start my first private home page, which included my celebrated attempt to get my dog elected president.

Being a technology firm, Suite 224 has had to keep up with technology or become the new Blockbuster or Circuit City.

In 1999, it went into the cable TV business when the national provider wouldn't give Conneaut any more than 40 channels.

These days, Conneaut Telephone is continuing to expand and change with technology. It is far from Conneaut only. I am part of that expansion, hoping to inform, entice and entertain you with our new news web site.

Besides local school news and sports, we want to introduce you in a fun way to what local businesses have to offer, tell you about interesting people, spotlight local events, sports and festivals and whatever comes down the pike.

All this will come with a new name for what is now Conneaut Telephone Co., Suite 224 and Cablesuite 541. The next few months will mean lots of positive changes.

Yes, we will keep you updated about the new news website and where you will be able to find it come February.

This is all interactive, so if you have people, places or events you think we should spotlight, shoot me an email at bobleb@suite224.net with all the details.

My phone number is 440-593-7177. And please, don't beat around the bush.

Suite 224 / Conneaut Telephone on facebook
https://www.facebook.com/suite224Internet

Ashtabula woman gives new life to old dogs

2013-12-23T08:49:00.004-08:00

Roger was a 10-year-old shiba inu dog who found himself at the Animal Protective League in Kingsville Township.

He was an older dog so the staff kept him in the office, where he would be seen and have a better chance of adoption.

“He was a stray, came in June. Didn't appear to have any medical issues,” said Irene Fiala, who started as an APL volunteer and is vice president of the board. “He was kept in the front office so people could see him. A kind gentleman offered to pay for his teeth extractions. During examination it was learned he had end-stage renal failure and he went down hill very, very fast.”

But Fiala didn't want him to end his life at a shelter. So she did what she has done many times before, she adopted him.

“Basically we were able to provide comfort care. I did not like the idea of him dying in the shelter, so I brought him here. He got to spend two days here lying in the sun on a gorgeous fall day. Kind of laid in the grass,” she said.

“When it was time, his condition deteriorated, he died here with me, surrounded by the other dogs, Not only loved in a nice setting, but not in a steel cage, not a hard floor.”

Then there's Oscar, the yellow lab.

“He was found wandering in the woods in a cemetery. He was found emaciated in November. Upon examination, it was learned he had a tumor in his jawbone. He was expected to live two to four weeks. He could barely stand up without crying in pain. He came to my house basically for hospice care and that was 3 to 4 years ago. And he's doing very well.”

Martha is a beagle. “She will be 15 (this month). When she came to the shelter she had some neurological issues. She had a hard time keeping her head up. She had tumors. Her prognosis wasn't very good. She came here and that's been 5 years and she is doing good.”

Then there's Roy. Roy was a beagle who came to the shelter in January as a stray. “He didn’t have any known medical history. In March we learned he had abdominal masses and they were growing rapidly. So he came to live with me. For hospice care. He came here for comfort care. He lived about 5 weeks and then passed. Again, he had some good days in the sun in March. He would lay out on the back porch with the others and just be a dog and that's what it's all about. Be a dog on a nice spring day instead of living in a shelter.”

When she began volunteering at the APL, she had a male poodle at home. She decided she needed to give a deserving home to another dog.

“I decided I wanted the least likely one to make it out alive. I went up to shelter site unseen and said, 'I need your oldest female' and it was a beagle, Corina. She lived to be 16 years old. She had cushing's disease. She had mammary tumors. She was just a sweet old gal. I had her for six years.”

Fiala, an associate professor of sociology at Edinboro University, said medication for Corina cost $200 a month. “I downgraded my cable,” she said.

“It's hard. I won't lie about that, that it's emotionally depressing, knowing especially they haven't had the best of care. They haven't had the opportunities. Waiting at a shelter. I don't want to be anthropomorphic (affixing human traits to animals), but you can see it in their eyes when someone comes to the shelter. They get all perky. All excited and happy. When they are left behind they get melancholy and sullen.”

One dog she adopted turned out to have rectal cancer. “He was sleeping in the far end of cage. He was depressed. He lived here just about a year. He had surgery. The tumors came back. He died here with his head on my lap with the other dogs surrounding him.”

The dogs she takes in have had hard times.

“They seem so grateful to be out of the shelter, to be in a home, have a bed, go for walks, snuggle on a bed. They live for the moment . As far as my observation of them ,they are really appreciative of the good times. The shelter is a very stressful environment,” Fiala said.

When they come home they have the consistency, she said

“(Taking in dogs) is not for everybody. It can be emotionally taxing. The way I see, it they got a raw deal. They have a short life on this earth. If I can make it any easier for them, I'll do it.

“They seem to adapt quickly to their environment. Within a day with Oscar you would have thought he lived here all his life,” she said.

“It might be a little rough at times but they have it a lot worse,” Fiala said.

How does she pay for it all? “I am very fortunate. I have a good career. I have no children. Anything I would spend on luxuries I spend on my dogs. You make a responsibility for them. You are responsible for veterinary care, responsible for nutritious meals.”

“When they come live in a home it is a whole new dog, a whole new personality” from living at a shelter.

“I think environment plays a role,” Fiala says, rubbing Oscar's back.

Ashtabula councilwoman finds solace at cemeteries

2013-10-03T19:21:00.001-07:00

Ann Stranman at Chestnut Grove Cemetery.

Ann Stranman has found relief from the stress and strain of everyday life ñ she's turned to the dead.
Ashtabula's Third Ward councilwoman was spending days looking for 'day work' and spending time with her daughter. But as daughter came closer to being a teenager and hanging with Mom became less cool, Stranman started taking solace in area cemeteries.
It all began a few months back when a newspaper article stated Joshua Giddings' historical law office in Jefferson was being moved. It stated Giddings, a onetime U.S. House member and strong opponent of slavery, was buried at Oakdale Cemetery in Jefferson.
While driving by the cemetery, Stranman went exploring and has been hooked ever since.
Walking through cemeteries she has found quiet, beauty, history and her great great grandfather.
"I find cemeteries to be beautiful, peaceful and serene and probably one of the only such places you can go and walk around and enjoy the outdoors on a nice day and not have to deal with a bunch of other people," she said.
Stranman knew little about her great grandmother's family, except her name had been McKay. One day while walking through Chestnut Grove on Grove Drive she came across the grave of Martin McKay, who died during a hurricane in Florida in 1927. She checked findagrave.com and discovered someone who wrote a tribute to McKay. She emailed the tribute writer who sent her 37 pages of information, including that McKay had a daughter named Alice, Stranman's great grandmother.
With help from a web site developed by Darrell Hamilton, former city manager candidate and businessman, Stranman started looking for the graves of former city managers and mayors of Ashtabula. One she has looked for is R.H. Hardee, who served in 1915 and was the last mayor before the charter was changed to city manager.
The first mayor is purported to be buried there was well, Roger W. Griswold, who served from 1831-1833 and then again in 1839. Stranman so far hasn't found the grave.
The grave of Henry Lawton Morrison soon intrigued Stranman. He was the grandfather of her former employer, Robert S. Morrison, who founded Molded Fiberglass and was a huge civic booster.
Henry Lawton Morrison served several times as mayor, starting in 1858, and also served on the school board and as county commissioner. He helped create the Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Ashtabula Railroad and was a director of the Niles & New Lisbon Railroad.
She found many people buried at Chestnut Grove, her favorite cemetery, who headed big companies but also served their community.
"We need to look back at people who started this community. For so many guys today it is all about the bottom line" she said.
Here you will find the Hubbards and Blakeslees. You will find the mausoleum of Charles Collins, the engineer who designed the bridge that collapsed into the Ashtabula Gulf in 1876 when a train drove over it, killing 92.
The engineering was greatly criticized and Collins had to appear before the Ohio General Assembly to answer questions. He was found days later in his bedroom, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. He was buried near where 25 victims are buried in a mass grave at Chestnut Grove, adjoining a memorial to the disaster.
Also buried at the cemetery is Fred Blakeslee, who at 21 was a firefighter and photographer who worked all night helping train victims. He owned a photography shop and after a few hours sleep, returned to the scene to take photographs under freezing conditions.
"I've wandered around here for three hours at a time. You lose track of time" Stranman said.
She has combined her interest in gravestones and photography, keeping a camera with her during her strolls. "I like cemeteries. I like taking pictures," she says while walking through Chestnut Grove, the sounds of mowers echoing across the cemetery.
Stranman is involved with findagrave.com, sometimes taking photographs of gravestones for people in other parts of the country.
She has also posted cemetery finds and photographs to her Facebook page.
ìI think it is important to remember the past,î she said.
And yes, it does get slightly scary.
"I have been here just before dark. It gets a bit spooky. One night I heard a noise and there were four deer"
She also finds humor, posting a photo of the grave of someone named Beer, declaring ìBeer is dead.î
While still looking for the graves of city managers and mayors , she would also like to start looking for those who served on Ashtabula council, at least council presidents.
It's a tall order, but she's reconciled to that.
"I don't ever expect to be done with this,"

she said.

Avoid meat, stay in the pink

2013-09-13T07:33:00.001-07:00

A little analogy, if you please.

Let's say there's a Maria, a single mother. Maria works hard. She has kids. Her job doesn't pay enough for all her needs. Consequently, each month she goes a bit deeper in debt.

She doesn't like the idea and thinks of ways to get out of debt. But at the end of the day, she's tired and puts off decisions, going further in debt.

She has thought of alternatives. She could go back to school to get a better job. But she has kids and that would mean quitting her job and imposing on relatives. She can't stomach the idea.

