Dayton Stories Project
Story Circle Session #091295
Miamisburg Senior Adult Center
Miamisburg, Ohio
September 12, 1995
Tell Us a Story
Interviewer: Faye Neace Recorder: Todd Williams Trascriber: Holly Bergman Transcribe Typist: Sue Broadstock
Participants: Daphne Armstrong, Richard Armstrong, Helen Behnken, Betty Daily, William Daily, Tony Dallas, marcia Dunahue, Lawrence E. Fogle, Marge Judd, Faye Neace, Elma Reichbauer, Ray Roberts, Marilyn Shannon, Mildred Skelding
This session lasts approximately 58 minutes.
Due to its length the interview has been split into two parts.
PART ONE
PART TWO
The following transcription of the session has been edited, with repeated phrases or interruptions deleted to make the text flow more smoothly. It is suggested that visitors who find the text interesting take the time to listen to the audio portion of this session. A more detailed text will eventually be added.
Faye Neace explained the purpose and mechanics of a story circle. Members of the circle introduced themselves and told a little bit about themselves.
Larry Fogle
I was born June 15, 1911, along with my twin sister. She arrived before I did. She was born on the fifteenth and I was born on the sixteenth, but technicality says it was the fifteenth, so that’s what we did.. I was fortunate to have her around in my life for some 68 years. She has passed on of course. I was born in West Carrollton, Ohio, educated in that community in a town called Alexandersville. Now, don’t look for it on the map, ‘cause it was non-existent. But I think there’s one man here that knows what I’m talking about. Our home life was a delight. My mother had a sense of humor that made us laugh a lot of the time, and yet she had a sternness about her that corrected all of us. Now my dad supported her in that. I was educated in the local schools, then graduated in 1930, I went to Ohio State for five years, this was during the depression era, came back, and sought my career locally. Of course needless to say, there was a depression we all had to go through, there was World War II we had to go through, and the political and social changes in the sixties and seventies and into the nineties. I retired from United Color Press in 1976 and have been a part of this senior center from its very inception. I find there are some lovely, delightful, and most precious friends in this area.
This involved a shopping tour that my parents took. And they did that at intervals, involved my twin sister. My mother would announce that she had to go buy some gingham, calico, rick rack; all these things to make dresses and shirts. And the only way to get them was to go to Dayton. And this involved going on the inter-urban. My dad got dressed up in his stiff collar, my mother in her leg-of-mutton dress and all fancy and high-topped shoes. We were dressed up halfway decent too. Anyway we get on the inter-urban; and for those people who have ridden on an inter-urban, its and experience in itself. This inter-urban, then, goes into Dayton and entered on South Main Street where the old NCR buildings were, there. We got downtown, and at that time, the overhead was not there, that meant stopping at Sixth Street for the railroad. Now, we got off the inter-urban, and my mother knew those stores. There was Therkield’s, there was Adlers and Childs, there was Elder Beerman, Rike’s, Merric’s where she would go as a routine. Now this was an all-day affair, and that of course then to catch the inter-urban back home again, we went to the railroad station. We would go to that station, and oh boy, a lot of activity around that place. It was where the old canal was nearby, and these inter-urban cars would come in and they had signs on ‘em, “Richmond”, “Toledo”, “Columbus”, “Cincinnati”, and I thought, “boy, maybe someday I’ll get to those places.” Well anyway, by that time the darkness had fallen. And when that inter-urban started west on Third Street, the lights came on, those blinking lights, and it was a fairyland. You went down there and all the stores were just a’sparkling, and oh, I thought that was wonderful. Well we gawked and looked and looked and gawked and then finally got down to Third and Main Street. And oh, those beautiful lights stayed in mind forever. All of a sudden, the inter-urban disappeared after it passed the NCR. By that time, we were out in the no man’s land, and it didn’t show any more lights until we got down to a town called Carmon. Well, these inter-urbans would stop everyplace along the line. And it did, we got home. In my mind, I still see those lights sparkling, and those stores and everything.
