GEM CITY GEMS

Farewell to old Clarke Hinkle Field

2011-12-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

Clarke Hinkle

Members of 1970 team, left to right: Joe Chadwick, Bob Petras, Dan Baker, Larry Hughes.

Pre-game gathering

Red Knights Forever

View From South End

Ron Paris Jr., Ron Paris Sr., Head Coach Ralph Anastasio

Bob Chadwick, THS Class of 1974 and West Point graduate.

Chuck Walker, late 60s guard and linebacker.

Brian Zorbini, running back, early 90s.

Red Knight mascot leading the final charge.

HALL OF FAME CITY

2010-12-04T07:13:00.000-08:00

   It's neither Cooperstown, New York nor Canton, Ohio, but few towns the size of the Gem City can claim that five professional hall of fame athletes once called the ball fields of Toronto, Ohio home.
   Receiving his first shot of professional football here at the old Kaul Field was Wilbur "Fats" Henry, an All American lineman from the College of Washington and Jefferson. "Those were rough and tumble days," the late Tom McKelvey said about the 1920s. "Doc Kilgus was the owner of the Toronto Tigers and was trying to build up the team with outside players. One of those was Fats Henry, fresh out of college."
   Henry would go on to play and coach for the Canton Bulldogs, and in 1926, he brought up Toronto native John Comer for one game. Wearing number 3, Comer carried the ball once for one yard, giving him the distinction of being Toronto's first professional football player.
   Henry is both a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and the National League Hall of Fame.
   The Gem City athlete to next join the professional football ranks was Clarke Hinkle, after whom the high school stadium is named. Carl Snavey, his coach at Bucknell University said of the Lackawanna Express, "Without a doubt, the greatest defensive back I have ever coached." Hinkle became a three-time All American at Bucknell and then went on to play with the Green Bay Packers from 1932 to 1941, a period this fullback-linebacker became the NFL's all time leading rusher with 3,860 yards.
   In 1964, the NFL enshrined Hinkle in Canton and the NCAA in 1971.
   Two decades later, continuing the proud gridiron traditions of Toronto was Don Sutherin, a 1954 graduate of THS.
   Sutherin, of course, is best remembered for kicking the winning field goal of the 1958 Rose Bowl for Ohio State, but, locally, he and fellow classmate George Deiderich have the distinction of being the only two future professional football players to have paired at THS at the same time, from 1949 to 1953. During their senior season, the two future Canadian Football League players performed on a squad that produced four wins, four losses and one tie.
   The New York Giants drafted Sutherin as a defensive back in 1959. He played for the Giants part of that season and then played with the Pittsburgh Steelers the remainder of the year and the 1960 season. Sutherin then took his talents north to the Hamilton Tiger Cats and played in the CFL for 12 years, participating in eight Grey Cups, his team winning four.
   By the time he retired, Sutherin held 18 CFL records. He was inducted into the CFL Hall of Fame in 1992.
   Toronto contributed to the Baseball Hall of Fame, as well. Pittsburgh Pirate shortstop Honus Wagner often brought several teammates to barnstorm against local clubs. He also played for the Toronto Athletic Club.
   In The Era of Elegance author Walter M. Kestner wrote, "Wagner, in the twilight of his years of his career, played in Toronto where he alternated with Lawrence Hughes on the all star team managed by Doc Kilgus."
   Kilgus also recruited for the all star squad Boston Red Sox outfielder John Bates and Chicago Cub catcher Tom Needham, both from Jefferson County.
   One hall of fame athlete who did get away from the Gem City was Rollie Fingers, whose father George played for Class D Williamstown in the Mountain State League in 1938.
   The Fingers family resided at 601 Clark Street. Around when Rollie was ten years old, father George, fed up with working at Wheeling Steel in Steubenville, decided to move the family to California.
   Rollie went on to play 18 seasons in the major leagues, pioneering the role of closing pitcher while recording 341 career saves.
   He was inducted into Cooperstown in 1992.

RETURN TO THE CORNER MARKET

2010-09-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

1935 Advertisement from old Victory Market

Melhorn Dairy sold not only its own products, but also that which you purchased on the typical corner market of the period.

Barnum's Stores, Fourth Street, early 1900s

   The corner market, like penny candy inside glass counters, has long disappeared from Gem City neighborhoods, but has left sweet memories and a rich history.
   With the development of Toronto during the late 1800s came the arrival of the neighborhood market, its numbers increasing as the town expanded southward, peaking during the 1950s and 1960s when nearly 8,000 people inhabited the river town. As many as 20 small markets were in business during that period, usually family owned and operated, the family often residing in the same building that contained the store.
   From Romey's, Karaffa's and Brem's in the north end to Calabrese's and Didd's at the south, a Toronto resident could walk within a few minutes to purchase bread, milk, lunch meat and other daily groceries. One street, Federal, had three such stores-Frank's, Wasyk's and Smitty's--on three successive city blocks.
   "Most families had only one car back then," said Mike Swaykus, who was owner and manager of the former Mike's Market, where now sits the empty Olive Branch. "While the father worked, the kids or mother could walk to a store to get whatever they needed."
   Karaffa's Store, catty-corner from the present Tucker's Tavern, was the small grocery with which the Swaykus family dealt when Mike was growing up.
   "My family had an account there," Swaykus said. "I remember my mom would call Karaffa's and order a pound of bologna, a rump roast or a bag of potatoes, and Joe Karaffa would deliver them to our home on any day of the week. My mom would always settle the bill on pay day. That kind of thing is a thing of the past."
   Handshake accounts and home deliveries are two childhood memories for Liz Fedash, who lived on the 900 block of Loretta Avenue, where Katz's was the neighborhood grocer from the 1930s to the 1950s.
   As a teenager during the late 1940s, Fedash cleaned the Katzes' upstairs apartment and worked filling orders at Calabrese's, then located at Pierce and Wentworth.
   "Katz's was like a general store," Fedash said. "They sold produce, meats and penny candy. They were really nice people. Many times my mom needed milk on Sunday, and they would open the store for us. You don't get that kind of service today.
   "When I went to pay my family's bills, regardless of how much we paid, Mr. Katz would always give me a bag of candy," she continued. "The Katzes would always send us gifts on Christmas, which I thought was especially nice since they didn't celebrate Christmas because they were Jewish."
   Friendliness was also a familiar trait with the Calabrese family, for whom Fedash worked filling orders.
   "They took call-in orders. They sold meats and produce and beer by the cases and delivered all over town," she said.
   Vince Exterovich, who grew up on Sixth Street during the 1930s and early 1940s, described McClane's on the same street as "a very small store where you could buy some canned goods and bread."
   He also mentioned Russell's on Findley, north of the old Roosevelt School and and the Victory Market on downtown Fourth Street. "They were very friendly," Exterovich said of downtown store owners. "They would always speak to me."
   Just north of downtown was the old Ralph's Golden Crown Store, which the Swaykus family purchased in 1976 and renamed Mike's, a store with a name that reflected the first-name basis values of the traditional corner market.
   "I can honestly say at one time I knew half the people in town by their first names," Swaykus said.
   He attributed the demise of the corner market to the ownership of more than one family vehicle and the competition with franchise markets.
   "The small grocer started declining in town during the 1970's," he said. "Families could then drive to look for better prices."
   Mike's, the last corner market in town, went out of business in 1998.

THE OLD TORONTO POOL

2010-08-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

Looking east from Little League ball field.

Add caption

Baby Pool, circa 1956

   In the mind's eye, the best way to lap around the old Toronto Memorial Pool would not be performed by swimming around its white-walled basin.
   Rather, it would be by padding barefoot along the gritty, puddled concrete deck, past the powder-blue sliding board, past the white wooden lifeguard chairs, past the buoyed rope separating the shallow and deep sides of the topaz water and then onto the high and low diving boards, the stroll enriched with the shrieks and laughter of children, the piercing whistle of a teenage lifeguard, the coconut aroma of Coppertone suntan lotion mixed with the pungent taste of chlorine while the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations" blares from a transistor radio.
   The stroll back in time is nearly complete when the aluminum ladder of a diving board is ascended, the fiberglass bows and catapults, and a "kerplunk" resounds and soon follows is the well angled geyser of a can-opener, drenching the few fully clad adults leaning upon the white railing of the spectator section, the lap finished, the water receding and receding--swept away with the waves of nostalgia.
   For a little more than three decades, the Toronto Memorial Pool provided local youths with their primary source of summer recreation and social activity and, years later, still fresh memories.
   John Romey, longtime recreation supervisor and civic leader in the Gem City, grew up during the 1950s, putting in plenty of recreational time at Memorial Park.
   "The old pool was exactly the same as the one at Marland Heights in Weirton," he said. "Identical. There were two levels. The bottom level was for women and men to change clothes, the same level the present pool is located.
   "It was fun, exciting for a kid," continued Romey. "We had pretty good crowds. People came to view as spectators."
   Being a longtime recreation supervisor, Romey pointed out that many laws regarding the operation and maintenance of a municipal pool have changed, including one from a period that did not shine so brightly in the Gem City.
   "Way back in the beginning, it was segregated," Romey said about the town's swimming pool. "I could never understand it. That was a part of segregation those days. It was not unique to Toronto. It was part of the times."
   African-Americans were granted access to Memorial Park Pool only on Tuesday. Segregation ended at the public facility around 1966, two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
   A lesser change occurring to the park, Romey recollected, was the positioning of the Little League ball field, which sits approximately 30 feet in elevation above the current Olympics-style pool. In 1951, the first year of junior baseball in town, Romey played catcher for Kaul Clay.
   "Home plate was where the concession stand now is," he said. "Below left center was where the pool stood. It was always a dream for me to hit a home run into the pool. Of course, I never came close."
   A decade and a few years later was the era another longtime Toronto resident, Mark Rebres, fondly remembers.
   Rebres said that a typical summer day started out walking with friends Paul Morris and Tommy Lang from their Clark Street homes to the pool, their suits rolled up in towels, and then participating in morning swim lessons. They would return home and walk back to Memorial Park to swim again.
   "You picked up wire baskets with numbers from behind the counter," Rebres said upon paying the ten-cent admission fee. "You had to walk on the wet, cold, musty concrete all the way around and step into a little tub of water right before you took the steps to the pool deck."
   Rebres said that the pool and its lifeguards had their own peculiar rules. "You were supposed to be able to swim the width of the pool before you were allowed to go off the dives. You would get yelled at by lifeguards for hanging on the ropes separating the shallow and deep ends."
   Clinging on to happy pool memories of the period is Karen Walker, who lived a Frisbee's throw away from the pool on Jefferson Street and walked from there to work at the concession stand.
   "I remember all the kids coming up to the concession stand," Walker said. "It was penny candy. You could get a lot for your nickel then."
   During that time, the Trenton Street-based Melhorn's Dairy provided many of the pool's refreshments, including banana Fudge Sicles and blueberry, cherry, root beer, orange, lemon, lime and even licorice Popsicles. "Fudge Sicles were seven cents. Popsicles were a nickel," Walker said. "Kids would ask you at the beginning of the day if they could pick up papers around the playground so that they could get ten cents worth of candy. It's hard to believe what you would do for ten cents back in those days."
   Besides working at the concession stand, the 1971 Toronto High School graduate spent plenty of time at the pool level. "That was a hangout," she said about evening swim parties. "The big thing was whether you got thrown in with your clothes on." Traditionally the old pool opened on Memorial Day and closed on Labor Day, but on closing day the park staged its biggest events of the swimming season and sponsored races, diving competitions and stunts, the crowning of Little Miss Lions and dances at the tennis court.
   "You would have to go hours before so that you could get a seat," Walker said about the pools Labor Day festivities. "Some people would be sitting on top of the monkey bars."
   The last year for operation of the old Memorial Park pool was 1980, being replaced the following year at the same site by the current Olympics-style model.