She could drastically cut back on an already spartan existence. But when her kids ask for pizza once a month, it's hard to turn them down.

She could get a second job. But she's already busy and wants to spend some time with her kids.

So she comes up with an idea. She will start a personal campaign against debt. She makes tags on her home computer that says “Down with debt.” She wears a tag each day.

She cajoles friends to sign a petition against debt. She gets them to walk against debt. She starts a web site detailing debt and how to avoid it.

Yes, Maria is fighting debt. But when the next month roles around, she is just as in debt as before.

And with that, let me remind you we are weeks away from another October of pink ribbons to fight breast cancer. People will wear pink ribbons to work. There will be walks. There will be camaraderie.

There will be reminders to get a breast cancer screening.

Pink ribbon fights against breast cancer are a big success, too, if you operate eventpromotionsnow.com. That's because it sells everything from pink-ribbon T-shirts to tote bags with a pink ribbon to pink lollipops in packages of 250. There's pink shoelaces, pink sticky writing pads, pink zip wallets, even pink measuring cups.

All of those sales should have wiped out cancer right then and there, correct?

Has the number of breast cancer cases gone down? Yes, from 1999 to 2005, breast cancer rates have decreased by about two percent a year, but only in women 50 and older. Breastcancer.org speculates this is mainly because of the decrease in the use of hormone replacement therapy.

What would be even more effective in cutting cases of breast and other cancers? Get rid of or severely reduce intake of animal products in the diet. Stop eating meat. Curb or eliminate dairy products from the diet.

An international study at the Wiley Online Library shows positive correlations between foods and cancer mortality rates in the case of meats and milk for breast cancer, milk for prostate and ovarian cancer and meat for colon cancer.

The British Journal of Cancer found, “Women, both pre- and post menopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of cancer.”

The American Cancer Society reports one-third of all cancer deaths in the U.S. can be attributed to nutrition.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals states vegans (who eat no animal products) maximize intake of foods that fight cancer, including grains, beans, fruits and other vegetables.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine states vegetarians are “about 40 percent less likely to get cancer than non vegetarians, regardless of other risks such as smoking, body size and socioeconomic status.”

One study compares cancer rates among 34,000 Americans, some vegetarians and meat eaters. Those who avoid meat, fish and poultry had dramatically lower rates of prostate, ovarian and colon cancer compared to meat-eaters.

A 2007 study of more than 35,000 women published in the British Journal of Cancer found women who ate the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer.

And the dietary habits of men in 32 countries found the highest risk factors for prostrate cancer mortality involved meat and dairy products.

PETA reports Dr. T. Coli Campbell, which the groups says is the foremost epidemiological researcher today, believes animal proteins are the prime carcinogen in meat and dairy products. “No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

A World Health Organization reports show an 8 ½ fold increase in breast cancer for affluent Japanese women who eat meat daily vs. poorer women who never or rarely eat meat.

The Shanghai women's Health Study finds soy food intake provides protection against postmenopausal breast cancer when consumed during adolescence and as adults.

The consumption of high-fat foods such as meat, dairy products, fried foods and even vegetable oils cause a woman's body to make more estrogen, which encourage cancer cell growth in the breast and other organs that are sensitive to female hormones.

OK, there's plenty more studies and correlations between meat and other animal fats and higher cancer and consumption of grains, fruits and vegetables that lower cancer risk.

This doesn't even begin to explore meat consumption and strokes and heart attacks.

Studies have shown even moderate meat intake has a big impact. What is “moderate” consumption? One study describes it as little as two ounces of red meat a day. OK, we all know a McDonald's Quarter-Pounder is four ounces. Minus cheese and beef-drenched french fries. That's more than twice a “moderate” meat eater consumes for a day, and this in one sitting.

Unlike my Maria scenario, ending meat consumption isn't so difficult. After you get the swing of things, it is even easier. Veggie burgers are plentiful in grocery stores and take a minute in the microwave. Burger crumbles heat up fast and can be used in casseroles. There are also chicken substitutes and the like.

Pink ribbons are OK. Even pink tote bags — I guess — but they don't lower cancer rates like banishing meat from your table.

There's a fact to sink your teeth into.

Just move the decimal point

2013-09-08T15:18:00.001-07:00

It had only been a few days, but I was back at Love's Travel Center, pumping more gasoline.

This time it was mainly because I needed to mow the grass and that meant refilling my 5-gallon container. While there, I topped off the Equinox as well.

While pumping, the lady next to me said, “Don't you wish gasoline prices were like they were years ago?”

Now I could have looked shocked and said I am too young to remember the days of cheap gasoline. Not cheaper gasoline, but cheap gasoline.

But she had me. I admitted it. I remember those days.

It was when I first started to drive and quite simply, all one has to do to figure out prices then vs. now is to move a decimal point.

Gasoline that is $3.59 a gallon and takes $40 to $50 to fill a tank, used to cost 35.9 cents and you fill the tank for $4 to $5. And believe it or not, as a young high school kid, I wasn't appreciative of the low price of gasoline. I tried to buy during gasoline wars, when gasoline dropped from 35 to 25 cents per gallon.

But there's more. Somebody would pump your gasoline for you. You didn't even get out of the car. And that someone would check your tire pressure if you asked. That someone checked your oil, your window wash solution. Took you to lunch. OK, that last part wasn't true.

But how about this, service stations gave out something called S&H Green Stamps. Now you couldn't mail a letter with these, but when you got a roll or so of them for buying gasoline, you licked them and stuck them in a book.

After you got so many books, you could buy stuff, like stereos or portable TVs or whatever. I bought a magazine tray and a card table with S&H Green Stamps. Wonder who S and H were?

You also got the stamps for shopping at Kroger supermarkets.

As if the attendant pumping your gas, checking your oil and giving you trading stamps wasn't enough, I remember when you bought 8 gallons or more of fuel, you got a best of Disney record album.

No iTune downloads then, my friend. Au contraire, this was one of those big old albums you could hold in your hands and place on your turntable.

Now I wasn't a big fan of Disney music, but hey, it was free. And there was always somebody you could give the album to.

The days of fuel and honey ended soon after I became of driving age. Good-bye stamps, good-bye Disney music. Gasoline started to rise in price.

Now you might be saying, Hey, Bob, this is inflation. Deal with it. Nothing cost what you paid 40 years ago.

Well, even not adjust for inflation, you can buy a television for about the same price as then, and these days TVs are smart (that means Internet ready) and in high definition. Of course, nothing was Internet ready 40 years ago.

Factoring in inflation, gasoline is still pretty high.

A newspaper four decades ago would cost you 15 cents. Today, it would cost 75 cents. That's a five-fold increase.

If gasoline jumped as much as newspapers, we would pay about $1.50 per gallon these days. I'd take that.

A gallon of whole milk (which I don't recommend you drink) cost roughly $1 back then. Today I am told you can get a gallon for around $3. If gasoline prices rose like milk, you would be paying about 90 cents per gallon for gasoline.

Of course, over the years there have been many variables when it comes to gasoline prices. We had the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Up until the 1960s we had our own petroleum pumped in this country and it was cheap and plentiful. But those reserves started to die out and we depended on foreign oil from places like OPEC. Prices went up and up and up.

It changed our economy. We were no longer in control.

Partially as a result, the automobile is no longer such a centerpiece of our lives. We drive fewer miles. There's another trend. A growing number of younger people don't even get a driver's license. Instead of getting out of school and buying a car, they are paying off student loans.

If they work in a big city, it costs something like $30 a day to park.

More are using public transportation and places like Cleveland are becoming more bicycle friendly.

And here's something rather surprising: America is once again producing large amounts of its own crude.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said the country is obtaining more crude from tight formations and that will continue over the next decade. With alternate forms of obtaining the fuels, that production could go up even more. Tight formations come from shale and involve — are you ready — fracking!

For years we've been told if we used less fuel, if we could boost domestic production, prices would drop.

That's all happened and prices haven't gone down. That's because the rest of the world has become more industrialized and needs fuel.

So if U.S. Big Oil, with all of its tax breaks, can't sell its product domestically at a higher price, it isn't going to lower the price in order to sell it. We wish.

No, it will sell its fuel to foreign countries like China. It will shop around internationally, getting the best price possible.

So no big price cuts for us. And building oil pipelines across the U.S. won't mean a bigger break for us who still motor in the U.S. It just means the world will have more energy to bid on.

The real answer is alternatives to oil, something that as an added bonus won't cause our planet to be too hot to live on.

In the meantime, we still grumble as we pump our own gasoline and leave with no trading stamps, no Disney records, no tires checked.

When I finished up at the pump the other day, filling the container for the tractor and topping off the car tank, I noticed the pump stated I owed $40.

It would be so nice to move the decimal point to the left once again.

Down the hill at Gramps' house, over to the river

2013-08-24T05:46:00.001-07:00

For some reason, I just haven't spent much time at Conneaut Creek this summer.

Maybe it's the cooler weather, the rains. Maybe it's because it's a pain in the butt getting down there.

My back yard borders on the creek, but that means hiking a third of a mile into the woods and then a rather steep hill.

My goal this year was to have grandson Henry escort me.

Last year we made the trek to cliff's edge, but when sensible Henry saw the sharp grade, he opted not to try it. Of course, he was only 3 at the time.

At age 4, I figured this would be the year. I bought some rope and the day before the big hike with Henry, I scurried down the hill as much as possible, until I got to a point there were no limbs or branches or vines or roots to hold on to. Then I tied one end of the rope around a tree and used the rope to journey the rest of the way. Except the rope proved a bit short.