Helen Behnken
I was born and raised in Appalachia, in Kentucky. And when I was a young girl, I had to go visit my aunt all the time, and stay with her, because she had several children And one day we were sitting on the porch, up this holler in this log house, and my aunt was looking way down the road and through this cornfield, and she said, “Oh my gosh, Helen, I think the revenuers are coming! I know they’re gonna search the house. You should go, there’s two quarts of whiskey there on the kitchen table. You’ve go to hide the whiskey someplace.” She was nursing the baby, sittin’ on the porch.
So I said, “Oh my gosh, what shall I do?” I went in the kitchen, and I thought, “if I hide it in the over, they’ll look there, if I hide it in the cupboards they’ll look and search. I better take it out of the house. It might be better if I took it out.” So I ran out of the back door with these two quarts of whiskey in my hand. They were moonshine in quart jars, all sealed up. And I thought, “Oh, where shall I hide this?” And I ran around the house and looked, and there were some bushes, and I said no. Passed the house and here’s this big rain barrel, about a fifty gallon old wooden rain barrel. And it was full of old dirty water that rolled off the old roof on the house, those old shingled roofs. And it was as black inside, and there must have been forty gallons in there. And I thought, “Hey, I’ll just put those right down in there. So I just plunged those two, hoping they’d sink. Went down in that barrel as far as I could reach and I put those two quarts of whiskey right in the bottom of this rain barrel in that old dirty water. And they just settled down. And I said, “Oh goodness, I’ll go tell my aunt.”
And by the time, the men had got up to the house. And they wore brown suits and hats, and we knew they were revenuers “cause they weren’t dressed like old farmers and old tacky hunters. They said, “Good evenin’ Miss Carpenter. You know we’re going to look for moonshine at your house, your husband’s makin’ it. Is your husband home?” She said, “No, sir, he’s not here, he’s gone and I don’t know when he’ll be back.” “Well, we have a search warrant.” So he flashed a little piece of paper and said, “We’ll come in.” So they looked all through the house, searched EVERY place, went in the kitchen and they looked and they looked, and they walked around the house, and they just didn’t find nothin’. So they said, “Thank you, ma’am, we’ll go.” So they left, and I set down on the porch and just picked up the baby and held it, and just acted like everything was fine. They got way down the ranch, this little path, and my aunt said, “Where id you put that whiskey?” And I said, “Oh, don’t worry, I found the best place. I just dropped it in the big rain barrel out there.” She said, “That was sure smart. How’d you ever think of that?” I said, “I just was think’ fast, and that was the last place I thought they’d never look.” About sixty years ago, I think I was about 12 years old.
Mildred Skelding
My grandparents settled in the wilderness, down in Appalachia. They came from there, over from Pennsylvania. I lived way back in the mountains, I was born in a log cabin and lived there ‘til I was 20. I got married and came to Dayton in ‘47 when I was 22. I had done some lab work, and looked in the paper for advertisements for jobs and found one. I didn’t know how to dial a telephone; the people I was staying with had to how me how! I had to change the bus in Dayton to get to work; I started work at Monsanto.
Bill Daily
I can always remember one thing particularly. When I was a freshman in high school, we moved to Miamisburg from Wilmington, Ohio, which is a small Quaker town with a Quaker college, and so forth. This is when I was in seventh and eighth grade we were in high school, in the high school building and everything. We had a lot of interesting talks by the professors at the school, we had speakers who came in and talked to us about many things. We were hearing about Hitler, and we were hearing about all kinds of things, long before it was being talked about elsewhere, because of the nature of the community. When I moved here, one of the first things that got me was when we were living in Wilmington we had dial telephones, I’d never known anything but dial telephones. I came to Miamisburg, and we had a handset you hooks it up to talk to the operator. And for the first time in my life, we lived on a farm. So there I was in a new situation, milking cows and pigs and all this kind of stuff, which I was familiar with, but never really had to do it every day. And everything seemed so different. Because Miamisburg, in certain respects, at that time seemed very interesting because we had a streetcar that went down the main street! The inter-urban, it could go anyplace. And we had a lot of things here, the river and the canal, and the famous picture of up north of town, where we could watch all the modes of transportation. We had the airplane in the sky, the inter-urban, we had the railroad and we had the river, we had the highway and the canal, the Erie Canal. All of those things were things that I’d studied about in geography already before, so there were interesting things. We had railroads with gates that came down, and things that I hadn’t been around, particularly. So it was quite a contrast, and yet I’d been an usher in a theater in Wilmington. It was the old Murphy Theater, which was supposed to be the grandest theater in southwest Ohio and all that kind of stuff. And we had all the latest movies, we had world premieres, we had all the stage shows that they had in Dayton at the Colonial or Keyes, we had the same things that went on down in Cincinnati. All these things the week before they go to Dayton, but it was a very different type of thing. I came to Miamisburg, and went to the Plaza Theater in Miamisburg, and this was just asa freshman in hight school, and I was utterly shocked at the behavior that they allowed in the Miamisburg Theater. Up and down the aisles, a’hollerin’ and yellin’ and screaming and doing everything under the sun, and anybody in Wilmington would’ve been ejected immediately. It was just a culture shock, the whole difference between one town and another town.