TORONTO'S FIRST PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER

2010-01-09T06:57:00.000-08:00

   Many men would give their souls to play just one game in the National Football League, but it was the heart of Toronto Tiger legend John "Hook" Comer that gave him that single opportunity.
   During the first quarter of the 20th Century, football players participated for the love of a game with crude equipment and often with equally crude treatment. Those playing for semi-professional teams, such as the Toronto Tigers, supplemented their primary jobs at the local clay works with a few extra bucks against such notable teams as the Akron Silents, Bradley Eagles, Dusquesne Apprentice and various Ohio Valley clubs.
   "Those were rough and tough days the way they dressed and talked," said Tom McKelvey, who watched many semi-pro games during their heyday in the Gem City. "I remember before one game the Toronto coach had his players diving into a mud puddle by the old home plate to practice recovering fumbles."
   Out of the most physical and punishing era of football emerged one athlete, John S. "Hook" Comer, standing 6'3" and weighing 180 pounds.
   "My father told me Hook Comer could kick the ball almost the length of the football field," John Petras Jr. said.
   "They said he could throw the football 100 yards," McKelvey said. "Of course, that's probably exaggeration."
   What isn't hyperbole was Comer's athleticism. Some old timers said he was equally gifted at running, kicking and passing.
   In his "Era of Elegance," author Walter M. Kestner gives this account of Comer: "As I recall the football of that era was much larger in diameter that that used today and consequently was much harder to throw. However, John Comer or Big Hook as he was called could grasp the ball and throw it with extreme accuracy. On one play particularly called the Formation A, Dave Ferris would lateral the ball to Hook, who would then throw a pass down field to Goose Mundy or Jim Condrim with a touchdown usually resulting from the play."

   Accounts by both Kestner and McKelvey attest that the early Toronto Tiger teams consisted of local talent, but around 1920 Doc Kilgus, club owner, wanted to increase the talent pool in the Gem City.
   "Doc Kilgus brought in guys from out of town to build up the team," McKelvey said.
   Often these athletes were collegians playing under aliases for money to maintain their amateur status One such athlete was Pete "Fats" Henry, an All American tackle from Washington & Jefferson who played on the same side of Kaul Field with ringers and the few remaining legitimate locals, such as Hook Comer.
   Henry would go on to play with the Canton Bulldogs in 1920 and, as player-coach in 1926, he brought up fullback John "Hook" Comer, now 36 years of age and well past his prime. Wearing number 3, Comer played but one NFL game, carrying the ball once for one yard alongside 38-year-old Jim Thorpe.
   The Bulldogs that year finished with one win, nine losses and three ties--the worst record in the fledgling National Football League.
   In 1963, Henry was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, one year before Toronto and Green Bay legend Clarke Hinkle was enshrined, arguably giving the Gem City two members in Canton.
   Comer went on to become a well respected policeman in Toronto, serving with Hinkle's brother Les. He died in 1950 and is buried in Toronto Union Cemetery, not far from other Gem City legends, such as Clarke Hinkle and Pick Nalley.

BILL JACO REMEMBERED

2009-12-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

   During the 60s, when I was growing up, I thought Toronto was nicknamed the Gem City because it had so many colorful characters like Nick Yanick, Singing Kate, Johnny Wasco, Chief, George Tarr, Joe Hitchcock, George Peckins, Naughty Dotty and many others. None, however, was more memorable than the man himself who said "the town's full of nuts"--Bill Jaco.
   My first recollection of Bill came at the old A & P where the abandoned Save-a-Lot now stands. My father was pushing a cartful of groceries to the family Ford while my mother was trying to herd her four children safely across the parking lot. "Push cart, push cart," Bill said, knowing this courtesy usually amounted to tips of dimes and quarters.
   "That's all right," my father replied, "I can handle it."
   Bill trailed us to our car, anyhow. As my father began stowing grocery sacks inside the trunk, Bill said, "Ford junk. Ford junk. Hit a bump and the seat falls down."
   I would later learn every model of car made was junk in Bill's estimation, except for funeral cars, not many of them being drove those days other than by Clarkie, of whom Bill said was goosey.
   To me, back then, Bill appeared as tall as Wilt Chamberlain, but in truth, during his prime, he stood, at tallest, six-foot, three-inches. He was naturally big-boned and broad shouldered and had a Santa Clause-like belly. Legends abounded about his strength, including being able to lift the rear end of a Volkswagen Beetle off the ground.
   When I was first married, my wife Debbie and I lived across the empty lot from Bill and his sister May at the top of Daniels Street. Many people were afraid to let their children go near Bill, but he was a gentle giant who would hold the hand of our daughter Sevy and walk her up and down the block.
   Bill did not know Monday from Tuesday or a weekday from the weekend, but he did know garbage day and took out the trash faithfully the evening before garbage day, and, on cue, the following morning, regaled the truck crew with his Jaconian philosophy, usually always referring to junk Fords and that Clarkie was goosey.
   Whenever I saw Bill toting an umbrella, I knew rain was probably coming sometime soon. The weather, however, never stopped Bill from taking his daily and evening strolls. Wherever Johnny's Pizza Shop was located, Bill would walk in that direction, or toward whoever was passing out free goodies to Bill--nearly everybody. I could always determine what Bill had eaten because half of it was smeared on the front of his shirt.
   Back then, Johnny's was the only pizza shop around, and it frequently moved. For a while it stood at the corner of Federal and Franklin, later next to the Manos Theater and still later in the heart of downtown Toronto. No matter the location and the change of pizza cooks, Bill would always be there, one minute calling my date "skinny girl," the next minute telling me, "Man marries girl something's loose."
   Bill almost always repeated his statements as though his diaphragm had a built-in echo chamber. He would sneak up behind you, poking his finger in your back, and in that signature flutey nasal voice, utter, "Whoops. Goosey. Goosey. Clarkie's goosey."
   The Dairy Aisle was another regular stop for Bill, who held an equal affection of free ice cream, courtesy of the Henry family. One evening, a young man coasted his car onto the Dairy Aisle parking lot, stopped by Bill and asked him directions for Kuhn's Hardware Store.
   Naturally, Bill assessed the man's car first and called it "a piece of junk." Then Bill said, "Turn up bay. Turn up bay. Drive junk by Clarkie's--by Clarkie's. Clarkie goosey. Clarkie goosey. Turn up bay."
   Frustrated the man crisscrossed his arms and yelled, "Just stop now; you're nuts!"
   Bill casually replied, "Ain't lost."
   Another signature quote of his was "push daddy." I could never quite determine what that one meant, but maybe it bore some reference to his old A & P days when pushing grocery carts was in vogue. Or just maybe he used such phrase to fill in conversation gaps. Bill was certainly not quiet or one for a loss of words.
   The seats of my cars have never fallen down, sometimes I agree with Bill that the town was full of nuts. About his assessment of marriage, I am going to have to plead the Fifth.
   "Push Daddy."

WE ARE MARSHALL

2009-12-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

   Andy Warhol once said everybody has fifteen minutes of fame. Eight of my fifteen minutes probably were spent in the 2006 movie We Are Marshall, starring Matthew McConaughhey.
   Fellow THS 1971 graduate Bob Eshbaugh and I played on the Young Thundering herd team that followed the one devastated in the tragic plane crash November 14, 1970. We won two games that year, the big one against Xavier just our second contest of the 71 season.
   I tell everyone that I am the long-haired skinny blond kid who disrespectfully picks up the Falls City beer and drinks it inside Reggie Oliver's dorm room. I was probably the skinniest player on the team, undoubtedly the main reason my football career was short. Truth of the matter is that we were not allowed alcoholic drinks in our rooms. Even truer, I did not like Falls City, despite the fact it fit a college boy's budget.
   Despite the Hollywood fictionalizing of a true story and all the slow motion sport cliches, We Are Marshall conveys the loss, grief and suffering of a college and a community in an artistic and sensitive manner.
   I am very proud to have been a part of the rebirth of Marshall football.
   PICTURES: Me on the sidelines against Potomac State.
   My Young Thundering Herd Certificate
   Matthew McConaughey, who played head coach Jack Lengyel and Matthew Fox as assistant coach Red Dawson.
   Number 43 Bob Eshbaugh, holding football Jack Lengyel, number 58 me, Bob Petras.
   1971 football team and coaching staff--the Young Thundering Herd.

THE LOST VILLAGE OF PORT HOMER

2009-11-26T09:37:00.000-08:00

   It was not always a coal yard and barge harbor that occupied the floodplain north of Stratton and Goose Run, but rather a town once called Port Homer, a village that preceded Stratton, Empire and Toronto.
   The lost village of Port Homer was founded by a Quebec expatriate named William H. Wallace, who opened a small store near the mouth of Goose Run on the right descending bank of the Ohio River sometime around 1840. Wallace named the site Port Homer after his son, Homer. "It soon became a prominent shipping point for the entire section," wrote Mary Ekey Robinson in The Stratton Village Story. "Products from distilleries, flour mills and salt wells were brought here to be shipped on river boats."
   In the early years of Jefferson County, farming was the primary occupation for residents, with one of the most profitable products being wool. Steubenville and Jeddo with wool mills were two of the larger exporting sites in the area, but evidence suggests Port Homer might have been the largest. "Sheep growers would bring their wool," wrote Robinson, "there would be long lines of these wagons waiting for the wool to be weighed and loaded on the barge."
   Wallace move to Hammondsville in 1851. Unfortunately for him and his family, power from steam was increasing and accelerating transportation by both rail and water, making the still young country a glutton for coal. Miners tapped into the vein of coal from the hill sides of Goose Run. The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Rail laid track and established a depot at Port Homer in 1958. The Ohio River here was easily forded from then Virginia across the Ohio and its islands of Nessley and Cluster. Fossil fuel, wool, produce and other goods and the available access to transport them soon attracted other business to the small community. Sprouting along the floodplain were a carpentry shop, a one-room schoolhouse, a post office, a ferry service, a barber shop and the Mineral Paint Oil Works.
   Oil was also discovered at Port Homer. "The first well was drilled in the winter of 1899-1900, but was very small, making a barrel or two only per day," an early Ohio geological survey reported. "The Berea grit is said to have been struck at a depth of 715 feet. In the spring of 1900, the second well was completed and started at 100 barrels per day, but this rate was not long maintained."
   Like the nearby Knoxville and Yellow Creek oil fields, those of Port Homer soon dried, but it was the clay industry that continued industry and commerce in this tiny community.
   In the early 1900s, the Peerless Clay company established the manufacturing of sewer pipes and other vitreous clay products. Company housing and stores soon flanked the plant and clay fields. In 1960, the U.S. census showed that the incorporated village of Port Homer had a population of 75 people, including a mayor.
   In 1971, Peerless Clay ceased operations, and by 1980, Ohio Edison razed the last two remaining houses of the village.