The next obstacle is a small stream that flows into the creek. It has steep sides to it, followed by a walk through dense brush and lots of prickers. I returned home covered in woodland debris and thinking my decision to take Henry the next day was probably crazy.

But I decided to do it anyway. I had sense to call his mother and tell her to include socks and tennis shoes, rather than regular summer footwear of sandals. Oh, and long pants.

The next day, Henry was ready and willing to go on the trip, not knowing what was in store. We got him in jeans, sturdy shoes and I included in a backpack snacks, water, my camera, Henry's camera and a cell phone, in case of the worst.

When Henry glanced at the cliff overlooking the creek, he had the same reaction as the year before, no thank you.

Ah, but this year I bought an $11 rope I wasn't going to waste. So down we went, me hanging onto Henry while grabbing tree limbs, vines and roots. When it looked like there was little left to hang on to, I tied the rope around a small tree, using a triple knot. Henry, seeing my assured actions, said, “What are you doing? What are you doing? We need to go back.”

Undaunted, we headed down, clutching at the rope, clutching at dirt. Then the rope ended and we weren't down the hill yet. Fortunately, there were some dead tree branches, some that didn't break when I grabbed them. We were finally down the hill.

“We better go back up,” Henry said.

Undaunted, we made it down to where the stream was, walked on rocks to the other side and then I climbed up and pulled Henry over. Battling thick brush and prickers, we eventually got to nature's stone patio connecting to the beautiful Conneaut Creek.

I suggested we take off shoes and socks and go wading. Henry was all for it, as he threw rocks into the creek. Unfortunately, he was wearing long pants and I doubted rolled up pant legs would stay rolled up.

He and I got the same idea at the same time. “Want me to take off my pants?” he said. I said sure. Soon we were walking about in the creek, watching the little fish swim away from us. We stopped at the wall so saturated with water it drips down.

I took pictures with my camera of Henry splashing in the creek. Henry got out to take pictures of me with his camera, standing in the creek. When he was done, he walked back into the creek, only to fall.

We both found the situation funny. He was wearing shirt and underwear and the underwear was soaked.

An hour later, we decided to head back. In that time, his underwear didn't dry, so he wore the long pants commando style — back through the prickers, back through the brush, back across the little stream with the deep sides, back to the hill with the rope.

We climbed, moving upward some, then sliding backward. I realized once I was holding on to Henry for support. I pushed him to the next tree, telling him to grab, grab, me shimming up the hill with little to hang on to. Eventually we got to the rope and with a combination of Henry climbing and me pushing, he and I got back up the hill.

Walking back through the woods, Henry fell. Henry fell a lot through the adventure. How many times do you think you fell? I asked him.

“About a hundred,” he said with a smile.

It was a big adventure and was a lot of fun and I finally got first grandson to visit the place I had gone exploring with his father 20 years earlier, where I had taken beloved beagle Casey many times.

Casey is gone and his father is a bit busy these days.

Henry said he'd be willing to go with me on another adventure down to the creek.

For all of the falling and troubles traversing the woods, I was pleased he was ready to go again.

Next time, we take another pair of underwear, too.

Rocketing across Ashtabula County

2013-08-23T14:44:00.001-07:00

Better than a half-century ago, the TV series “Twilight Zone” had an episode called “Kick the Can.”

It was about a bunch of old people living in a nursing home who complain about their old-age maladies.

When they see kids out playing kick the can, they get the idea playing the game might return their youth. In a nutshell, it proves to be correct and all of the residents except one doubter become children again.

And it's sorta, kinda of like that when you take off on a bicycle. Even at advanced ages.

For the past few years I've tried riding the 12 miles to work and then back a couple of times a week during the warmer months. Recently I joined a biking group. We start from various parts of the county on Tuesday nights for journeys ranging from 20 to 24 miles. We occasionally do Saturday and Sunday morning rides as well.

Most of the participants have been riding together for long stretches and tell tales of riding across the state, sometimes camping out.

Most of them are roughly my age, that is, if pressed, they will admit remembering the JFK assassination. Heck, one was a language teacher back when I was in high school.

I keep up the best I can since I have a bike with thicker tires, not really made for a fast pace. But the other riders don't seem to mind, or complain when I'm not around..

And while I've had various experiences with bicycles throughout my life, I must admit I've learned a few things since joining the group.

Such as the great kickstand controversy. Yes, some say kickstands aren't necessary and just add weight. Who would'a thought?

Everybody wears helmets. And they have gloves, too. I never thought about wearing gloves until my hands got sweaty while going up a steep hill. I was in high gear and practically had a coronary, but I bloody well wasn't going to get out and walk it in front of everyone. There's some things you just don't do. You see, the sweaty hands made it impossibly to downshift.

I found a temporary and rather cheap solution. I carried a hunk of paper towel in my hands to battle the sweat of hand. In fact, I used the same hunk on a couple of trips. Got the gears changed just fine.

But I finally decided one can be too thrifty and opted for a pair of gloves that does the job even better than a paper towel. Plus, not having to use a new piece of towel with every other ride, those gloves will pay for themselves in another 20 or 30 years.

I also learned rather than whipping your neck back while riding to see if cars were coming, I could just buy a mirror and give my neck a rest. I think that reflects well.

Our best ride was on a Sunday morning and at my request. I suggested after spending many a day or evening riding in and around Conneaut, Jefferson and Geneva, why not go down Andover way? We all parked in the old Pierpont Elementary School parking lot and made our way south.

When we were within site of Pymatuning Lake, we all agreed to continue across the causeway into Crawford County, Pa., expanding our 20-mile trip by another 10 or so. I'm glad we did. It is beautiful and exhilerating crossing the causeway on a bike in perfect weather, the shimmering lake, deep blue skies, the birds soaring, the fish jumping. Just wish I had a webcam.

Being directionally challenged, I simply nodded my head when others agreed going down any one of a series of roads after the causeway would get us to the spillway in Linesville.

Well, we rode by a beautiful resort closed by the state of Pennsylvania for budget reasons. We found a nice bike trail that ended at a closed campgrounds. In other words, we found out not every road would NOT get us to the spillway.

After maybe close to an hour of riding about, two – yes – two fellow bikers commented their smart phones had GPS's and maybe we could try those. Soon we were at the spillway, enjoying some lunch, watching the birds and fish and eventually heading into downtown Linesville. The wrong turns were just part of the fun.

Now bicyclists should follow the same rules of the road as vehicles, like stopping at traffic lights or stop signs, riding on the correct side of the road and giving hand signals. For the most part we do. But we allow ourselves one bonus act that those driving petroleum-powered devices don't have. We find ways around closed roads, shirking detour routes.

On our way back to Pierpont we found ourselves at such a detour. We simply road around the barricades, got as far as we could, pulled our bikes over a separation on the road grade, walked the bikes over the unfinished roadway and lifted our bikes back to the finished road. We probably could have taken the one-block detour and be that much ahead, but then, that wouldn't be a bonus, would it?

The ride started at 10 a.m. and was supposed to end at noon, meaning I would get home at 12:30. I got home at 3:30 instead.

I don't know about the rest of the group, but riding over the causeway, getting slightly lost, crossing the closed roadway gave me the kick-the-can feeling, even if I didn't get the curly locks of my youth back.

When we were kids, our bikes could be anything, a motorcycle, a boat, a rocket ship. We rode everywhere and the type and color of our bikes was part of our identities. When we got older, that was replaced by a car. These days I'm not sure how people are identified. By what version iPhone they have, maybe?

Biking is actually an ageless hobby. In the group we fly down hills and challenge ourselves going up the next. We see things we wouldn't normally see or hear or smell while in a car.

I have learned so much more about the beauty and uniqueness of the county. An evening in the Geneva area gave me a whole education about The Strip, the city of Geneva and Geneva Township that would be lost while driving a car.

Now I could also mention our bike trips get the blood pumping and is good exercise. But that's adult talk. Kids don't talk about staying healthy on their bikes.

They're too busy pretending it's a rocket ship.