Marcia Dunahue
I sorta think of this as sort of a love story. After I’d been at Ohio U., I came back and started i Miami Jacobs in 1945. And I came down from West Milton on the bus, and got off there at Second Street, and went back to Ludlow, where Miami Jacobs was, above the old Seville. I was walking down Ludlow, and here comes my future husband, George, up Ludlow. And Oh, God, he looked great. He was just back from the islands, fighting in the South Pacific with the 37th group, you know. So he and I were the only ones that went into the lobby at Miami Jacobs, and up the elevator together we went, you know. So there, really, started a nice romance. We went to Miami Jacobs and both graduated. Btu before we got to the graduation, one day he noticed that I came down and out from Miami Jacobs and made a right, and went over out towards the bus station, which was over on Wilkinson at that time. So one day he pulled up beside me on the street, and says, “Where are you going?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to catch a bus.” And he said, “Well, I’ll take you home.” Well he didn’t realize how far Laura was from Dayton. And in those days, you know gas rationing and everything. So I said, “Okay.” Well, we kept going out North Main Street, kept going up to Union, Englewood, West Milton and so forth, you know. So we finally got to my house, and we had a nice evening and so forth. Well, nobody has enough gas to get home. So my dad had a fleet of trucks. Well, Daddy gave him a nice little gasoline, took him down to the pump, you know, took care of him to get back home. But you said to express an experience to change our lives, and I think that was one, great one that changed me, because then we will be married 49 years next year.
Daphne Armstrong
Ths was back in 1934. We lived up on Smithville Road near Huffman Avenue, and my dad heard that McCall’s, out on the west side, was hiring. And so, he didn’t have enough money to ride the bus, so he walked out there to see about getting a job. You know, I never found out whether he got the job or not, but on the way back, why, he came through downtown Dayton. And Adlers and Childs had just opened a new store called the Home Store, and they were giving out cake. Well, Daddy stopped, and he stood in line two different times to get cake to bring home to us.
Marge Judd
When I think of my childhood, it’s the sounds that bring back memories. We had a victrola when I was a child. It was a marvelous machine. It had a crank on the side and you had to turn that crank frequently, or the sound wavered and died. My dad was a fan of the stage, of opera, of musicals’ we had records of everything. He was also a great fan of Fanny Brice; we had records of Fanny. There was a comedy team called Gallagher and Sheen, they half-sang and half-talked as they gave their sill spiels. All of the sounds of radio announcers’ voices as they announced baseball games; you could see every play. You could see every play as those men talked. And then of course, there were my favorite shows. There was Rin Tin Tin, and there was One Man’s Family, and Shanu the Magician, and oh, many many many more. And as an aside to this, recently our writing club was interviewed by a fourth grade class. And those children, bless their hearts, could not conceive of there being a time when there wasn’t television. And when the teacher took ‘em back to the classroom after they had interviewed us, she had them write up what we had said. And it was hard to recognize it, when we read those essays. But one thing they said as they had interviewed me, was that, “They didn’t have television, they watched the radio.” Then there were carousels, we called them merry-go-rounds back then, and there was one at Forest Park, there was one at Lakeside Park; we though we’d died and gone to heaven any time our parents would take us to ride those merry-go-rounds. My dad would stand beside me as the horse went up and down; he was trying to catch the brass ring, because that would give us a free ride. Usually, the rings that were ejected were of silver finish, not that beautiful brass ring. He hardly ever caught that.