   Pictures-- Port Homer today buried under fossil fuel.
   Unknown woman and infant standing before row of company houses in Port Homer.
   The village of Port Homer in Ohio River flood.
   Probably only known picture of the four-room Port Homer School.
   Hand-drawn maps of Port Homer, artist unknown.
   Peerless Clay.

THE DIAMOND MINE OF YELLOW CREEK

2009-11-24T13:21:00.000-08:00

   "To the paleontologist there are few places in the world more interesting than the Diamond Mine at Linton," wrote Cleveland geologist John Strong Newberry in 1856, "since here he gets such a view of the life of the Carboniferous age as is afforded nowhere else, and of the great number of species found there."
   Few people other than men of science have heard of the Linton, Ohio to which Newberry referred, but it was a small village that once sprawled along the mouth of Yellow Creek. No more than a roadside park now sits at this historic site, and yet paleontologists still refer to it as Linton, and have excavated the hillside for fossils as recently as 2007.
   Linton was known primarily as the mouth of Yellow Creek prior to the 1800s when settlers erected a small blockhouse as protection from hostile Indians. It remained an unincorporated village for more than a half-century, although a post office and a railroad depot put Linton upon maps by the mid-1850s. This began the period when Connecticut entrepreneurs started operating the Diamond Mine, which produced a nine-foot seam of Freeport coal. Below this rich seam, miners discovered a six-inch slate-like coal called canal from which they culled one of the richest pockets of fossils produced in the United States.
   Newberry and some of the most renowned paleontologists have visited the Diamond Mine, one such being Edward D. Cope, perhaps the most prominent paleontologist of the 19th Century. His most notable contributions to science included the discovery of dozens of dinosaurs and the development of Cope's Law, which expounds upon the gradual enlargement of mammalian species.
   During the 150 years scientists have documented fossils gleaned from the Diamond Mine, ten dozen taxa of invertebrates, including small worms, millipedes and crustaceans, and forty taxa of vertebrates, mostly fish, have been documented. According to Dr. Mark J. Camp in his book "Roadside Geology of Ohio," some fossils found at Linton are the only such kind ever discovered.
   "The Linton location ranks as the most prolific Pennsylvanian vertebrate fossil in the world," Camp wrote.
   Camp also stated that the most common fish found at Linton, numbering in the thousands, is the coelacanth, a carnivore that attained sizes of 6.5 feet in length and weighed nearly 198 pounds. It was thought to have gone extinct with dinosaurs, but was discovered off the south coast of Africa in 1938. A group of scientists theorize the coelacanth represented an early stage in the evolution of fish to terrestrial four-legged animals like amphibians.
   Long before the Ohio swept past what is now Linton, once sat an ox-box lake in which these fish including sharks and the coelacanth--as well as invertebrates inhabited. A complex chemical process under enormous tonnage of sedimentary deposits preserved and fossilized these once living creatures in the canal seam of the Diamond Mine.
   The Diamond Mine officially operated from 1855 to 1921, collapsing during 1924. In the ensuing years, scientists continued collecting specimens at dump sites of the mine and by the 1960s were taking them from the road cut nearby the development of the four-lane highway now consisting of Ohio Route Seven. Scientific activity at the hillside cut discontinued during 2007.
   Many of the Linton fossils can be observed at numerous museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Orton Geological Museum of Ohio State University and the Smithstonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.

WILLIAM PITTENGER, HERO AND AUTHOR

2009-11-08T12:59:00.000-08:00

   Bold, loyal, dutiful, intrepid and faithful--all are words that appropriately describe the attitude of the 22 Union soldiers who had participated in the Great Andrews Train Robbery during the Civil War, but none describe it better than Daring and Suffering, the title of a book written by Knoxville native William Pittenger.
   A son and eldest sibling of seven to Thomas Pittenger and his wife Mary Mills, William was born January 31, 1840 on the south skirt of Knoxville on a small farm his father rented from in-laws. Young William attended one-room schools in the Knoxville area and developed into a voracious reader, becoming especially interested in history, astronomy and law. By the age of 16, despite the handicap of being shortsighted, Pittenger obtained teaching certification from the Jefferson County School Board.
   His teaching duties took him to Ravenna,Ohio and Cleveland where he became an editor and publisher for School Day Visitor. By 1860 he was intensely studying law under the direction of Miller and Sherrard of Steubenville when the Civil War erupted.
   The twenty-year-old Pittenger enlisted with the 2nd Ohio Regiment from Steubenville and soon found himself fighting beside friends and relatives in the first battle of Bull Run. Afterward, the regiment served in Kentucky and Tennessee campaigns, but it was the latter in which he and 20 other volunteers became famous under the leadership of civilian James J. Andrews, of Holliday's Cove, West Virginia, present day downtown Weirton. The band pirated a Confederate locomotive, the General, with orders to burn bridges, derail track and cut telegraph lines between Marietta, Georgia and Chattanooga.
   The mission was delayed a day, forcing the Union operatives to perform their mission during a day of heavy Southern rain. On April 12, 1862, they stole the General without incident near Big Shanty, Georgia.
   Andrews and the soldiers did manage to cut telegraph lines and dislodge some track, but the heavy rain made bridge burning nearly impossible. The deposed engineer, William Fuller, pursued the hijackers on foot and handcar several miles and eventually commandeered a faster, more powerful locomotive, the Texas, and caught up with the Union operatives when they ran out of fuel 76 miles from Big Shanty.
   The hijackers all fled through the surrounding countryside and were captured within several days and then imprisoned at Chattanooga, Knoxville and Atlanta. It was the Georgia capital where Andrews and seven other members of the raid were executed as spies. The rope by which the hangman had noosed Andrews was too long so that prison guards had to shovel beneath Andrews's feet, inflicting upon the mission leader a tortuous death.
   The Union's blockade of all major Southern ports created a deficit in food and other goods within confederate lines and severely affected supply to Southern military prisons such as the notorious Andersonville and those holding Pittenger and the participants of the Andrews Raid. For the majority of their confinement, they struggled in squalid, crowded, dank cells and suffered malnutrition and disease.
   The survivors learned they, too, would hang for spying and began preparing for the afterlife. "It is an interesting fact," Pittenger wrote in Daring and Suffering, "which the rationalist may explain as the will, that from the times of that long prison prayer meeting--from early afternoon to midnight--the fortunes of our party began to improve. There were fearful trials still before us, not much inferior to any we had passed; we held our lives by the frailest thread; yet till the close of war, though many perished around us, death did not claim another victim from our midsts."
   Soon afterward, penetration of the Union Army probably saved the party's life, the Confederates sending them to different prisons, one being Knoxville, Tennessee. Ironically, General John Hunt Morgan was stationed there at the time. In a year, the Confederates would lead a raid passing near Pittenger's hometown, Knoxville, Ohio. The Rebels later returned the Union raiders to Atlanta.
   At the Georgia prison, a Methodist minister befriended Pittenger, lending him books to read, furthering his religious transformation. "I did not care, as in Knoxville, for law books, but the fact that many, though not all, of the minister's books were of the theological and religious cast only made them more welcome. This Atlanta jail was my seminary."
   The Rebels eventually shipped all surviving members of the locomotive raid to Castle Thunder in Richmond, Virginia where they were exchanged for Confederate prisoners in March, 1863.
   At Washington D.C., Pittenger and his comrades received Congressional Medals of Honor from Secretary of War and Steubenville native Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln, making them the first soldiers on record to receive the nation's greatest distinction.
   And then Pittenger took a friendly railroad ride home, his family picking him up at Sloane's Station.
   "The journey over the old familiar hills about which I had dreamed in Southern dungeons," he wrote, "the tearful welcome of father and mother, the surprise and joy of the little brother and sisters. For the first time in history a public supper was given in honor of an individual in the little village of Knoxville. The next Sunday I attended the Methodist church in New Somerset and had my name enrolled as a probationer. The vow I had made to God in hour of trouble was not forgotten."
   Honorably discharged for disability August 14, 1863, Sergeant Pittenger soon studied for the ministry and became ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church. While his ministerial duties took him to numerous locations across the country, he published his account of the Great Locomotive Chase in a series of stories to the then Steubenville Herald, in 1887 republishing them in book form. He authored several other books, including Toasts and Forms of Public Address and Extempore Speech. All Pittenger books remain in print and can be borrowed through public library services or purchased via Internet catalogs.
   Daring and Suffering generated two movies, The General, starring Buster Keaton in a silent comedy, and a 1956 Disney made-for-television film, The Great Locomotive Chase, the latter erroneously portraying Pittenger as becoming the first-ever person awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
   Pittenger died in Fallbrook, San Diego County, California and is buried there. A U.S. Army base, Sergeant William Pittenger Camp, is nearby.


   Pictures above: Portrait of hero and Knox Township native son sergeant William Pittenger, and his birth site, on Ohio Route 213, just south of the old Knoxville School.