Planes, cars, supermarkets and Henry

2013-08-12T15:16:00.001-07:00

So wife Louise was heading off to the supermarket.
“You better get Henry,” I told her, referring to our 4-year-old grandson.
She didn’t heed my advice.
You see, grocery shopping is necessary but boring. But Louise seems to enjoy it, that and laundry. Well, she does both a lot.
I mentioned Henry because the last time I went shopping, it was with Henry and he made the process a lot more fun.
It all started because of the new animated movie “Planes,” brought to you by the people who gave you “Cars.” I inquired whether Henry would like to see the film and he said yes.
Henry and I have been to many films together. They have always been animated and they have always been in 3D. Tickets cost about as much as a house on the outskirts of Detroit.
At most of these, I have also ventured to take a camera and shoot pictures of him watching the screen intently.
So what does this have to do with grocery shopping, you ask? Well hold on, I’ll get to that. Do you have attention deficit syndrome?
Now we have a rule at the movies. When we enter the complex but before going to the individual theater, we take a potty break. I mention this because Henry insisted he did not have to go before “Monsters University.” Just before our heroes in the movie had to perform a scare in the library, Henry informed me he indeed had to go.
To this day, I do not know what type of scare the guys executed in the library. I keep telling myself I will live.
So after potty, we settled down to endless commercials, waiting for the movie to start.
Bringing the camera included an ulterior motive. I smuggled in the case some popcorn and a juice box. Henry has no experience in soda pop and has allergies to peanuts and dairy. Concerned the theater popcorn might include one or the other, I opted to bring a small bag guaranteed free of all of that stuff.
Popcorn at a movie was a first for Henry, who sat eating and watching, whispering to me at one point, “I haven’t seen this movie before and I like it.”
This contrasts with the first film I took him to a year ago, in which he loudly proclaimed, “I like this movie.”
After the film, we headed across the street to Best Buy because I needed to replace the filter on my favorite camera lens. The camera was accidentally knocked to the floor from the couch and that was enough to shatter the old filter into a million pieces. Henry checked out some video games and tried determine which cameras there are like Gramp’s.
Next up: Wegman’s.
Between of my vegetarian diet and Henry’s allergies, Wegman’s is a good place to shop. Henry and I also inadvertently created our own little slapstick festival at the supermarket.
First of all, I had Henry’s parents’ minivan, because of the required child seats. I parked too close to the adjoining vehicle, because it parked right on the line. I squeezed in the back passenger door to help Henry out of his seat in the third row of the minivan. Since the person I parked close to was still in the vehicle, I decided Henry and I would exit the second row of seats on the driver’s side, the opposite end from where I got in. Except the door wouldn’t budge. I hadn’t thought of the childproof locks. It is in the second row where Henry’s twin brothers, Benjamin and Marcus, normally sit.
I ended up swinging Henry across two rows of seats, plunging him onto the driver’s seat. From there he exited the car and opened the passenger door for me. For a minute, I felt like Shemp and Larry in the Three Stooges episode “Brideless Groom,” where the pair are in a phone booth and drop a nickel and end up intertwined with the cord, eventually busting the booth.
But the car remained unbusted as we entered the store, shopping list in hand. Henry wanted a cart with a car and steering wheel. Except none were available. So we opted for the normal cart, with Henry sitting in the kiddie seat facing me. For about two minutes. Then it was time to get out.
Henry jumped on the front of the cart, feet secured above the wheels, hands on the cart. As a responsible adult, I swung the cart around each aisle as sharply and quickly as possible. Not knowing where many of the items we were looking for were located, we went down many aisles, me swinging the cart, Henry laughing while holding on for dear life.
During one point, while I was stopped, wondering why chocolate syrup and fudge toppings weren’t together, Henry walked around the cart and crawled under it, from the handle side, and promptly got stuck.
I was able to extricate him without need of the fire department and we continued, Henry back on the end of the cart.
At this point, we saw a guy pushing one of those car carts that Henry wanted. We discussed briefly hijacking it, but then we would have been stuck with his groceries. We opted not to.
What seemed like hours later, we went through the checkout line, deciding fudge topping wasn’t worth spending the rest of our lives there.
At the car, we were happy to see the right-on-the-line neighbor vehicle was gone. Henry had ahold of the cart as I started throwing items in the back of the van. Until Henry let go of the cart and I had to chase it down the parking lot. I wheeled it back and told Henry he was in charge of the cart. After which he ran over my toe.
I yelled, “Henry, you ran over my toe.” A 50-something guy walking by laughed.
Then Henry let go of the cart again. I grabbed it just before it careened into an oncoming drive.
Groceries in the car, we headed to the enclosed area where shoppers place the carts.
Sore of toe and tired of olympic cart chasing, I told Henry to stand in the cart area and look sad. Eventually someone would take pity on him and adopt him.
But Henry knew I was joking. He just stood there smiling.
So did the Wegman’s attendant who was getting ready to take the carts back to the store.

Mowing the grass like saving orphans

2013-07-12T07:25:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago the three grandchildren graced our threshold.

Twins Marcus and Benjamin, both 2, and Henry 4, quickly make wherever they are visiting home. Books are scattered about, toys everywhere, riding toys careening across the wooden hallway.

During all of this chaos, er, activity, I felt nature call.

Um, not that nature. I looked out and saw how all of the rain turned the yard into a jungle. So while the boys napped, I decided to mow.

I have better than four acres to mow. Wife Louise says it's mostly weeds. If I worked it right and was meticulous about my lawn, I could probably make working on it a full-time job. That ain't gonna happen. As it is, I figure each mowing costs close to $15 in gasoline.

Ah, but all of that pales when one considers the impact this has on the boys, especially the twins.

If I won $50 million in the lottery or saved an orphanage full of children in a fire, those twins would think more about me riding that garden tractor, mowing the lawn, than anything else. To them it is a magical, mystical experience.

For as I was zipping along, plowing down masses of greenery, I saw three little heads peeking out various windows, watching me in awe.

I waved enthusiastically and they waved back.

This love of mowing in the preschool set is not exclusive to the Lebzelters. I spent the better part of an afternoon of mowing waving at the similarly aged neighbor boys, who stood out to watch me mow from their driveway.

Maybe we should make a video of my mowing and put it in the kids section of Netflix, right there with “Bananas in Pajamas.”

Now as the Lebzelter boys watched, I realized I was having trouble with a belt on the tractor. When I disengaged the mower the belt was a bit loose and would come off. I would have to put it back on. So my hope was to stay on the tractor, mower engaged, until the lawn was done, then see about getting a new belt.

But as luck would have it, the mower ran out of gasoline and the belt wouldn't stay. Mowing was done until I had a good belt. (You know, good tractor belt.)

So the entertainment for the boys was over. But that didn't stop them from thinking and discussing Gramps on the tractor.

Every visit after that started with a question from Marcus, “You on tractor, Gramps?” He says it with a slightly Southern lilt.

Throughout the visit he would come up to me and say, “You on tractor, Gramps?”

When Louise would visit without me, the twins would inquire if I was home mowing.

One day we decided to take the trio to the park, but it was raining. You recall a few days this spring when it was raining, don't you?

So we decided to take them to the play area at Ashtabula Towne Square. As they caused havoc, Henry felt nature call. This time it was the real nature. So I took him down by the food court to handle that need. It took us a few minutes to get back because he wanted to stop at a jewelry store and look at watches. Henry has some decidely older interests for a boy of 4.

While we were gone from the play area just outside Kmart, Marcus wondered if I was riding on the tractor. Did Marcus think I was like Aquaman, who must submerge himself in water regularly or die? Only with me, it was a tractor?

When the tractor was back in running form, I had Louise take a photo of myself in all my mowing brilliance, atop the tractor, grass shooting out the side, waving like I was in a parade. We printed it on heavy paper and presented it to the boys.

They all took turns carrying the photo about, discussing Gramps being on that tractor.

They haven't asked me to autograph it yet.

This weekend they will be spending some time with us and the grass (weeds) are looking shaggy. Might be just the time to jump on that tractor and save another orphanage.

Just like in the photograph.

Roger Smith: A true patron of the arts

2013-06-30T14:48:00.001-07:00

I would often find myself sitting at my desk, planning the Star Beacon Weekender section, when I would get a call.

“Bob, R-r-roger Smith calling,” Roger would say. He would roll those r’s, sort of like “Herrrre’s Johnny.”

Roger would be telling me had emailed a review of a play at the Ashtabula Arts Center of Rabbit Run in Madison or maybe one of the playhouse theaters in Cleveland.

Roger loved the theater and the arts. I know things had to be bad when he called during the first of the year to tell me I needed to find someone else to do reviews because he had to take time off to fight a serious illness.

But he said he hoped to be back onboard by summer.

I wished him luck and told him to concentrate on getting better. I said let me know if he needed anything, like there was anything I could do.

A couple of months ago he called to ask if he it was OK to begin doing reviews on a limited basis. I was relieved, since I heard his disease was particularly serious. But Roger sounded upbeat and ready to go.

I was sorry to here last week from a mutual friend that his condition had worsen and the next day, he died at Cleveland Clinic.

Roger had a myriad of interests. He went on exotic vacations that left me jealous. I was happy last fall to share with him wife and my plans to tour Europe. He gave me a few suggestions on what to do on the tour.

He was also a fan of classical music. A member of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Roger provided copy on the guest musicians along with photographs for its Fine Arts series.

He was always reliable. He always got the job done and well.

Being a critic in a city like Ashtabula requires some finesse. We are not talking about professional actors for the most part, although most local talent does a superb job. Yet you can’t gush and praise each production because there wouldn’t be much point. Who wants to read what you say if you give every play a glowing review? It’s meaningless.

Yet you can’t review a local play like it stars Matthew Broderick and was on Broadway and tickets cost $500.

Roger was a champion of local theater. Yet on occasion he would say his review was emailed and “They won’t like this one.”

Even plays he didn’t think were well done, he always found good points of the productions.

He was an educator at one time in Ashtabula and Geneva school systems. He retired in 2005, if you can call it retirement. He still wrote numerous reviews for me. He still handled St. Peter’s classic music news releases and taught English and other classes at Kent State-Ashtabula.

I am going to a play at the Ashtabula Arts Center tonight and I bet it’s going to feel a little like Roger is there.

A shell of a building

2013-06-30T07:35:00.001-07:00

So the attempt to save the old Shea Theater in downtown Ashtabula lives on.

The Ashtabula Downtown Development Association did a survey and found 64 percent of respondents thought the renovation of the theater is a good idea.

I wonder, did the association also poll the people about how much money each plans to contribute to this restoration? A study shows it would take 5 years to complete and cost $5 million.

The problem is I have actually been in Shea Theater this year. I mean, I went into the front, which is the Senior Center, and traveled to the magic door taking you into what was once a beautiful theater.

First thing beyond the door is tons of orphaned wheelchairs, apparently unneeded by Senior Center participants. Beyond that, the once-grand Shea’s would shock you. From the first floor, it no longer looks anything like a movie theater. It is difficult to orient yourself to where things were. All of the seats are long gone. The screen is gone.