Betty Daily
I was thinking of my very first job. After I left Miami University, I went to Miami Jacobs, and I got through the year and a half course in less than a year. I wasn’t quite finished, but I’d passed everything anyway, and a job came up with J. R. Woodhull and company. And they were stockbrokers. So I go trotting over there, and I followed Miss Sweeney, who had been there for 20 years. As Bill says, Miamisburg really was sorta back-woodsy, and I was following Miss Sweeney, who they assured me had been very efficient for these 20 years. And I didn’t even know how to dial a telephone, so that was the first thing I had to learn, was how to use a dial telephone. That made a great impression I’m sure, on my first day. But anyway, I went back and forth on the bus, ‘cause I didn’t know how to drive and nothing to drive, there was gas rationing anyway, in the War. So to me, it was an experience, getting off that bus, and I had to walk by some place, I’m not sure which street I was going to. This was in the Third National Building on Main Street in Dayton I was aiming for, and I had to walk by where they unloaded prisoners in the morning. It seemed like I’d be going by about the time all these people would be going into that. Then there was some sort of an open market where they were selling things. And of course, I’d been raised on a truck farm, I kinda related to that. But nothing looked good there, like we sold. But anyway, I walked by it, and I would get over to my office and the Third National Bank Building on the thirteenth floor. And my folks thought that was really something to be up that high in the world. In some ways, that’s about as high as I got. Third and Main, I’m sure, is the coldest spot in the world, when you walk by that and the wind just gushes around, I don’t know why, at that intersection, but it REALLY is cold. We had a group of people, they were English soldiers, who were stationed in the Third National Bank Building; the elevator would be full of them, I don’t’ know exactly what they did. And they paid a lot more money that I was making, but my dad assured me that you should stay with the job you got for security; this War wasn’t going to last forever. So I didn’t try to go and get probably double my salary, working there.
Richard Armstrong
I was born, of course, in the middle of the Depression. My mother and father, to keep their house which they had just built, went out for the loan company, and restored houses that had been repossessed, or people’d lost their houses.. Then, ‘round 19-I guess it was 34- by then my father had got anothe4r job at Harris, Siegle and Potter’s, went back to work. He had a job. The WPA came out and put the ditches and swales down the street, and of course, I sat in the window and watched ‘em. And my mother would make coffee for ‘em once in a while. And they had their 55-gallon drum, their fire barrel where they would stand around and warm up, ‘cause it was pretty cold weather. But on some of the days, my mother would let me go out and play with the WPA. And of course, it was pick, shovel and wheelbarrow work they were doing. And they would give me rides in the wheelbarrow. And they would let me stand around the fire with ‘em; they treated me very nice. Course, my mother helped feed them, too. But in a way, I saw what it was like to be out of a job, and I have never been without a job in over 50 years. I’ve never suffered a layoff, or anything. I’ve always had a job. I’ve been working continuously for 50 years.
Ray Roberts
My little corner of the world-in 1934 I was seven years old-and it revolved around Linden Avenue and Fifth Street in Dayton. We had come to Dayton from Pine Village, Indiana. My father was an automobile mechanic and he got a job at Staump Chevrolet on-I believe, maybe South Main, as I recall. And we moved into an apartment above a bar slash café at Firth and Linden called Michael’s, Michael’s Café. And my world at that time was very, very simple. Unlike the others, we were too poor to have a telephone, so I didn’t have to worry about dialing or calling the central. Basically, it was a very pleasant life; things were so much simpler. I recall my hero at that time was the guy that owned the care down below. We called him Mike. I can remember setting at the bar and teasing Planter’s peanuts poured into Pepsi bottle. I also recall the Tip Top Potato Chips that were always so good, and Mike would always set a little dish of those out of me. He made fun of my big ears, I remember that, but it never bothered me, because you could always tell your story to Mike and he would listen. Some of the basic things I remember about how fast you had to grow up; there was no money for anything, so whatever you wanted, you had to earn it. So I sold Liberty Magazines, I sold Saturday Evening Posts, and for that you would get a lot of times a jackknife, or some kind of a special prize. But I needed the hard case. So at the age, I got a paper route with the Journal Herald, which at that time was the Dayton morning newspaper. And real early in the morning, before dawn, I would be down to pick up my papers on Third Street. And I can’t imagine in today’s world, a child that age going around the neighborhood delivering papers in the dark. Btu that was part of it then. My father promised me that I could have a bicycle if I could make the payments. He would put the downpayment down. So we went to Western Auto, and found a 24 or 27 inch bike; I can’t remember what the size was now. But he put down the five dollars, and I paid the balance out of my earnings from carrying papers for the Journal Herald. It was a very simple life. For entertainment, as an example, the4re was a drugstore across the street, and they had a pipe fence around the corner. And I would hang by my knees from that, and I would look up at the streetlights and squint my eyes, to make all these different forms appear. Now compare that to the television kinds of today. Very, very simple times. And my rather and I used to set and watch prize fights on the radio. AI mean literally set ‘ere and stare at that radio set, thinking that Joe Lewis would come outta there and show us how great he really was.