THE PHANTOM KILLER OF WHEELING STEEL

2009-10-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

   William McCloskey peered out the curtains of his picture window facing the ghostly shadows of Lincoln Avenue on this unseasonably cold night. As a full silver red- moon was rising in the east, he turned from the window toward his wife Mary and said, "someone is going to be shot tonight."
   Down the block, amongst the shadowy light, lumbered a barrel-chested figure with an ape-like gait toward the Steubenville plant. He was reclusive mill sweeper, David D'ascanio, known by the neighbors as just Dasco, whom when encountered along the sidewalk women and children and even some men gave wide berth.
   McCloskey, the Wheeling Steel chief of police and a World War I veteran, had good reason to fear the full moon; after all, one employee had been shot and killed, another wounded, under two preceding full moons at Wheeling Steel, and his Irish instinct made him feel uneasy about the night--the same inner sense that made the Irish such good cops and priests.
   Stressful events often brought a relapse of malaria that McCloskey had suffered as a soldier during the construction of the Panama Canal. He had already broken into a cold sweat in bed when the phone rang shortly before midnight. Two more mill workers lay dead, the third and fourth victims of what the press hailed as the "Phantom Killer."
   The series of slayings began under the full moon on January 20, 1934 when Fred Melsheimer, on his way from the cafeteria to start the midnight shift at the rail yard, was shot multiple times from a .38 caliber revolver, dying shortly thereafter, the coroner determining from shock and hemmoraging.
   Authorities had few motives with which to work regarding Melsheimer's slaying other than he had recently relocated to Steubenville from Chicago and perhaps he was hit for a previous transgression with the Chicago mob. Otherwise, the train conductor had proven to have been a model citizen and had served his country during the first World War.
   There were few leads.
   "The man who killed Melsheimer," the Steubenville Herald-Star reported, "approached him as the latter was walking between the cafeteria and the mill office when about 25 feet away he opened fire and continued to walk toward Melsheimer, firing as he went. He then turned, ran to the fence separating the mill yard from Mingo Boulevard, mounted the fence and disappeared in the darkness. He was clad in overalls."
   The killer escaped by vaulting over a chain-linked fence, and just vanished, the exit seeming almost superhuman, and, with the full moon bathing the death scene, preternatural.
   With little information other than conjecture and theories to follow, McCloskey, Jefferson County Sheriff Ray Long, and Steubenville Police Chief Ross Cunningham had little to follow or to conclude, other than the mill murder was an isolated incident.
   That sentiment, however, changed two full moons later when on March 24, shortly after the midnight shift began, the Phantom Slayer riddled another rail yard employee, James Barnett, with six bullets, and then kicked him in the face.
   Again the phantom vanished into the smokey moonlit night.
   Barnett, however, somehow survived the assault, paralyzed from the waist down.
   Authorities stepped up their investigation while McCloskey and the mill increased security. Mill workers no longer worked solo--on any shift--but with groups and suspicious of everyone.
   Barnett gave police a sketchy description, stating "the Phantom was a tall man, wore a slicker and a uniform cap, resembling the type of cap worn by the mill police."
   McCloskey watched with interest the man they called Dasco, who lived on the next block up Lincoln Avenue. The chief of police knew little of the Italian immigrant other than he had won his U.S. citizenship by serving with the Army in World War I and that he was a very hard laborer. Dasco spoke broken English, the cop attributing his reclusiveness partly to the speech barrier.
   Still McCloskey had hear rumors of Dasco's uncanny strength and agility, such as hanging like a flag full sail from a pole and performing one-handed chin-ups.
   Common sense told McCloskey these tales of the five-foot five-inch, 47-year-old Italian immigrant were no more than fabrications often tagged to the mysterious.
   His Irish instinct told him otherwise.
   McCloskey's unease at the full moon proved correctly because soon after the onset of the July 1 midnight shift, the Phantom grew bolder and shot to death two open hearth workers, Ray Kochendarfer, 36, and William Messer, 42, both of Steubenville.
   This time, several witnesses watched the assassin flee, a third victim that night spared by an empty chamber. The consensus discribed him as short and stocky with an odd, waddling gait, and abnormally long arms for his height.
   Another inference investigators concluded was that all four shootings occured between 11:35 and 11:40 when the mill was exchanging shifts.
   But each time the Phantom disappeared into the darkness.
   Dasco was now a suspect, but no motive or conclusive evidence existed for his arrest. He had been clocked in the mill during those shifts. McCloskey insisted the mill police keep a scrutinous eye upon Dasco.
   Meanwhile, the mill and Jefferson county commissioners offered a reward of 7,500 dollars leading to the arrest of the serial killer--quite a sum of money when the average salary was near 20 dollars a week. The award and national attention drew a slew of private detectives to Steubenville.
   Opinions and theories varied widely regarding the killer's nature, some pundits attributing it to moon madness, many others maintaining German hatred was the motive because everyone slain was of Teutonic descent.
   Another oddity about Dasco, McCloskey noted, was that the Italian immigrant lived smack dab in the middle of the Irish-Scotch district of Steubenville. What was he hiding?
   Four weeks later, under another full moon, mill policeman, Lieutenant C.H. Baily, of Steubenville, watched Dasco clock in at 11 p.m. and then trailed the suspect to the cafeteria where he bought a small pie. At this point, Dasco knew he was being followed and in his distinctive apelike gait zigzagged through several departments of the new process mill, attempting to distance his pursuit from the mill entrance gate.
   Faster and faster the diminuitive Dasco moved around and around machinery, stacks of finished steel, down an alley, across the annealing floor, the entrance gate now in site. Dasco was now nearing the safety office where mill policeman John Fonnow, of Clark Street, Toronto, was stationed. Baily drew his gun, ordering Dasco to halt. Then Fonnow subdued him.
   McCloskey and his staff soon arrived. An ensuing body search revealed that Dasco had cut out one of the pockets of his extra baggy pants, inside glinting the hard steel of a holstered .38 caliber pistol.
   Dasco's trial opened October 22. Cross examined by prosecutor Ray Hooper about his possession of the revolver, Dasco replied, "I buy the gun for protection. Everybody in the mill afraid." He went on denying he had ever fired the revolver.
   "If you didn't fire it, how did you know that it would even shoot?" Hooper asked.
   "I no know," Dasco replied, "but maybe it make big noise and scare people away."
   Although no motive for murder was produced, the trail lasted only six days, the jury ruling guilty.
   On that night a full moon rose once again.

IN SEARCH OF GABBY KUNZLER

2009-10-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

   A certain bit of lost information about one Gabby Kunzler, a much celebrated athlete from Toronto, Ohio continued to haunt me. His feats occurred sometime during the 1920s when the sleepy and much isolated town recorded the shady side of its history by only word of mouth. I knew of but one person who could clarify the matter causing me this consternation, and he was Renal T. Stokes, a venerable octogenarian who knew a little something about everything that happened in my home town since the day he could crawl.
   Renal's speech often roamed into tangents and tended to spin the same yarns again, like the time he tackled Clarke Hinkle all by himself, and he repeated it as if he were narrating the story for the first time. You dared not interrupt him, at least not until he was finished, which usually happened when he fell asleep, and you had better sneak away while you had the opportunity.
   I drove to his cabin at Wildcat Hollow, just outside the north end of town. I found Renal sitting upon his front porch, sitting upon a wooden rocker under the end of the roof whose support had disappeared years ago and remained unrepaired. It reminded me of a broken wing. Renal was wearing bib overalls and a gray denim railroad cap.
   Having hunted squirrels a few times with him at Kaul Wildlife Area, I needed no self-introduction. "I have a question to ask you about Gabby Kunzler," I said.
   Renal gnawed upon his lower lip and before he could finish, he said, "Kunzler, Gabby, yep, I member him, he's the guy they named the gymnasium after--the very first one in the valley. Nobody in this here town could spell much, so they shortened it to 'gym.' That's how the town came to be named Gem City. Why, if I'd misspelled a word, my pappy would of warshed my mouth out with lye soap, and then beat me with a hickory switch for usin' bad grammar."
   "I member the year the gym was built, started in December of 36--jest a few months afore the Great Warsh of 37. It was the winter before when I'd walk seven miles to school with snow up to my hips. That snow never hampered them construction workers on the gym none much. Course, we had real workers then, not like the bunch of sissy boys today, take off three days for a hang nail, then expect to get paid.
   "They completed it just afore the big thaw, and it rained six straight days and all that snow melted. The river flooded all the way uppen Wildcat Holler.
   "I was fishin' right at this here spot, catchin' more carp and mudcats than you could shake a willer stick at. My ma and pappy and the rest of my kin was trapped up the holler some ways, but I was payin' them no never mind cause the fishin' was so good. Ain't every day you can fish off your front porch.
   "I member the very moment. I was recollectin' bout the time I tackled Clarke Hinkle one-on-one--I have to tell you bout that sometime--when out where the driveway is now gushed through the surface the biggest fish I ever done seed. I shook my head a couple of times and rubbed my eyes. That weren't no ordinary fish, but was the Oswongo Monster.
   "I member my grandpappy told me bout him onced and how'd he harpooned the monster right in the eye. And his grandaddy afore him seed the monster when he was tradin' with the great Chief Logan. Oswongo--that's what the Mingoes called the Ohio River them days.
   "I sees this is the very same Oswongo Monster cause he got just one eye and it got this real ornery look like in the bear that bit Ole Yeller. Some old timers called him Long Jaws cause he had more teeth than the Fuller Brush salesman. The monster was as long and thick as the chimney at Kaul Clay and was covered with sea weed from head to tail.
   "I onced tackled Clarke Hinkle all by myself, so I weren't afraid of no oversized fish none. I says to him, 'I spose you got unfinished business for what my grandpappy done did to you.'
   "The Oswongo didn't take too kindly to that remark and promptly swatted his tail upon the surface, nearly drowning me. I went to skiddaddle to the cabin, but when the water fell back it slammed the door locked. 'Well, now you're done for,' I says to myself.
   "I was stuck like a piece of cheap steak between your teeth, with nothin' more'n a hickory switch I carved into a fishin' pole to defend myself. I jump back and forth with the support in the middle, knowin' with just one eye the monster's vision ain't åll that good. The beast comes a hurlin' at me and chomps right through the post that used to support the roof at this end of the porch. A couple of stones fall right on top of his slimy, gooey head, stunnin' him for a few seconds. I drives the butt end of my rod right into his good eye. That's the last anybody ever done saw or heard tell of the Oswongo Monster."
   Renal coughed, and was clearing his throat when I said, About Gabby Kunzler?"
   "Yep, I member him. He was that guy they named the gymnasium after...."
   Renal repeated the story three of four times until slumber mercifully overcame him. Before his sleeping permitted my escape, I forgot what information I had been seeking in regards to the legendary Kunzler. It had something to do with baseball, I think, but I hustled home and was able to write Renal's story word for word while it was still fresh in my mind.
   I did go fishing at the river the next morning. I heard a gigantic splash along the opposite shore. I did not stick around long enough to see what caused it.