It looks like a bombed out building during war time. It is filled with collapsed ceiling and horribly crumbled plaster.

It’s as if the Titanic sunk, was brought to the surface and allowed to dry out. Except maybe the smell at Shea’s might be slightly better.

If you gingerly go up the still red-carpeted staircase to the balcony, you get an idea this was once a theater. You can tell where the stage and screen were. The rest is like a forbidding tomb.

I am no expert in building renovations, but I’ve seen schools and libraries that it was determined were too expensive to renovate to modern standards. New buildings would be cheaper. They were in pristine condition compared to Shea’s.

It is hard for me to believe from a purely practical point of view that this building, neglected some 30 years, should be renovated.

Shea opened during a different era as a beautiful addition to downtown Ashtabula in 1949. Yet in less than a quarter century it closed as a regular movie house, with the opening of a much smaller Shea Cinema West out in the old Nicholas Plaza in Saybrook. This was the 70s and grand movie theaters in smaller communities were already impractical.

Yet it was brought back as more of an art house in the late 1970s. I supported it. I remember seeing great film noir like “Casablanca” and comedies featuring the Marx Brothers on the big Shea screen. It was great.

But the community couldn’t make a go of it. Not enough people were aficionados of old movies. It quickly closed again.

Now keep in mind this was before the vast majority of people had VCRs. It was long before Netflix streaming or movies through Amazon Prime and iTunes. Back then if you wanted Humphrey Bogart, you had to wait until it showed up on Channel 43’s classic movies on Saturday night and watch it on your 25-inch screen, sliced up by commercials. There were no DVDs, no Blu-Ray, no Turner Classic Movies. It was before everyone had 40-inch TV screens.

Still, the classic films failed to keep the theater open. Does anyone think 35 years later that would change? My movie library already contains lots of Marx Brothers, Bogart, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and more.

Yes, I bet on occasion I would still love to see these on a big screen with other people. But will sufficient numbers of other people be interested enough to make a go of it?

Plus can good copies of these movies be found on film, to rival what you can see on Blu-Ray versions on your home theater?

Classic movies would not be enough to sustain it. Now there’s something called the New Lyceum Circuit, bringing entertainment to local communities. Developers say this could be Shea’s salvation.

I am not familiar with the New Lyceum, but I read about the old Lyceum movement in history class.

More than 100 years ago, the industrial age gave people more free time. In evenings they wanted something to do. But there were no movies yet. Definitely no radio, TV. But there were the Lyceums. They brought plays, music, speakers, opera as traveling shows to smaller towns.

That was then. This is now.

And how would this impact the Ashtabula Arts Center and Conneaut Arts Center and other such places that are deserving of our support? Are we willing to put $5 million into a project to give us services we already have?

If this group can cough up the money and make Shea beautiful again, even just perky, and people support it and give rebirth to downtown, wonderful, I will admit I was wrong. I will be happy for its success.

But right now the only entertainment value I see in Shea’s Theater is filming a remake of “Combat” in there. It makes a perfect bombed out German building in a World War II set.

More plaster is just itching to fall. I know it.

Americans create their own '1984'

2013-06-23T21:47:00.001-07:00

As if life wasn't tough enough already, we suddenly have lost our privacy.

Yes, up until just recently, nobody could find out where we were going or what we were doing.

Not until the government stepped in and started spying on us.

In a pig's eye.

Yes, a majority of Americans are concerned the government might be tracking us online. There's even a joke going around you don't need online backup services like Carbonite, because if your hard drive goes, you can just ask the federal government to return your data to you.

There is also renewed interest in George Orwell's novel, “1984,” about big brother spying.

Of course, this tracking isn't really new. It goes back at east to George Bush II. Now Barack Obama may have ramped it up a bit. While the Bush administration, to fight terrorism, went in more for bringing out the military and have the various forces invade other countries, much to the delight of Dick Cheney and other war profiteers, Obama has used data collecting more.

For example, you are a suspected spy. If investigators see you have been corresponding with other suspected terrorists and those communications are increasing and suddenly you and other alleged spies converge on say, Ashtabula, well, shades of Superman, the game must be afoot, Watson.

Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombings, Obama foes started asking why the administration hadn't known about these brothers and stopped it.

But some of those same critics are horrified about possible government surveillance of ordinary citizens. Ah, but how do we learn about otherwise meek, mild, keep-to-themselves individuals who may turn out to be spies?

Before allowing your blood pressure to rise, it is impractical to believe the government has people watching everyone's individual digital moves. It would also be pretty boring. Someone monitoring me might be thinking, Come on Lebzelter, looking up where CNN HD is on the cable dial again? Or, He's not uploading more pictures of his grandkids to Facebook, is he?

At best, amongst the billions of individual activities on the Internet is a tiny entry that at my ISP address, somebody went to the Time-Warner address.

You might think people are beside themselves with worry about their privacy. Yet most people have given up their privacy long ago, and not necessarily to the government. Any time you get on the Internet, you are leaving little footprints showing where you went and what you did.

Consider I went to the Amazon website to order Season 9, Volume 1 of “Perry Mason” on DVD. Suddenly, other sites I go to have advertisements for “Perry Mason” DVDs on sale. Coincidence?

Or I go looking at the latest and greatest lenses for my Canon camera. Now, wherever I go, there are advertisements for cameras and lenses. Hmmmm.

At least if the government sees I am debating about buying the Canon or Sigma lenses, it doesn't inundate me with more advertising.

I can't imagine what I would see if I first visited a porn site.

Sometimes you are tracked by where you are. Ever visit the Los Angeles Times website and see an ad that states, “Conneaut mom learns secret to making millions in just two hours.” You can bet people in Anaheim aren't seeing this ad.

If you are aghast that someone might be tracking you online, you are probably older than 30. People under 30 have grown up in a transparent world and think nothing of it. Sometimes they should.

People rarely check their privacy settings on Facebook and proclaim in status updates on Facebook and Twitter what they are doing and where they are going.

We learn who didn't sleep well last night, who broke up with who, what restaurant somebody just walked into, who someone voted for and much, much, more.

Facebook will sell you an advertisement, for example, that will be seen only by people in certain zip codes by females, under 25, who have a Pinterest account, wear bikinis and like One Direction.

That transparency can actually put people in danger. A young woman I am friends with on Facebook announced she planned on going for a walk for about an hour. Unless she keeps current on security settings (because Facebook keeps changing them) some pervert could see what she looks like, where she lives and start lovoking for her.

How about kids in high school who post their names, addresses, where they go to school, lists of friends, activities and where they work? Sometimes they post something like, “Leaving cheerleading practice at 5. Probably won't be home until 6. If you see me walking down Main Street, wave.” It's perv motherlode!

Yes, even if you are guarded on the Internet, experts can glean information about you. To stay entirely private, you would need six pieces of software, including some that encrypts, and a degree in computer science.

But while we rail against the government and Barack Obama, we voluntarily put ourselves in harm's way all of the time.

Announcing all details of our lives has just become too embedded in our world. Now I'm going for a run, but I won't carry any money. You're welcome to the Kleenix in my pocket.

Think you're gonna die? Go outside

2013-06-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

ABOVE, Ben, Marcus, grandma Louise and Henry burn off energy with a neighborhood walk. Below, Marcus is upset after being pulled from his beloved sandbox.

I stumbled out of bed a few weeks ago, when the grandkids were staying with us.

The boys, twins Marcus and Ben, 2, and Henry, 4, all wake up hours before me.

Curly-haired Marcus, with his iron blue eyes and scrunched face, ran up to me and said, “Gramps, I died. I died.”

Oh no, I said to Marcus. Did you have a bad dream? Then I started wondering how Marcus could remember a bad dream and how at his age he would know anything about death.

“I died,” he repeated. “Pweeeeeze!”

And suddenly it hit me. He was saying, “Outside, please.”

Marcus wanted to run up and down the small hill (big to him) that slides down to our driveway. He wanted us to clear out the garage so they could use the riding toys. He wanted out so he could play on the swings and play hide and seek and step in a mud puddle.

“I died. I died.” Marcus wanted outside.

And here’s a tip. When you have three boys in the house between the ages of 2 and 4, get them outside as often as possible.

Let them run. Let them hide, Let them slide. Let them swing. Now inside is fine. They love books. But either they tire of being read to eventually or those of us older people who do the reading get antsy on the seventh reading of “The Monster at the End of this Book.”

Eventually inside means fighting over who plays with what, what toy one can take from another or who gets hit with a toy helicopter.

When everyone has had timeout and are crying and moaning on the floor, reminiscent of the hospital scene from “Gone With the Wind,” it is time to visit the great outdoors.

If it is raining out, the next best solution is to turn on the Hub, which happens to be a cable channel, and let them watch transfixed while wife Louise and I try to feel less guilty about letting their brains rot from mindless TV. After all, I watched mindless TV and my brain didn’t rot. Me have good brain.

The boys have moved into their new home in North Kingsville with parents Derek (aka son) and Jessica (aka daughter-in-law.)

During the week, Louise gets up in the middle of the night, better known as 6 a.m., to care for the young boys at their new home while Derek works. Jess has a few more weeks of teaching in the Rochester area before she ends her commutes and settles in the new house.

I eventually show up at the new abode, Maison Chaos, in time for some outside fun.

The boys like it best when I ride my bicycle the seven miles to their house. We all go out on their cement driveway and ride our bikes, trikes, three-wheelers and firetrucks up and down and up and down the driveway, careful to avoid going out onto the cul de sac.