But those are memories of just that period of time. I remember I went to Hoffman School; it was about a two year period before we moved into the West Carrollton area, and I went to Hoffman School. And there was a gym teacher there named Mr. New, N-E-W. And Mr. New was a mean old guy, but he probably taught me more about life then any other teacher. Another one I remember, her name was Mrs. Robinson. And she, I think, got me interested in English. She was the one who was primarily responsible for me getting into the writing business, really, clear back that far. It’s amazing how your life can be changed so abruptly, in such a short period of time and at such a young age. So that was my little world at seven years old at Fifth and Linden in Dayton, Ohio.
Tony Dallas
I grew up in the beginning of the TV age. My best friend didn’t have a TV; they were sort of hold-offs. They didn’t have a TV for a few years. We did. Though we didn’t watch all that much tv; we sort of regulated how much TV we could watch. Every Saturday morning they would come over. It was myself, my sister, who’s a couple years older than me-and this family lived right around the corner from us-they had two brothers and they’re roughly our age. So I was one of the younger of the four, and then my friend who was a year younger than me. We used to watch Mighty Mouse, the Fury, and then sometimes you could stretch it out to the Texas Rangers, or something. But the magic of watching the TV, you know you were just starting for the longest time at the standby symbols, you know the little indian chief with the little test pattern.
But we also spent a lot of time outside, which a lot of kids don’t seem to do much anymore. One of the things we used to do is pair up, and either play cowboys and indians, or it was...we didn’t call it “superheroes”, but essentially that was sort of it. [TAPE CHANGE TO SIDE B] But my sister was very tough. And so, at least in my mind, Supergirl, she could fill it out, whatever this nebulous character was. So it became my friend and I always sorta fighting over who was going to be Mighty Mouse as opposed to Superboy. And I always seemed to end up, to my recollection, with being Superboy. And even though I’d sorta jump in there, and call Mighty Mouse first, it was always somebody had their fist in my face, saying that my friend was going to be Might Mouse.
And then we’d play cowboys and indians; there was often a sense of, we’d sorta divide up so that the two youngest kids were not on the same team. So there was always either me and my younger friend’s brother, or me and my sister and the older brother always seemed to sort of converge at some point and create a team unto themselves, and be off, and you’d be trailing after them. So there was always a sense of not quite becoming a part, or fighting to get to that position that had some sort of clout to it. One of my fondest memories of childhood; we’d come home from a matinee-matinees were what, 75 cents, or 50 cents-of seeing Errol Flynn play Robin Hood. And there was the Walt Disney Robin Hood on TV, and there had been a couple other movies of Robin Hood that we had seen. And all of a sudden, Errol Flynn made it possible so that all four
could be Robin Hood. That was one day when things didn’t break out in hostilities or ill feelings.
Faye Neace
About makin’ moonshine in Kentucky; I can remember, in the fifties when I was in high school, there was this, really the best-lookin’ guy in school, and he always carried a bag about so big and so tall. And he ended up bein’ valedictorian, so he went for years, one b, all A’s. So I wondered, you know, what he always carried. It always seemed heavy on one side. Years later, I married this guy, and come to find out he was carryin’ moonshine. He’d put like four quarts, and put his book between them, and then here he’d put a piece of clothing, underwear or whatever, and put a little pipe jar. And his uncle was bringin’ it in to him. I remember an uncle talkin’ about when the revenuers’d come around, that some of those revenuers evidently thought they were real smart, or maybe they were paid off by a lot of people these days, I guess, or ended up in the law business. They’d be standin’ right on top of an old rug, and the moonshine would be under the floor. And they had just walked out on the porch and these jars started poppin’-some of it could have been beer, or whatever. But anyway, they had to know, really, I think sometimes where you kep’ it.