THE BIG LITTLE ISLAND

2009-10-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

   During a 1754 surveying journey down the Ohio River, George Washington noted in his journal about Brown's Island: "At eleven or twleve miles from this (Yellow Creek), and above what is called the Long Island, which though distinguished is not very remarkable for length, breath or goodness." As a military leader, as the first president and as a surveyor, the ambitious Virginian made many mistakes, amongst them his assessment of Brown's Island, for its history has been anything other than unremarkable.
   Long before young Washington snubbed the two-mile river island, Indians had made it a frequent stop as evidenced by the large number of projectile points and artifacts gleaned from its rich soil after the arrival of the first settlers there during the late 1700s. Artifact hunters have continued finding these little treasures until the construction of the Weirton Steel coke oven was completed during the early 1970s. Also signifying the importance of the island was petroglyph known as Harts Rock at the island head. A petroglyph is a rock into which was carved or pecked crude renditions of animals, celestial objects and other symbols of importance to indigenous people.
   On his watch from Mingo Town to Yellow Creek during the Revolutionary War, Michael Myers claimed to have slain an Indian who was carving an image into Harts Rock.
   Brown's island was named after Colonel Richard Brown, of Baltimore, who had fought under the command of George Washington. Around 1800, he purchased 1,150 acres of land in present day Weirton, including the 350 acres comprising the island. Brown became a local magistrate and built a farm on the island, one manned by slaves. On the Ohio side of the island, he had a grist mill constructed, arguably the first-ever dam on the Ohio River.
   "The slaves, cattle, officers and the appearance of everything here," wrote Reuben Gold Thwaites in his journal, "indicated the greatest abundance of the produce of this plentiful country. Though he does not keep a tavern, he knows how to charge as if he did, we having to pay him a half dollar for our plain supper, plainer bed, and two quarts of milk we took with us the next morning, which was very high in a country where cash is very scarce and everything else very abundant."
   Brown's brother Hugh returning from a visit from the island, drowned on the Ohio side of the river, along with his horse. The perils of fording the river and impending floods did not deter further settlement on this land bisecting the river.
   "We passed Brown's Island," wrote Gilbert Swing in his 1889 book, Events in the Life and History of the Swing Family, "a great summer resort six miles above Steubenville, containing two hundred acres of land, with large shade trees, beautiful lawns and extensive boarding-houses erected upon it. This is one of the most beautiful islands in the Ohio River."
   Families continued to live and farm on the island until the great flood of 1937 wiped out all existing structures.
   One of the more notable characters to have called the island home was Samuel Burnell, known as the hermit of Brown's Island. Around 1870, when the federal government established pilot lights along the Ohio River, Burnell took charge of those on Brown's Island and vicinity. "He built a little cabin among the thick hillside forest, just visible from passing boats, and there he lived alone, doing his own cooking and household chores. When the boats passed they would sound their whistles, he would come out and salute, and then retire to his cabin again," noted the 20th Century History of Steubenville and Jefferson County.
   Another notable journey down the Ohio was commanded by Merriweather Lewis en route to join George Rodgers Clark at Louisville in 1805. September 5 of that year, Lewis wrote in his journal while his expedition camped at the head of Brown's Island: "Foggy again. It grew very dark and my canoes which had on board the most valuable part of my stores had not come up, ordered the trumpet to be sound and they answered."
   A little more than 30 years later, in 1836, the Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the first navigation dam upon the Ohio River, one of square sandstone blocks spanning from the Ohio shore at Wellsmar across to the island. Two years later, the crops constructed a diagonal dam stretching from the head of Brown's Island to Jeddo Run and by 1840 erected a half-moon dam on the Virginia shore opposite the head of the island.
   The diagonal dam would later become the site of what the New York Times heralded a disaster when on March 15, 1888, three stream boats--the Ed Roberts, the Sam Clark and the Eagle collided and spilled 40,000 bushels of coal into the river. The wreck and the ensuing clean-up disrupted river traffic until June 12 of that year.
   Head engineer of that operation, William martin reported finding 21 coal boats and barges stranded and scattered from the head to the foot of the island.
   The steamboat disaster was certainly not the last. On March 22, 1932, an airmail passenger plane crashed into the Ohio River along the upper east bank of the island, killing pilot Hal George and passenger Doctor Carol S. Cole. December, forty years later, a Weirton Steel coke oven explosion killed 19 workers and injured another 20, ironically one fatality named Brown.

THE FIRST DAMS OF THE UPPER OHIO RIVER

2009-09-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

   During the 19th Century, Ohio Valley residents had a common saying about the waterway that was so vital to their welfare and economy: "The Ohio River was dry half of the time; the other half it was frozen."
   The French called it La Belle Rievere and La Riviere Grande, the Native Americans, Kis-ke-ba-la-se-be and O-hee-yo. The 981-mile southwestwardly flowing river was beautiful and majestic--in any language--to all who viewed it in its pristine state, but the Ohio was equally as shallow, providing a natural channel of only four feet at best and an average depth of only two feet, levels limiting the westward expansion of settlers to only bateaux and flatboats.
   Oared or hand-powered, the flatboat usually floated with the current while transporting settlers and their possessions to new territory. The owners of these crude watercraft did not intend to return upstream and generally dismantled them at the end of river voyages, the lumber used in construction of new homesteads.
   A new era suddenly dawned in 1811 with the launching of the first steamboat, the New Orleans, on western waters near Pittsburgh. By 1835, more than 650 steamboats existed in the west, their presence accelerating the westward and industrial expansion along Ohio River territory and beyond.
   Shifting sand and gravel bars, snags and rocks, and sunken trees called sawyers combined with low water levels during summer and ice during winter to make navigation along the big river difficult and often hazardous. Boating companies pressured he federal government to improve navigation conditions, and, thus, in 1824, Congress authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to remove snags and other obstructions from the Ohio while constructing dikes and wing dams to concentrate flow into the main channel.
   The Corps constructed the first series of dams at Louisville, Kentucky, the second parallel to present-day Wellsmar, spanning from the Ohio shore to Brown's Island in 1836. Its purpose was to back water up to another dam that stretched from the northern tip of Brown's Island diagonally to the Ohio shore approximately to the site where the old Follansbee Steel pump house stands today. Later called the "dike" by local residents, its primary function was deflecting the higher water onto the then Virginia side where the channel bisected the river.
   Prior to the construction of these dams, the channel weaved along the right bank, or Ohio side. The construction of the Brown's Island dams raised consternation amongst Jefferson County citizens about loss of shipping revenue, so much, in fact, they petitioned state congress during 1836 but to no avail.
   The Corps added a crescent-shaped wing dam less than a half-mile downstream on the Virginia shore to deflect flow back into the channel. The Corps and local labor constructed the dams from sandstone quarried from Island Creek.
   "The dams at Brown's Island," wrote Reuben Gold Thwaites in Early Western Travels, "the shoalest point on the Ohio have been so eminently successful as fully to establish the efficiency of the plan.  Several other works of a similar nature are proposed...When all improvements are completed, it is believed the navigation of the beautiful Ohio will answer every purpose of commerce and the traveller."
     The "dike" still existed intact by the turn of the 20th Century and was featured in a chapter of Walter M. Kestner's The Era of Elegance: "The most productive and popular angling site was at the dike, a wing dam as some called it, that extended from the bar below the mouth of Sloane's Run to the head of Brown's Island. On propitious occasions this dike would be lined with devotees of sport from the Ohio shore to the break in the wall which we called the 'riffle' near the island end of the dam."
   Up to this period, navigational problems still continued. During dry months, the river was so shallow in places it could be forded by people and horse-drawn wagons. River companies and shippers relied upon two rises or tides to navigate their goods, the fall rise occurring in late October through November, the spring rise running from February through April.
   Sometimes, even rises failed navigation at Brown's Island. On March 15, 1888, three steam tows--the Eagle, Ed Roberts and Sam Clarke--collided while trying to cross the dike and spilled 40,000 bushels of coal into the Ohio River.
   In 1910, Congress enacted the Rivers and Harbors Act to canalize the entire river with wooden wicket dams, including Dams Nine and Ten, spanning across from Freeman's Landing to New Cumberland and Steubenville to present-day Weirton. The Corps of Engineers eventually replaced these dams during the early 60s with the present series of high-lift locks and dams, including New Cumberland and Pike Island.
   First picture: Remnants of the "dike" including square sandstone blocks still remain today.
   Second picture: The Ed Roberts involved in the cleanup operation of 40,000 bushels of coal spilled at the head of Brown's Island.
   Third picture: An old navigation map showing the locations of the three Brown's Island dams.
   Fourth Picture. The right bank of the Upper Ohio's first dam, just south of Wellsmar.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TORONTO'S WOODS

2009-08-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Like the city itself, the woods situated along the Gem City's southwest border has a history, deep, rich and mysterious.

Foremost amongst the deep green forest was Camp Crumb. It stood upon a plateau where Sloane's Run forks west to Wallace Heights and northeast to Rock's Farm. A dirt road once twisted along Sloane's Run, but has long been covered with the natural erosion of the steep gully through which it passes.

Walter M. Kestner, in his book, The Era of Elegance, mentions Toronto's early park: "The log cabin and the rustic pavilion for dining up Sloane's Run hollow called Camp Crumb where clambakes and corn roasts were regularly held. My first picnic in Toronto was held in the second grade when Miss Nora Yingst, our teacher, escorted us out the Pike to Camp Crumb, and I ate my lunch on the way but dined elegantly on the bounty of the others who were not as voracious as I was.

The Boy Scouts of America began operation in 1910, and the local troops found Camp Crumb and its environ of beeches and oaks, huge boulders, rock shelters and cascades an ideal place for scouting activities. If the initials carved in the rocks and towering beeches are any indication of its usage, then the 1940s was the peak period for Camp Crumb.

Local lore reports that this bucolic getaway fell into disuse after a distraught Toronto man hanged himself from a beech tree overlooking a cliff. Legend also hints that he carved his initials into the tree prior to committing the act. Some old-timers say the grounds are haunted.

Another long forgotten piece of the Gem City's woodland past is Slaughter Hollow, which today is just west of the state's access gate along Route Seven near the south end ramp.

"One of the favorite Sabbath afternoon walks," Kestner wrote, "was out the Knoxville Pike to Sloane's Run then up the left fork to slaughter house hollow where the crumbling remnants of the old abattoir still sheltered the grisly implements of its former operations. Along the way at the base of the hollow huge limestone rocks produced a prolific harvest of sea animals which offered mute testimony that the waters of the distant seas had once laved these shores."

The Gem City author was certainly correct regarding water once encircling the Toronto we know today. In Roadside Geology of Ohio, Mark J. Camp wrote about Mount Nebo. "On the south edge of town the highway swings around a large hill that is separated from the Pennsylvanian (an era 320 to 286 million years ago) escarpment by an abandoned channel of the Ohio River. During Wisconsinan (90,000 to 10,000 years ago) time this was a bedrock island in the Ohio River. At some point sandbars cut it off and the river assumed its present course."

Modern man has also left signs of his presence in the surrounding forests. A couple of anomalies are rock piles appearing to be funeral cairns, one each on both sides of the hill upon which Fairview Heights stands.

In Greater Toronto 1899, author G.H. Stoll noted that before the inception of Union Cemetery, people sometimes buried their deceased in the hills above present-day Toronto.

Another mystery is an abandoned well, or cistern, concave and still open, which sits approximately 50 yards west of Route Seven above Daniels Street. An 1878 map indicates that the property once belonged to an R. Lee, an 1871 map to an H. Gaston.

Lesser oddities include rock carvings of a snake, an eagle and an oak leaf upon different boulders scattered throughout the woods and Indian Rock, named such for the collection of arrow heads near it.
PICTURES top to bottom: Indian Rock. Open Well. Winter Scene of Rock Shelter. Oak Leaf Carving by JMW.

THE FIRST BAND CAMP

2009-08-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

Some of our favorite memories soon come to mind when certain songs play across the radio, but no experience is so sweet as making the music that makes the memories, such as the case with the participants of the inaugural Toronto Band Camp.

This Toronto high School tradition started in 1949 when the band fathers converted a Yellow Creek farm into a practice field for the marching band and the barn into a cafeteria. As the years progressed, succeeding band fathers added more modern amenities; the first year, however, they simply roughed it.