Sometimes I have to admit to the boys Gramps drove his car to their house instead of the bike. No riding up and down the driveway for me, since I have a hard time on the three-wheeler.

Recently, I died, er, outside activities included walking the new neighborhood, repeating over and over the necessity to hold somebody’s hand and not to walk into the street.

We have discovered that even though North Kingsville Elementary School has been closed a few years, the intricate playground remains intact, a playground my father, a former North Kingsville principal, helped build.

By late afternoon, the place is filled with kids and adults. The playground has plenty of swings, slides and other physical challenges to keep any kid occupied.

There are a couple of drawbacks. First, there is so much in the playground it requires at least one adult to watch one child. The other thing is, they don’t want to leave. Now I don’t want to mention any names, but Marcus was escorted away in deep, tearful distress. In Marcus’ mind, he apparently thought he could live the rest of his life at the North Kingsville Elementary playground.

By the way, here’s a lesson you can learn from us. One of our outside excursions was to Township Park in Conneaut. We really didn’t think this visit clear through. You don’t take an intense, outdoor fan like Marcus, put him in a huge sandbox with lots of Tonka trucks and then a half-hour later pluck him out and inform him it is time for lunch.

No, no, no. There were plenty of tears that day, but no sustenance was consumed that afternoon.

So if you have young charges, even if they are intelligent and sophisticated like Ben, Marcus and Henry, my best advice is to get them outside for mindless running, riding, jumping, climbing, hiding, swinging, sliding, sandboxing and whatever else you can think of.

Too much inside time means you’ll die, you’ll die.

A place for man or beast?

2013-04-26T08:18:00.001-07:00

I noticed the other day in a newsletter from the Animal Protective League, it was reassessing its Ashtabula Towne Square location and it would be closed for a few weeks.

I hesitate to say this, since I haven't looked myself, but apparently there's nothing much left on that end of the mall to attract customers.

The APL, if you remember, began operating a satellite store in the old Harbor Pet Store location by what was then a Sears Store and across from what was then Phar Mor. Well, Sears, Phar Mor, its successor stores, Steve and Barry's and Old Navy, are long gone. The APL adoption center operates on Saturdays only at that location and needs enough volunteers to work it. At one point, during a Christmas season, it even was open on Sundays.

The APL is open daily except Mondays and Wednesdays at its facility on Green Road in Kingsville as well.

I'm probably not the best person to comment on Ashtabula Towne Square, which opened in 1992 as the Ashtabula Mall (even though it isn't in Ashtabula.) I haven't stepped foot in the mall portion since before Sears announced roughly a year ago it was closing the store.

I've been in Kmart and my wife plied me with margaritas at El Puente in order to get me to go shopping at JC Penney a time or two.

But to go roaming the halls of the mall, er, towne square, no. First, I'm not sure what's left.

Also, I'm not much of a mall person. I can go to Peach Street in Erie a dozen times and not go to the Millcreek Mall.

I guess I'm not much of a mall person. There is a beautiful mall near where son and daughter-in-law were living outside of Rochester which has, among other things, an Apple store. My wife says it isn't likely Ashtabula Towne Square will get an Apple store.

Last fall, we visited a mall in Milton Keynes, England, that was so big, I had indoor ski slopes plus an Apple store. No, I don't think Ashtabula Towne Square will be getting that, either, although there are probably enough empty spaces to build a ski slope.

In fact, I'm spending less and less time in stores altogether. My visits to Best Buy are fewer. Too many clerks stand in line asking if they can help you. And virtually every visit includes a sales pitch for one of the satellite TV services. They just can't believe I don't want to switch.

I'm not buying movies as much as I used to and often simply order them online. It's easier that way. I've even opted out of getting physical discs at times and going directly to iTunes. Instant “Argo” and “Django Unchained,” without leaving the house and they look pretty good on the iPad and connected to the TV.

I've been thinking about taking a stroll through the 21-year-old Towne Square, maybe take some pictures. But then I remember a decade ago when a Star Beacon reporter got hauled into the security office and questioned because she was counting the number of empty storefronts. Today, she would need a much bigger notebook.

I noticed this week the animated signboard in front of the mall is still going strong, although I think it needs to stretch a bit to have enough to display to entice you inside. I saw multiple screens on what was available at Burger King, including many Whopper deals.

The movie theater is still there. I found the seats in the place noisy when I visited in the 90s sometime and haven't been back. Ironically, I saw “Jurassic Park” there, which is making the rounds of theaters again, this time in 3D, in celebration of its 20^th anniversary.

The retail industry has changed a lot in 20 years. The Fisher Big Wheel store in the Conneaut Plaza closed 20 years ago, followed by Carlisle's, Dillard's, Sear's and a lot more.

A lot of my retail needs have been replaced by Amazon and its mail order ilk. But that probably isn't the answer to the APL's retail needs. We aren't ready to buy our dogs and cats via mail order, I hope.

But if somebody tries it, for God's sake, put some holes in the top of the package.

How to stay young watching old TV

2013-04-15T09:19:00.004-07:00

TIM CONWAY, Ernest Borgine and Joe Flynn on "McHale's Navy.

I don't spend much time watching TV in the daytime, except for the 15 minutes or so I'm doing various exercises down in the family room.

Can't figure out why after using the ab machine, I still have such lousy abs, and why after working with weights, my arms are still sad, but that is for another time.

I have found during this workout, things can get boring looking at stains on the false ceiling or junk we have left downstairs that is accumulating.

So, of course, I divert attention by watching TV. I have gravitated toward the nostalgia channels, like Me TV and Antennae TV. These are secondary channels for the main Cleveland network affiliates like WJW Channel 8 and WOIO Channel 19. Seems like when they all went digital awhile back, the frequencies left room for extra channels.

And what to do with those channels? Why, program like when TV was still in its infancy. Literally.

These channels have brought back everything from “The Flying Nun” to “Gidget” for you Sally Field fans to “McHale's Navy,” “Dennis the Menace” and “Leave It To Beaver.”

Now I remember “McHale's Navy” as being pretty funny and you know, it still is, especially the interaction and physical comedy of Tim Conway as Ensign Parker and Joe Flynn as Capt. Binghamton.

Flynn, by the way, was from Youngstown while Conway hailed from Cleveland and both made frequent trips back to their hometowns. Flynn, sadly, went the route of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, found dead in his swimming pool. Flynn lived to be only 49.

The trouble with “McHale's Navy” is it is so darned funny, I find myself watching to the end of the show, even though my workout is over and I need to go out and run. I did learn to discipline myself to shut the TV off before another episode comes on. These nostalgia channels often air double episodes.

The trouble is the commercials. They are scary. They are also for old people. Sometimes, they are gross.

But you have to figure, if you first caught “Leave It To Beaver” on network television in, say, 1959, and you were 20, today you would be something like 74.

So we have the parade of ads for mobile scooters so you can get around just dandy without exerting any energy. Or reverse mortgages, in which if you are 74 and are still paying on your home, you can get a loan and not have to pay it back. The bank can just take the house when you kick off. This is especially good if you want to screw over your kids. And there is the oxygen tanks for sale because you thought the guys on “77 Sunset Strip” where cool, smoking all of the time, and didn't believe it when the surgeon general said smoking causes lung cancer.

There's also commercials for tubs with all sorts of handles and nonslip flooring as well as buttons to push to activate help if you slip anyway. I need not mention the personal bathroom devices and materials for sale via TV. Nuff said.

All of this for 70-somethings watching Wally and Beaver, who are eternally young and still in black and white.

First thing you gleam from all of this is old people like free information. Free, free, free is constantly mentioned. Like somebody is going to pay money for information about colostomy bags.

Then there's commercials from super senior personalities, like Pat Boone. Ugh. What a snake-oil salesman. Do we really need to see old Pat relaxing in one of those super-safe bathtubs while singing? How many face lifts has that guy had? He's also the guy, outside of the tub, who tries to convince you to get a reverse mortgage.

Ironically, in a mid 50s “I Love Lucy” episode, Vivian Vance as Ethel says something like, “I never understood young people anyway. Just who is Pat Boone?”

These days, it is doubtful young people know who Pat Boone is either.

Today, both Ward and June Cleaver are dead, so are both Mr. Wilsons on “Dennis the Menace,” and Sally Field, well, she is alive and looks about the same.

On nostalgia TV they are all alive, cracking one liners on low-def, black and white TV, while their audiences are using lifts to go up and down stairs and Scooters to travel about the house.

Nostalgia TV commercials also provide the key to a more mobile life for our aging population. Yeah, I figured it out. Just buy a cellphone endorsed by the AARP. That's right, because those people with the AARP phones, according to the commercials, are out riding tandem bicycles and all-wheel drive vehicles at breakneck speed and enjoying a swim. Getting those phones apparently provides such an active life as to make Justin Bieber envious.

What do you have to lose? The information is free, you know.

It's my turn, my turn with grandkids

2013-03-01T15:50:00.004-08:00

GRANDCHILDREN, from left, Marcus, Henry and Benjamin, will be bringing their hilarity soon to Ashtabula County.

Anybody zipping through Facebook will find those prewritten nostalgic pieces about the good old days, you know, when Spam was a meat, well, sort of, almost, and a web was something a spider built.

I always thought it made the poster seem, well, old and stodgy. I don’t post such offerings or pass them on, because I don’t want to appear old and stodgy.

Why, back in my day, we didn’t want to appear old and stodgy.

Speaking of my younger days, at something like age 5 I got my first bicycle and it was my ticket to ride to my friend Joey’s home a full two houses down the road. It wasn’t long before I could ride the full two blocks to my grade school.

By the time I was 11 I became interested in music and comic books and the faithful bike took me downtown to City News or the bus stop for comics and then Simon’s Music Store, W.T. Grant Co. or JJ Newberry’s for records, especially Rolling Stones records.

I remember pedaling downtown to pick up a copy of “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow.”

“Want a bag?” the clerk asked.

Heck yes. Ever try to balance a $1 single on your handlebars without a bag? ITunes? What’s iTunes?

It wasn’t long before I was biking to West Springfield, Pa., for swimming lessons.

Of course, my first car made biking oh, so uncool. We secretly laughed at the guy who was 18 and still road around on a bicycle.

When I got older and started running to keep in shape, the idea of adding biking to my regiment seemed appealing. A few years ago I bought a bike at four times what they cost when I was a kid. But then, gasoline went up 11 times.

I started biking to work, biking around town, biking to the Animal Protective League to run with the dogs. There was the instance when I fell, breaking my collarbone and several ribs, too, while biking.

I recovered by the end of September and returned to biking the following spring.

These days the biking takes on a new aspect. Biking with the grandkids. OK, so the oldest just turned 4 and couldn’t reach the pedals of either of the bikes we have for him (yeah, two) at last attempt.

But Henry, 4, and twins Marcus and Benjamin, 2, will be moving much closer. By coincidence, so are their parents, son Derek and his wife, Jessica.

They have been living in Rochester, N.Y., close to Moe’s Mexican restaurant and the Apple store, very convenient when we came to visit. But changes in work are bringing them back to Ashtabula County and a house a few miles from ours and a long distance from the Apple store (sigh).

The other day, it dawned on me: When I’m not pedaling to the Beacon or the APL, I can pedal to their house and the grandkids and I can pedal around their driveway and turnaround in whatever devices our collective legs can reach.

Certainly my grandkids are as enamored as the next kid over technology. The iPad fascinates them. They like the Playstation 3 and its ability to magically produce Netflix movies. They take Facetime and Skype in stride.

But they still know the old-fashioned concept of running and jumping and playing.

It’s something I think needs to be preserved and continued.

The twins have come up with a phrase they use often, “My turn.” Their arguments about who gets to play with a specific toy often comes down to: “My turn.” “My turn.” “My turn.”

This summer, when daughter-in-law Jess hears this invigorating, logical argument and turns around to determine which two kids are arguing, one of them might just be me.

OK, so I download music these days. None of the stores I used to frequent are even in existence today. And the price of comics today are too steep for me.

But I’m basically the same guy I was decades before the tech revolution. I still ride the bike everywhere.

Well, I do have a metal rod in my collarbone that was required to get the darned thing to heal properly. My doctor thinks it’s because I was too active, didn’t stay quiet enough and allow for natural healing.

He didn’t understand. It was MY turn.

Old West still taking lives

2013-01-31T20:00:00.003-08:00

AMERICA IS still stuck on the gunfighters of the Wild West, fictionalized by Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain in the TV series "The Rifleman."

One thing that always made the United States stand out is its Old West heritage.

All you have to do is watch old episodes of “Rawhide” or “The Rifleman” to remind you America’s heritage stems from the rough and tumble days when men were men and women were school marms or prostitutes.

Yes, your average macho guy spent his days on horseback with a gun in his hostler. There was no shortage of bad guys, be they Injuns, train robbers or corrupt sheriffs.

It is that heritage that we share today. It is what makes us so unique amongst the world’s more advanced countries. We are a country of men’s men. It’s also what makes the rest of the world look at us and say, “Those people are crazy.”

Now the real Wild West is a far cry from all of those 60s westerns shown on the nostalgia TV channels. And today’s America is different from Hoss Cartwright or Bat Masterson. Today’s American male isn’t out corralling cattle or meeting bad guys for duels at high noon. Lots of macho has gone out of America.

But we cling to the illusion created mostly from 60s TV.

Why does America look back so wistfully at Ronald Reagan’s years as president? He certainly started the downfall of the middle class. No longer did hard-working Americans get yearly pay raises and improvements in life they could pass to their children.

But he did play macho, tough guys in various movies when he wasn’t playing opposite a chimp. And when he wasn’t helping tear down the Iron Curtain, he was back at his ranch chopping wood. That’s what macho Ronnie liked to do, chop wood. Sort of an Abraham Reagan.

But today’s male doesn’t have all of those macho things to do. We don’t split wood. We turn up the thermostat.

But that macho heritage has to go somewhere, right? So we plough that into football, one big modern-day testament to testosterone. It’s sort of like “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” where the two men wake up in the same bed and regain their manliness by talking about a recent Chicago Bears game.

The other way of keeping the machismo alive is through guns. Take a deep breath before continuing to read: Most people don’t really need one gun, let alone an arsenal of assault weapons. Nobody needs to go hunting for food. If you think the government with that scary black dude as leader is going to come after you, even your arsenal can’t stop it.

But the government isn’t coming after you. Yet many Americans need to hold on to that idea that the only thing standing between them and tyranny are those automatic weapons.

It wouldn’t be so horrible if it didn’t result in the deaths of something like 11,000 Americans a year.

As I write this, a nutjob in rural Alabama is keeping authorities at bay for the third day while holding a 5-year-old hostage. This is a mean guy who walks around his property at night with a flashlight and a gun, maybe looking for injuns. He beat a dog to death with a pipe.

The same day this was unfolding, a gunman opened fire in a Phoenix office, killing one. He later commits suicide. A few days before, there was another shooting in an office in Texas. Another shooting takes the life of a prosecutor in Texas. Meanwhile, a junior high student shoots another junior high student in Georgia.And remember that crazy who set houses on fire in Rochester, N.Y., so he could shoot at firefighters who came to battle the blazes? This wasn’t long after the massacre of the first-graders in Connecticut. Meanwhile, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was begging lawmakers to act quickly to curb firearms. She had to resign office because she was wounded in the head and six others died in a Tucson shooting.

Chances of meaningful legislation coming after this carnage is probably nil and a large number of people want it that way. They say more guns are the answer and post canned propaganda to their Facebook pages describing their love of guns. It’s sort of the modern equivalent of strolling into a saloon with your six-shooters on and ordering a whisky, leave the bottle.

Helping to stoke the fires you can only stay free with an arsenal of weapons is the NRA. That’s not the NRA you see at the beginning of W.C. Fields or Marx Brothers movies of the 1930s. That NRA is the National Recovery Act, a program to help us get out of the Great Depression.

No, this NRA is the National Rifle Association, a group that once taught gun safety but now exploits gun craziness for money. It’s all about money and power and that’s what the NRA wants. Whether the NRA actually thinks guns are effective is irrelevant. Convince enough Wild West wannabes that guns are vital and the NRA is the only thing keeping you from losing your guns and baby, those gun nuts are throwing money at the NRA.

It’s like the great Red Menace of the 50s and 60s. Was Russia ever that strong? No, but convince enough people it is and Americans gladly give their tax dollars to a bigger and better Defense Department that keeps huge defense contractors in financial heaven for years.

Let me suggest another NRA, a completely fictional NRA, that stands for, hmm, National Reducers of Aliens. So using our heritage of 50s monster movies and the like, I convince enough people there are indeed aliens trying to take over America. Your only hope of not being cooked by monsters from an Ed Wood picture is my NRA. So you contribute. And I get rich. And my organization gets rich. And I can influence Congress. I can get laws passed that benefit the National Reducers of Aliens.

Sure, it’s silly. But it doesn’t really matter how true the premise is. The end result is a group with great wealth and power.

The difference is the National Rifle Association is real and it uses its power to keep the status quo. The result: More shootings, more innocent people dead.

Look at Europe and other industrialized countries. They don’t have our Lucas McCain culture and as a result they have far, far fewer gun deaths.

If you live in Japan, you can register for a gun. But the government does a thorough background check. It checks with your physician. It looks for any mental issues. It interviews your neighbors to find out about any peculiar activities or actions. If all goes right, you get the gun.

The result, seven deaths last year from guns, compared to 11,000 in America. OK, Japan’s population is roughly a third of America’s. So that’s 21 deaths vs. 11,000 in the U.S.

Every year we lose almost the population of Conneaut to gun violence to retain our Injun-fighting, rail splitting illusion of America, with fires flamed by money and power.

And Congress will continue to allow this to happen.

This nation refuses to do something to combat something real and horrible because of fear of an illusion.

Two years ago twins born; no way

2013-01-26T17:06:00.002-08:00

BEN LEBZELTER (top) in January 2011, with Marcus (left) and Ben Lebzelter in January 2013.

Life hasn’t always been easy for Marcus and Benjamin Lebzelter.

And that’s not simply because I’m their grandfather, although that would be tough enough.

The two were born two years ago, about two months premature. Their first few months were in warmed incubators, connected to enough tubes and wires, they look like they could be recycled for an electric chair.

Ben, the younger of the two by something like a half hour, came home first after several weeks of hospital care.

Older brother Henry, then not quite 2, was perplexed about this tiny little being, not sure at first where the baby brother ended and his little child seat began.

Marcus spend more weeks in the hospital, only to return home and go back to the hospital. Eventually, he had a portable device that looked a little like one of those 1989 cellphone transmitters to keep track of his vital signs.

It’s pretty hard to believe those little ET-like figures moving in animatronic fashion in February 2010 are the yelling, running, hilarious figures they are today.

In fact, all three just spent a week with us, wearing out the hallway with their riding toys, banging on the piano, demanding stories, wrestling and requesting to watch “Spider-Man” on Netflix.