We slept in tents," then high school senior Dolores (Argentine Graceffa said, "five or six tents, as I recall, about eight to a tent. There were individual tent counselors, one for each tent."

"It got very cold in the mornings that summer, down into the forties," said Ruth Ann Campbell) Davis. "Two of the girls in our tent had to go home with ear aches. We had old iron double-decker beds. I was fortunate to have a big feather comforter that had been in our family for years. I slept on it and pulled the other half over me."

Reveille awakened the campers from their chilly slumbers every morning and then before breakfast, under the leadership of band director D.W. Hover, the 70 members of the THS band exercised and marched and then attended breakfast.

"When I think of band camp," Madonna (Smith) Baker, class of 50 said, "I think of reveille played at 6:00 every morning. So I left a nice, warm blanket and went to the lower part of the barn for a shower. Breakfast was held in the barn dinning hall, and we sat at picnic tables."

The band marched and practiced during afternoons and repeated their routines in the evenings, the early morning coolness soon forgotten.

"It was terribly hot," Mrs. Graceffa said. "It was a lot of fun. John Sabol, a graduate and band member of Ohio State University came out and taught us single line formation across the field, and we did it admirable. I think we were the first small school around here to perfrom this formation."

Band members did find some play and mischief time during the evenings.

"We had the lake back then and the kids swam," Mrs. Graceffa said. "In the evenings we had bonfires and sing-alongs."

There were the usual raids by the boys," Mrs. Devlin said, "but none of us got in big trouble. We really had a wonderful time and certainly needed the practice."

Before the inception of Toronto Band Camp, THS practice alongside the football field during summer while Director Hoover gave individual lessons at the Roosevelt Building. Attending the Yellow Creek camp broke up the monotony and created a tradition celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Graceffa summed up the sentiments of the thousands of band members from the various high schools who had the experience of marching upon this hallowed ground. "It was an experience for a city girl. I wasn't rich enough to go to a summer camp. I wouldn't have taken anything for that experience."

Band members from the classes of 50, 51, 52 and 53, if interested in forming a reunion, should call Doloroes (Argentine) Graceffa at 740-537-2106.

Picture of drum major is Dale Westlake.

Campers in front of tent are, left to right: Dolores Wagner, Ruth Ann Campbell, Joan Paisley, Letilia Arehart, Madonna Smith, Dolores Argentine, Marilyn Williams, and counselor unknown.

THE COOL SPRING OF CROXTON'S RUN

2009-08-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

Back before the practice of bottling water in plastic and associating it with Alps Mountain names was in vogue, people obtained the real thing from the real source and kept the promotion really simple.

From no source was the simplicity and ease of living better exemplified than the Cool Spring that once spurted from a hillside across Croxton's Run just outside Toronto.

"It gushes forth from the hillside and no water in existence is purer and sweeter than this," wrote G.H. Stoll in his book Greater Toronto 1899. "It's waters are as clear as crystal and as sparkling. Its source is so situated that there is no suspicion of its contamination. It never fails to yield water and beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitant never has this spring ceased to flow."

A spring results from groundwater that resides within large permeable sandstone and limestone called aquifers, from which some of the water is drawn through cracks of the rock and then through the surface of the earth by gravity.

No record exists to document who first called this aquifer "Cool Spring." Indian scout and city patriarch Michael Myers could have well been the first pioneer to discover it. Given his reputation for simplicity in speech and demeanor, he might have called it "Cool Spring" in passing reference to any of his acquaintances when he patrolled the Ohio River from Yellow Creek to Mingo during the Revolutionary War.

Before Myers, or Abraham Croxton, from whom the nearby creek is named, American Indians undoubtedly stopped to slake their thirst at the bubbling spring. Shawnees ambushed and scalped several soldiers hunting buffalo near this site. Four years later, the same tribe abducted Mary and Margaret Castleman while slaying their uncle John Martin.

In his book Fowler suggested that the use of Cool Spring predated the arrival of white man to the region.

"What tales it could talk, of the scenes enacted within the sound of its musical murmurings: tales of tragedy, love and pathos: tales of aboriginal orgies," he wrote.

During his scouting missions, Myers undoubtedly watched for Indian activity at Cool Spring and similar fresh water sources. Although no reports exist that he encountered any Indians at Cool Spring, he did shoot and slay an Indian at Poplar Spring, which today would be somewhere in the heart of downtown Toronto, and another at the head of Brown's Island near a spring just north of Wellsmar.

After the settlement of the hamlets Newburg, Fosterville and Markle, their merger leading to the eventual incorporation of Toronto in 1881, the use of Cool Spring continued to increase.

"For many miles in all directions," Fowler wrote, "people came to drink of its beautiful waters. On Sabbaths during summer, the spring is constantly surrounded by crowds. Toronto people greatly appreciated this natural, eternal, ice cold drinking fountain."

The tradition continued for years, according to longtime Gem City resident Tom McKelvey. "Before most people owned cars," he said, "people dressed up on Sundays and walked out Croxton's Run and stopped at Cool Spring, and many sat on the decks of Kilgus Country Club drinking the spring water."

Author Walter M. Kestner wrote briefly in The Era of Elegance about such an excursion. "...the pleasant Sunday walk up Croxton's Run to the Cool Springs where the limpid water gushed forth into a watering trough for the animals and a hand dipper was suspended from the wide spreading willow tree from which the humans drank indiscriminately."

"It was just good cool water," McKelvey said. The longtime Toronto resident, in fact, when he was nine years of age, toted water in five-gallon cans by a wagon form Cool Spring to the old two-room Lincoln School. "The school didn't trust river water back then. It was my first job. I made five dollars a month."

Toronto had running water pumped by its own electrical power house as early as 1891, but the popularity of the Cool Spring continued for another half century until it finally fell into disuse.

"It hasn't been used since the clay works shut down," McKelvey said. "It was west of the railroad bridge, down the hill at the bottom on the left."

Fowler believed Cool Spring would never go dry. "It has doubtless flowed for centuries, slaking the thirst of man and beast alike, and will so continue."

This early Toronto author may well be right, for the Cool Spring still flows, although it is obscured by an elevated highway, invasive Japanese knotweed and discarded tires and bricks. The once famous aquifer may no longer be used, but its memory will remain preserved with the Gem City's northernmost boundary, which, like its source of origin, is named, simply, Spring Street.

The Kaul Clay Riot of 1935

2009-07-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

The Toronto sky was dark gray and roiled, and a cold wind was stirring up north. On the the morning of April 17, 1935, four days before Easter Sunday, inside the coal-heated north end schools of Lincoln and St. Joseph's, the children were fidgety, eagerly awaiting the hour of the final bell granting them a short spring vacation for the holy day.

Meanwhile, less than a quarter-mile west, pickets held their posts at the entrances of Kaul Clay Manufacturing where this local of United Clay and Brick Workers of America had been on strike since April 1, the union asking for a closed shop, a check-off system and a nickel raise an hour from an industry whose laborers averaged earning four dollars a day in the middle of the Great Depression. The work stoppage at Kaul was one of 15 Eastern Ohio clay operations shut down from the strike, with nearly 4,000 workers idled.

The strikers had drastically slowed production of clay pipes and other vitreous clay products manufactured at Kaul. Pant manager Jimmy Dyer, a certified public accountant recently relocated from Pittsburgh, brought in an estimated 18 to 50 replacement workers and as many as ten special deputized guards armed with .38 caliber pistols, three high-powered rifles, two sawed-off shotguns and one Colt machine gun, as well as canisters of tear gas.

"Scabs" organized labor called such replacement workers during that period, and on the day shift of April 17, the replacement workers were busy preparing orders to ship.

The 200 idled Kaul Clay workers had plenty of support in Jefferson County, especially with organized labor from Union Clay in Empire, Stratton Clay of the same village, and Peerless Clay in Port Homer and the East Ohio Sewer Pipe Company from Irondale. In fact, an estimated 200 to 300 of these sympathizers marched south down the Cleveland nad Pittsburgh Railroad tracks while a dump truck filled with clay shoppers drove from Irondale to support picketing Kaul workers. Amongst them was Tom McKelvey, a closed union shop member who worked for Stratton Clay.

"We marched down the tracks to Kaul Clay," McKelvey said. "'Take them out; they're non-union!' the clay shoppers shouted. 'We're going to stop the shop!'"

McKelvey said that the objective of the marchers was to breach security, overwhelm the pipe house and then take over the press. "If you shut down the press, you shut down the operation."

The Herald-Star estimated the mob size at 200 to 300 men. McKelvey said that the crowd of sympathizers was more like 35. At the onset of the strike, Jefferson County Sheriff Ray Long had informed the Kaul Clay rank-and-file that Federal law limited it to post no more than six picketers at each entrance.

Whatever the number of organized labor and sympathizers present, superintendent Dyer, his management team and special security guards were prepared to repel them.

"About 1 p.m. a crowd of strikers, a hundred or more, came down the railroad from the direction of Port Homer," the Steubenville Herald-Star quoted Charles Merryman, a Jefferson County sheriff's deputy. "They came to my gate and demanded admittance. They said they wanted to talk to the men working in the plant to try to induce them to quit work.

"I would not allow them to enter and told them to go away before someone got shot. They went to another gate and were told the same thing."

The clay shoppers split up, some of them rushing up an unguarded embankment parallel to the tracks, then into the pipe yard, only to be greeted by 150 gun shots.

"We could hear bullets hitting in the pipe piles," McKelvey said. "There were at least three snipers up there. It was mass confusion.

"Then I heard, 'Got two men down there!'"

Twelve feet from McKelvey on the ground lay Andy Lastivka, of Port Homer and Peerless Clay, mortally wounded by a .38 caliber bullet. Not far from the fallen clay shopper was another stricken clay worker, Andy Straka, shot in the leg. Straka would soon recover at East Liverpool Hospital, as did four other union partisans, but Straka would carry the bullet in his leg for the remainder of his life. Jefferson County Coroner Charles Wells ruled Lastivka's death a homicide.

The day following the riot, Dyer issued his first statement, accusing the pickets of opening fire on employees and guards and that no shots were fired by any company official.

"Dyer also asserted that the strike which started April 1, does not have the sympathy of a majority of the workers and blames outsiders for the tradgedy..." the Herald-Star reported.

Jefferson County Prosecuter Arthur L. Hooper questioned the Kaul Clay deputies and another 25 witnesses and determined every shooting casuality occurred on company property while finding no evidence that any of the pickets who invaded the plant were armed. Already warned by Sheriff Long not to arm themselves, many of the pickets rushed past the gates April 17 guarded by deputies Cyrus Cook and Charles Merryman threw back their coats and said, "I got no gun, look."

According to Joe Lastivka, who was three years of age at the time of his father's death, neither his father nor Straka breeched Kaul property. "He was just standing on the railroad tracks and so was Straka. He was struck in the chest with a bullet they think was from a security guard from a roof or window."

"It was the first time anyone used gun fire to stop a strike," McKelvey said. "Spectators across the tracks thought they were using blanks. Dyer was new to the area and big anti-union. He wanted to show off."