But it is the same twins, sharing Henry’s collective interests in “The Transformers,” toy cars, toy railroads, Sesame Street characters, the iPad and more wrestling.

The twins’ vocal talents progress daily, although if you are trying to sleep past 6 a.m., their normal time of awakening, you can be lulled by their conversations, consisting of “No way,” “Cool” and everybody’s favorite, “My turn.”

If you haven’t had a child or grandchild for awhile, especially of the male variety, you might like to know these days Marvel and DC superhero stories have been toned down and simplified for the under 4 crowd and my grandkids want them read on a continual loop.

Yes, we tried directing their attentions elsewhere. They are somewhat interested when I put “Rocky and Bullwinkle” on Netflix, although I don’t think they got the jokes, like Bullwinkle graduating from What Sa Matter U. They had passing interest in “Mr. Ed” when I found episodes on Youtube. Henry was a bit surprised about a talking horse, but Marcus and Ben will still whinny on demand for you if you ask what a horse sounds like.

I found one of Aunt Megan’s old baby dolls to see how the boys would react. Henry recoiled like he was a vampire who accidentally opened the door of a sunny room. Marcus, taking queues from his big brother, turned away in disgust at the doll. Ben, on the other hand, said, “Oh baby,” attempting to cuddle it until Henry, protecting his honor, grabbed the toy away from him.

The three boys, all 3 and under, also like to wrestle. Who knew? Marcus thinks nothing of walking into a room, jumping on Ben and knocking Ben’s head to the floor. Ben, being of healthy stock, pretty much ignores the attack.

Both took their turns catapulting riding toys down the stairs. A few seconds of obligatory crying and a mark or two above the eye and they were ready to get back on to catapult again.

While we grandparents may be a bit more liberal when it comes to conduct than their parents, when Marcus wanted one of Ben’s toys and bit him to get it, I scolded Marcus and told him to say he was sorry. Immediately both boys hung their heads in shame, even Ben, who was the victim.

After another request or two to say he was sorry, Marcus said nothing but straightened his head and nodded once in “yes” fashion at Ben. The two then hugged and it was over.

Henry saeems to revel in having siblings after nearly two years brotherless. I did take him grocery shopping one evening sans his brothers. We took my Canon camera and his Fisher-Price camera and took pictures of each other looking through the lettuce, trying a cucumber out for a nose, checking dates on hamburger buns and buying milk. We took a break in the store when a Rolling Stones song came on the public address system.

“The Stones. You love the Rolling Stones,” Henry said as we danced in the dairy section to “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg.” (It was during this instance when we apparently let our guard down and bought 2 percent milk instead of 1 percent.)

The kids are back in New York state, the home of new gun control laws (a good thing) and toll roads and expensive gasoline (bad things.)

We have Facetimed with them a few times, and when possible, Grandma Louise and myself exchange phrases like “cool” and “my turn,” but it isn’t as much fun.

They will be back again soon with all new phrases and Louise and I will have found out we are behind the times in cute sayings.

We can only console ourselves in knowing we can get an extra three hours sleep each morning.

Cool.

A few surprises in store in 2013

2012-12-30T07:47:00.002-08:00

Welcome to 2013.

It seems a lot like old 2012, doesn’t it?

But new years have a way of slowly making their marks. Nothing happens under defined timelines.

If you talk to historians, the 1960s really started with the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 and ended with the Altamont shooting at a Rolling stones concert in December 1969. That makes the 60s something like a six-year decade.

But don’t you worry, 2013 will make its mark on history, just as assuredly as 2012 did.

If there was ever a year that the one could say the white male no longer dominated the political scene, it was 2012. The “close” race between Republican Mitt Romney and incumbent Democrat Barack Obama proved that true.

It was a year of fiscal cliffs, more disdain for politicians, who could agree on little, including global warming. Oh, it was also the year Hurricane Sandy brought the nation’s largest city to its knees.

It was a year many problems remained unsolved. The horror of a proliferation of guns and mental illness resulted in unforgettable tragedies in far-flung areas like Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., and our own backyard, Chardon, Ohio.

Ashtabula County continued to see its commercial trade erode to Mentor, Erie and Amazon. The Ashtabula Town Square continued to hemorrhage businesses in 2012, the most notable the loss of Sears. If studies are correct, that sorry trend will continue in this new year.

There are some efforts to bring back downtown Ashtabula, although a big part of it, to restore the old Shea Theater, quickly crashed and burned. The old theater today looks more like a bombed-out cave than the entertainment center it was when first opened in 1949.

Downtown Conneaut will get a boost in the new year with a large, bright, shiny new Dollar General Store. However, unless things change, it will have a full block of empty buildings, thank to the loss of a Dollar General Store from a less-than-shiny, old building.

It already looks like 2013 will be another year of school cuts and loss of municipal employees. Keep a shovel in your car if you live or work in Ashtabula this winter.

It is for certain that 2013 will take us on some twists and turns we never would have expected. So all we can do is sit back and try to enjoy the ride.

No bleary eyes for these three

2012-12-10T09:10:00.001-08:00

The other morning I had to get up at an exceptionally early time.

It was still dark out when my alarm unceremoniously went off. The clock scooted across the nightstand as I tried to silence it.

I rarely use an alarm since I rarely get up so early. It was one of the few shortcomings of touring Europe earlier this fall. We had to get up early each day, but it was to do things like travel up the Alps, take a boat ride in Venice, visit the home of King Louis the XIV.

But this morning the alarm went off for a far more mundane reason, an appointment I had.

I had to turn the light on, adjust my eyes and find the “off” button on the alarm.

That’s why I envy some young gentlemen who wake up not in a fog, but to tackle the day. They get so much more accomplished so much faster than I do. They scoff at the need for an alarm clock. They are my intelligent and highly motivated grandsons, Henry, 3, and twins Marcus and Ben, nearly 2.

Recently, they stayed a few nights at our house and since wife Louise got up with them one morning, I decided to the next. Plus, it is pretty difficult to sleep when you have three boys pounding on the piano (I think Grandma may have joined in the day before), laughing, zipping down the hallways on riding toys and crying after accidentally hitting each other. (I’m sure it was an accident.)

There is no rubbing eyes and orientation period in the morning with these three. It is time to run, play, drink milk, have a pre-breakfast snack, followed by breakfast followed by a post-breakfast snack.

On this particular morning, Marcus started the morning with a resounding speech. It was my failing. Most of it sounded like plausible gibberish as he expounded on his mystery topic for three minutes, arm in the air, eyes darting, furrowing, emotions changing. It was stirring indeed. There might be orators as good as Marcus, but probably not at 5:50 a.m.

How busy are these guys early in the morning? After getting everyone some milk and wrestling to get fresh diapers on the twins, I checked the iPad only to learn Larry Hagman of “Dallas” and “I Dream of Jeannie” fame died. I decided amongst the chaos ensuing, I would update the Star Beacon website with the news.

This is pretty easy, especially using the all-powerful Macbook. I found a recent Hagman picture on the Associated Press website, a “Jeannie” era photo and the story.

During that relatively brief time, Marcus was able to climb onto our extended living room windowsill, be told to sit down, ignore my warnings, fall to the ground, cry profusely, be comforted, climb back up and repeat the process.

Why, that would take me all day to do.

Meanwhile, Ben is running through the house, Henry is sorting through books. Ben goes up the indoor sliding board as Henry goes down. They meet somewhere in the middle and love it.

As the morning wears on, I introduce the kids to “Bullwinkle” through the magic of Netflix, attempting to expand Henry’s horizons beyond Spider-Man. Should a grandson of mine be enthralled with a Marvel character when we’ve always been a DC Comics family?

They seemed to enjoy “Bullwinkle,” despite all of the topical 60s humor, until the second “Fractured Fairytale.” Then they grew tired of it.

By then it was snacktime. It was time to dance. It was time for Gramps to grab and hang them by one leg, exclaiming, “Oh look, (Ben, Marcus, Henry) is a clock.”

On this particular day, we were heading to Jefferson to take a train ride with Santa.

While the kids are quick to get up and moving, they have no real goals toward getting somewhere on time.

Louise was in charge of grabbing kids, pants, shirts, socks, mittens, hats, coats, snacks, drinks, napkins, Kleenix, toys and diapers. I was in charge of saying, “Hurry up. we’re gonna be late.”

As I was getting the twins in their seats, Louise was hollering for Henry to get in the van NOW. But Henry heard his grandmother say, “Henry, stroll around outside and kick the rut on the side of the driveway left by the car’s tire. Be sure your shoes are all muddy”

We got to the station slightly late. I dashed to the ticketbooth, grabbed tickets and we were off.

I was impressed that as we sat down, Marcus commented, “Choo choo.” I was surprised the little guy was able to translate his concept of a “choo choo,” one of those little toys he pushes on a track at our house to the huge monster of a device we were sitting in.

Soon we were on our way, treated to elfs and Rudolph and finally, halfway through the trip, we picked up the Clauses, Santa and the wife. I told Henry I believed Mrs. Claus’ name was Ethel, but Henry disagreed.

The big guy gave the grandsons toys trains that included a pencil sharpener and those guys were happy.

Toward the end of the journey, the kids got a bit tired.

It was time to return home. It was only midday but it was event-filled none the less.

By then there was fussing and crying and some droopy eyes. It was nap time indeed.

Oh, it was time for a nap for the grandsons, too.

A holiday train ride

2012-11-24T18:38:00.000-08:00

Ben, Marcus, Henry, Derek and Megan Lebzelter go on a train ride and met some celebrities.