No matter who fired first at whom, the death of Andy Lastivka became cause celebre within the clay region of Eastern Ohio. His death was not only a result of the labor movement sweeping across the country, but also symbolized the solidarity of Eastern European immigrants, particularly Slovaks, many of whom served in World War I and now desired acceptance and respect as American citizens while manning some of the hardest and lowest paying jobs within the industry.

Andy Lastivka, a husband and father of two young children, was interred on Easter Sunday at Toronto Union Cemetary before a crowd of 3,000 people who had marched from St. Joseph's Greek Catholic Church.

The parade of solidarity from Port Homer and Stratton to Toronto was so large that highway officials had to shut down Ohio Route Seven and detour motorists through rural roads.

Even the local law agencies tended to side with the labor movement after Lastivkas death. During the only incident at Kaul to occur since the troubles of April 17, a truck driver hauling finished products from Kaul sometime during May was halted by a barricade of 40 to 50 pickets--an illegal assembly. Dyer telephoned Sheriff Long, who responded that he had no men available to help. Dyer also called Toronto Police Chief Thomas Wilson, who arrived at the scene alone.

Wilson asked the truck driver whether he had a driver's license, and the trucker answered he did not. Wilson then ordered the driver to back up and unload the pipe, but permitted him to depart with the empty truck.

Meanwhile, Dyer and other managers of the clay industry negotiated with the United Clay and Brick Workers through federal mediators at Uhrichsville. On June 10, 54 days after they went on strike, the union settled for a two cents an hour raise, no check-off system and no closed shop. Dyer fired some union officials upon their return to work.

No one was convicted for any of the April 17 shootings. Lastivka's widow Anna did not receive any monetary compensation for her husband's wrongful death. She and her young children went on to live with her mother in Stratton where son Joe helped at his grandmother's grocery store.

"I worked at Union Clay during my junior and senior years of high school," Joe Lastivka said. "When I graduated I went to the Kaul office and asked if I could see Jimmy Dyer. I wanted a job. The secretary said he wasn't there, but I could see somebody move in his office. I just walked in. 'You know who I am, don't you'" I said.

"He said, 'I'm not hiring.' Dyer said that I would destroy his building and cause trouble. What did I know? I was only 18."

In addition to his legacy as a tough negotiator, Jimmy Dyer and Kaul Clay had philanthropic reputations, donating the property for Dyer Country Club and the 900-acre Kaul Wildlife Area, as well as being one of the main financial contributors for the 1948 construction of the new St. Francis School.

In 1981, Kaul Clay ceased operations.

HISTORIC CROXTON'S RUN

2009-07-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

Every history has a starting point, and for Toronto, Ohio, it began at the mouth of Croxton's Run where the currents of time have eddied sometimes as violently as the jaded green currents flowing before it.

The stream defining Toronto's northernmost city limit was named after Abraham Croxton, a quaker and acquaintance of William Penn. The colonial governor himself granted Croxton 400 acres on both sides of the Ohio River, part of which is present day new Cumberland where Croxton settled. He and his wife Esther Dwyer had three children on the eastern shore of the Ohio, most notably son William, born in 1768.

The family remained in what was then Brooke County, Virgina, where young William grew up with ambition. Across the river at the stream bearing the family name, William tapped into the abundance of virgin alluvial forest, dominated by silver maples several feet in diameter, their crowns towering more than 100 feet. Although the red and sugar maples produce the best quality sap, the silver produces an acceptable one from which syrup (then called molasses) is made as well as sugar, candy and even alcoholic drink.

Croxton took his harvest across the river to his Black Horse Tavern, then a log cabin and one of the sites along which Indian agent and fur trader George Croghan stopped on his journeys down the Ohio River during the 1700s.

"We stopped at William Croxton's tavern, the sign of the Black Horse on the Virginia side," Croghan wrote in his journal, "and got a bowl of excellent cider oil. This is stronger than Madeira and is strained from the cider by suffering it to freeze in the cask during the winter, and then drawing off and barreling up the spiritous part which remains liquid."

The origin of the name Black Horse is uncertain. One theory is that Black Horse is derived from Moses Morse, who was a painter of signs, all of which were known for having the image of a black horse on them, printed from a design cut in pasteboard. The Morse story back then said that his road out from New England to the Ohio River could be traced all the way by the tavern signs he had painted, paying his traveling expenses. Law back then required publicans and inn keepers to have emblems painted in fair letters suspended beside every business.

Croxton also had a sawmill and a gristmill on the Northwest Territory side of his property, these enterprises fraught with peril from indigenous tribes, who sometimes sought to slake their thirst from the cool spring bubbling from the hillside less than a quarter-mile from the Ohio River, the present day Spring Street eventually being named after the aquifer.

In his book, Greater Toronto 1899, G.H. Stoll wrote: "A further evidence that this section was a favorite hunting place as well as battle ground for numerous tribes of aborigines is the fact that thousands of flint arrow heads, battle axes and other weapons of warfare have been found here and can yet be found without difficulty."

As recently as 2008, excavation for a new home at the mouth of Croxton's Run produced Indian projectile points.

In 1787, a battle ocured there between 14 hunters from Fort Steuben seeking buffalo, and a band of Shawnees. Ambushing at night, the Shawnees killed and scalped four hunters. The surviving whites managed to reach their canoes at the mouth of Croxton's Run and escaped down the Ohio to the fort.

Three years later while a family and friends boiled sap at the sugar camp, two Wyandots and Mowhawk killed a Mr. Martin, abducting his nieces, Mary and Margaret Castleman, bartering and dispersing them to Indian villages bordering Lake Erie.

In 1792--the Indians escalating their bloody forays along the upper Ohio Valley--settlers organized to thwart the menace. One of the outcomes of the Committee of Holliday's Cove (present day downtown Weirton) was the erecting of blockhouses at strategic points.

"Blockhouses are already erected, we mean, Sir, at Yellow Creek, Croxton's Run and the mouth of Herman's Creek," James Campbell of Holliday's Cove wrote Colonel Baird of the Virginia Militia. "Men placed in these stations would, in our opinion, be the best mode of disposing them and most agreeable to the inhabitants."

The duration and fate of the Croxton's Run blockhouse is unrecorded, but most likely burned or disassembled for wood by the time Michael Myers assumed ownership of the property as a reward for his services as an Indian scout during the Revolutionary War. In 1795, Croxton lost his property to Myers because he had failed to secure tenure and a land grant by notifying the government.

In addition to the natural resources on the Northwest Territory side, often referred to as the "right bank," the scenery itself was an attraction as written by Fowler. "Croxton's Run has been treated kindly by nature and is a beautiful resort in summer, cooling breezes always floating down its valley, and this combined with its grassy bottoms, dense foliage and cozy corners, make it an ideal idling place."

Undoubtedly, Croxton and Myers knew each other. During the war, Myers scouted the area from Mingo Bottoms to Yellow Creek. Myers had to have known the local terrain well and his selection of the Croxton's run acreage was not a haphazard guess.

In 1774, Myers dispatched two Mingoes with his long rifle "Limber Jinney" at nearby Hollow Rock and a couple of days later fired upon a bateaux full of Indians crossing the Ohio River to investigate the massacre of Chief Logan's people at the mouth of Yellow Creek. Myers also dropped an Indian sipping at Poplar Spring, located at the heart of downtown Toronto, and another at Deer Rock, at water's edge below the head of Brown's Island. Obviously, Myers knew the local terrain well so that his selection of the Croxton's Run acreage was not a haphazard guess.

Scion's accounts of Michael Myers report that the patriarch and founding father of Toronto predecessor Newburg constructed grist and saw mills and a log cabin on the property opposite Gamble's Run, which, incidentally was the maiden name of William Croxton's wife Mary. Myers also operated a ferry and a wharf opposite Croxton's Black Horse Landing. Whether the two families competed, cooperated or became antagonistic to each other can only be a matter of speculation, although from the right bank the property was seldom called Croxton's Run, but rather "the Myers Mill down at the river, Sugar Camp and even "opposite Rambles Run," the last an obvious slur at the Croxton's in-laws.

The Croxton claims and competition eventually ended. Mary Croxton left husband William and their six children for John Campbell, leading to an 1809 divorce. Two years later, William Croxton resettled at Monroeville, Jefferson County, 15 miles northwest.

Two and one-half centuries after his father Abraham arrived, the Croxton name continues flowing through time as does its historic stream. At the mouth is a large gravel bar called by the Army Corps of Engineers the Croxton Bar and just a pea gravel's throw downstream is the marker and light for Ohio River Mile 58.4, still referred today by riverboat pilots as Black Horse.

LITTLE LEAGUE

2009-04-07T06:33:00.000-07:00

My first solid recollection of the national pastime was returning home one afternoon after second grade, watching my father dance a thousand jigs the moment Bill Mazeroski swatted a home run over the ivied left field wall of Forbes Field to win the World Series over the New York Yankees.

I was immediately addicted.

Unfortunately, the dance lessons did not quite pan out; so I put my efforts to make the big time by playing Little League baseball.

One evening, I received a telephone call from Ron Farrell, coach of Catrell's P & H. I thought P & H stood for power and hitting but soon learned it meant plumbing and heating. Either meaning, I contributed little, unless when you consider keeping my end of the bench warm.

Back in 1963, my first year of Toronto Junior League baseball, we had about 20 boys on each team while no such rule existed that every boy had to play at least one full inning and one at bat. Those boys who did not play during the week had the opportunity to play on Saturdays against the benchwarmers on another club.

That was the year of expansion for Gem City baseball. Added to the already existing ten-team league were the Frosty Creme and Hughes Furniture, known as F & H as their ballcaps indicated, and the Knights of Columbus, or simply K of C. Othe teams included Peerless Clay, Titanium, Hancock, Union Bank, Kaul Clay, American Legion, Toronto Lanes, Lions Club, Kiwanis and, of course, Catrell's P & H.

The outfield was arced by a red snow fence pockmarked by line drives or outfielders whose P.F. Flyers and Keds failed to halt their momentum while attempting to run down drives swatted by the likes of Jerome Gabis, Mike Dilly, Bill Fisher and other talented 12-year-olds who were big enough to wield 31- and 32-inch wooden Louisville Sluggers.

Personally I preferred a 28-inch model endorsed by Roberto Clemente, one which Coach Ferrell advised me to choke up about six inches. Some kids choked up so much they appeared to be swinging three-celled flashlights, with the same results I was having.

I got the choke part down, all right, striking out all three at bats on Saturday.

My father had one piece of advice for hitting: "Keep your eye on the ball." On my first official Little League at bat I faced twelve-year-old Hancock righty Robert "Rabbit" Harris, whose fastball had more heat than the entire bench of Catrell's Plumbing and Heating. After swatting air on the first pitch, I discovered Harris was nicknamed Rabbit because his fastball darted and skipped like a cottontail chased by a hound. I took my father's advise to the batter's box, keeping my eye on the ball, in fact, both eyes, as the hand-sewn Rawlings stuck me right on the forehead.

I had taken a mighty Mickey Mantle cut at the baseball, but I doubt that even the Mick could so much as pop a blooper when he's swinging 20 inches of stick.

During my second year on Catrell's P & H, we had one kid, J.R. Pope, who swung the 32-inch model without so much as choking up one smallicule. His Rocky Colivito bat looked like a caveman's club, and when he connected, the ball not only soared over the red snow fence, but also the silver chained-linked one no less than 50 feet farther back down left field line.

To me, J.R. appeared old enough and big enough to buy 3.2 beer, his size making him equally feared at the plate as well as from the mound.

For lesser players like me, the outfielders positioned themselves upon the bare spots that had been worn into the grass straight away in left, center and right field. For J.R., however, the outfielders just leaned upon the slatted wooden fence, jawing away on their Bazooka bubble gum.

Occasionally they would spear a ball Pope had slugged, usually one returned by a spectator who was sitting on a lawn chair near the tennis courts, some 50 feet beyond the silver fence.

We went 19-1 that year while winning the championship, only losing to Kaul Clay and Oink Coulter's mysterious curve ball.

Oink, younger brother of former St. Louis Cardinal and New York Met Chip Coulter, was the best athlete between the ages of 12 and 16 I have ever seen. Oink was the only pitcher amongst all twelve teams that could bend the ball more than two inches. His curve appeared to drop two feet as though rolling off a table.

The 11-year-old strategy for hitting such a pitch was to stand at the front edge of the batter's box in order to swing before the pitch started to break. The, Oink would blow his fastball by you.

The Little Leaguers who did swat a home run off Coulter or anyone else during that era were rewarded with a giant ice cream cone, the highest such priced at 25 cents, at the Frosty Creme, located at the southwest junction of Biltmore and Franklin avenues. The 25-center was at least the size of a four-cell flashlight and needed choked up on just to tilt toward one's mouth.

The closest I came to collecting this tasty trophy was the first pitch on opening day against Peerless Clay pitcher Chris Molchan when I hit a towering shot to right field. As I rounded first base, I could taste the cold chocolate custard, I could feel it dripping down my wrist and--crack! The top of the snow fence splintered, my ball trickling back onto the playing field.

I would later hit a record 159 homers that summer, but they happened in my backyard with a wiffle ball, and I would have to buy my own ice cream.

CRUISIN'

2009-04-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

First of all, I was never a muscle car kind of guy. I owned a few muscles cars, but that's because they needed a strong back and legs to push them.

The slowest year of a young man's life is the one spanning from 15 to 16 years of age, the 12 crawling months before a boy reaches the ultimate rite of passage--obtaining his driver's license--which in turn, could lead to the ultimate rite of passage. How I envied older guys like Bob the "G" Grant and John Skrabak, cruisin' around the Gem City in a green metallic Pontiac GTO and a dark blue Chevy Malibu Super Sport, looking cool and rakish and peeling more rubber than a condom inspector.

By the time I reached 16 and then 18, the legal age for consuming 3.2 beer, I was still envying them.

My first car was a 1963 Plymouth Valiant I had purchased for 75 dollars from Chuck "Flap" Walker. It was not much to look at being the only turbine green car in the county, but it came with bucket seats--galvanized--and four on the floor--Hop-n-gator beer cans I was certain Flap had forgotten to throw away. When I exceeded driving my Valiant more than 30 miles an hour, the front fenders flapped as though a Penguin were trying to take off from an ice floe.

The coolest thing about the car besides the driver and his friends was the name Valiant. Donnie McFall and I recalled a passage from Shakepeare's Julius Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant only taste of death but once."

Donnie and I did a lot of cruisin' in the Valiant and a lot of quoting because the radio did not work.

For only three dollars, a guy could buy three gallons of gas, a six pack of Blue Ribbon and a pack of Luckys and then try to pick up chicks with his good looks.

We studied the other cool guy's cruisin' techniques: how they tilted their shades at a cool angle, the crook of their wrists draped over the top of the steering wheel, fuzzy white dice dangling from the rear view mirror, just burning gas, 31.9 cents a gallon, leaded, too, warbling blue smoke from dual exhausts.

The muscle cars of the era had engines so big and powerful they could be compared to major league batting averages. For instance, Roberto Clemente batted something like .351 in 1961, the same figure in cubic inches making one bad-assed machine, one that could burn and screech rubber down Franklin Street from the Frosty Creme to Lenny Ford's Sunoco. Anything around 400 was in Ted William's territory, rare indeed, and did not keep tires long.

Another way to characterize a car's power was by the number of its cylinders. The big boys had eight poppers, or 8 packs, for the equivalent of cylinders, of course, while a Volkswagon, I believe, that day classified as a 4-pack.

One sultry summer evening, T-town smelling like the Goodyear plant, I pulled my Valiant into the drive-in parking lot of the Frosty Creme, all set to devour a Goonie Burger, when a younger, unlicensed boy, obviously counting the slow days when he could be just like Donnie and me, cruisin' for chicks on our good looks, approached, pointing at my machine, "Hey, what do you have in there, a 24-ouncer?"

About at that time, this really cool cat pulled up Biltmore, gunning his engines alongside a group of teenagers clustered around a picnic table. With an index finger, the cat lifted his shades up slowly above his eyebrows (It was 10:30 p.m. the street lamps must have been too bright) and then flicked his cigarette out, and it cartwheeled to my Converse All Star tennis shoes. The cool cat nodded his chin ever so slightly, tapped his shades back to place and then coated Biltmore with two streaks of Firestone.

At that moment, the thought occurred to me that no one peeled rubber unless a crowd was watching.

The following morning, a Sunday, after mass, I drove past Terry Starr's service station, and, there, on the corner lot, sat the cool cat's machine, crumbled, the hood keel-shaped and impaling the center of a shattered window, the result of hitting a cement bridge piling at 60 miles an hour.

I pulled over. Peering inside the mangled car, I saw shards of glass strewn all along the leather interior, which reeked of beer and whiskey; the Foster Grant sunglasses on the dislodged bucket seat were smeared with a patch of bloody eyebrow.

After viewing the grisly wreckage, I realized I would have to redefine cool by cruisin' responsibly.

Soon after my epiphany, the art of strutting had arrived. A guy could be cool and walk at the same time, all of which was good, too, because the Valiant soon tasted death but once and had a proper burial at Lackey's junkyard.

CONFESSIONS OF A BUMPER SKIER

2009-03-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

Snowflakes swirled around the beery streetlamp at the corner of Euclid and Grant streets where I awaited upon crunchy snow for the arrival of Mr. X. He insisted on being called Mr. X or Mr. Red Knight because decades ago when he was out hopping cars he told his parents he was studying at the library and still feared their reprisals today.

I had arrived perhaps ten minutes early at the intersection, noticing not much had changed here since I had attended nearby St. Francis School some 45 years before. The scent of black cherry wafting from a chimney reminded me of the harsher smoke of coal furnaces that were pre-eminent during my youth. I could hear the rattling of tire chains in the distant past.

Finally, Mr. X appeared, wearing his Toronto High letterman jacket and a tasseled red knit hat. He was the same age as I and had been quite an athlete in several sports, and it came as no surprise that T-towners considered him the best in the Gem City to have ever graced the rear bumper of a Ford Fairlane.

Mr. X could do it all--punt, pass, hit, catch, run. The only times I remember he dropped passes or got caught stealing base was because he had a limp.

As he approached me, I could tell Mr. X still had that same old strut, exuding confidence, telling all the world, "Yes, I can still hop a car, even if it's a Toyota."

His firm grip almost put me to my knees. No doubt he could still cling to a bumper clear down to Johnny's Pizza.

"This was the best spot ever for hopping cars in the south end, he said. "There used to be hedges on the Melhorn's side of Euclid where me and the boys would hide." he pointed to the depressions running east to west on both sides of the intersection. "Cars would have to slow down here or else risk knocking their tailpipes off. You then slipped from the hedges and ran before they accelerated."

The bumper skiing buff said that the S-bend along River Avenue next to the old Manos Mansion was another prime spot as was the Biltmore-Madison corner.

When asked about car-hopping in the north end of Toronto, Mr X. replied: "A south-ender did not cross north of Myers Street unless he wanted beat up. Some guys up there would beat you up just because they did not like your looks--even if you were wearing a ski mask."

Mr. X said that wearing the proper clothing was essential to excel at bumper skiing. "You could not wear galoshes, clod hoppers or your mama's army boots," he said. "You had to wear school shoes with soles and heels as smooth as trail baloney."

He pointed to his Florshein wing tips, the soles glistening with Turtle Wax.

A pair of good gloves was the second piece of essential equipment, Mr. X said. "You want a warm pair, obviously, but not so thick that you fail to clamp upon a bumper."

The hip car hopper demonstrated his bumper-gripping technique. The chrome king maintained most kids preferred the two-hand-over technique, more commonly known as the western grip, while he personally favored the over-under, or continental grip, giving him stability.

"De Sotas had the best bumpers for car hopping," he said. "Fords and Chevys were second. Dodges were okay.

"I remember we were going to attempt a new town record of ten kids riding one bumper from this very spot. School was cancelled that morning and we spent all day packing Euclid Street by sled riding, skidding all the way to Findlay Street. It was perfect. Of course, you had to ride the bumper at least three blocks for the record to count.

"When the street lights flashed on, the first victim appeared, a blue '63 Rambler. Coming north on Grant, the Rambler slowed nearly to a stop for the gulch. It swung west at Euclid and we latched on like steel shavings to a magnet--all ten of us--me with my over-under continental grip, they with their more conventional western grips, a couple of kids clinging to waists and one to a shirt tail.

"Instead of continuing uphill, the car whipped onto Franklin, fishtailing south. But we all hung on, some of us one-handed, and I'm thinking, 'We need to go as far as Lenny Ford's Sunoco,' when suddenly we hit a patch of cinders and we fly backward, the bumper of the blue 63 Rambler still in our grips."

Mr. X slipped something from his breast pocket and took a long draw from it and then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his Red Knight letterman jacket.

"Well, the driver slams on his brakes and jumps out of the Rambler faster than you can say 'American junk.' We all take off running in different directions. The strategy for such a situation is to bring along someone much slower than you, in this case--. Well, I can't name him because he was supposed to be studying with me at the library that night instead of hanging on to some kid's leather belt. So, let's just call him Snail, for the record.

"Anyhow, the driver was from the north end and let Snail off easy, giving him a black eye and a bloody nose. Snail told his parents that when pulling WAR AND PEACE from the shelf, the book fell, conking him on the noggin."

Just then a white Jeep Wrangler slowed for the northern gulch in Grant Street. Mr. X slipped on his gloves, elbowed me in the ribs and said, "Watch this."

The Wrangler swung west and Mr. X sprinted after it, in fact, almost catching the Jeep ten yards up street. But Mr. X pulled up inches short, perhaps not quite the athlete he was 45 years before, but I remembered him well in both victory and defeat, especially with that old familiar limp.