Man
When was this?
Faye Neace
This was in the fifties when he was takin’ in into school.
Man
That’s interesting, because prohibition began in what, 191, and was rescinded in 1933.
Faye Neace
You have to remember the county that Helen and I are from is what we call back there a “dry county”. And the other counties that sell it are “wet counties”. So we were a dry county, and it’s still that way [bootlegging]. You go back there now and you go out of our county into another county and they have this big sign. When I was a little girl, “First Chance Clemens” and on the way back out of that county into our county, it has “Clemens Last Chance for Liquor.”
Mildred Skelding
Something someone said reminded me of vices when I was young. My father never smoked, but we discovered rabbit tobacco. We used to gather that and dry it, and if we could get a piece of an old paper bag or something, and wrap it up, and smoke it. But that was very dangerous, because it could flash up. And then, we didn’t have drugs, but I discovered a way to get high. I could go up to the milk gap, and lean over the bars,, backwards, and watch the clouds come over this big cliff at then edge of our farm, and I’d get so dizzy I couldn’t stand up.
Ray Roberts
We found another way, when we were kinds, how to get quote-unquote high. One of us would get behind the other, and you’d take three deep breaths, and the one behind you would squeeze your chest. And eventually, your mind would start taking little twirls, and it was almost like, I would imagine, getting high, never having been high on drugs. But it was one of those feelings, “Well I wonder when Img going to come down?” Great feeling! So we had our artificial means, you know; staring at lights and squinting, and as you said, some of that wacky tobacky back in those days, that could get to you too. I remember we used to smoke grapevines.
Man
Mother nature had a way of providing all those things. At the time, certainly wouldn’t do it today, but at the time, it was very easy to smoke cornsilk. Then, try an Indian cigar some of these days. Now, this is catalpa trees, where the dudes come about that long. And you take a couple, two or three puffs on that, and I don’t know what marijuana smells or tastes like, or any other drug, but let me tell you, a good, hefty draft on those Indian cigars and you had it. Then chew tobacco, that’s another one.
Mildred Skelding
We used to swing on the grapevine, then like you said, our brothers’d carry a little pocket knife, and they’d get a little piece of grapevine and smoke it. Then we didn’t call them bags, we called ‘em paper pokes. Get a piece of brown paper poke and wrap the tobacco up in it.
Heleh Behnken
When I grew up in the mountains, we smoked life everlasting. It’s a white thing that grew up, and then in the fall it got silver, and we always collected that, and the boys would smoke that behind the barn with the brown paper bag. But my mother brewed that as a tea, and gave it to us when we got sick. And that was very interesting. So, the boys liked to smoke life everlasting. So this summer, when I went to Chattanooga, and my daughter lives out up in the mountains, and they had a beautiful home, but there’s an old bunch of weeds and stuff where the houses haven’t been built yet, and I said, “Oh, my there’s that life everlasting.” And my granddaughter’s 13 now, she said, “What’s that, Gramma? Why that’s terrible. Why that’s as bad as smokin’ marijuana.” And I said, “Well, we didn’t really think about it like that.” But she really pinned me down, she didn’t like that at all. And I guess I really fell from grace in her eyes, when she said, “Gramma, you didn’t do that.” And I said, Well, we just kindy did.” That was very interesting, how times have changed.
Ray Roberts
This is ray Roberts, your local drug dealer for the senior citizens. And I’d like to report that the arboretum has life everlasting plants right behind the barn, and I’ll be there tonight to collect it. You know, Helen, I saw that down there, life everlasting, I saw that plant, and I wondered, “Now what is this really for?” The name would imply you could get a lot of good out of it, but I never dreamed that you smoke it.
Betty Daily
During World War II-you know nowadays when the busses go by, there’s hardly anybody on them-but in those days, there was lines to get on them. And I learned to use my elbow. I very seldom had to stand in the aisles. And then sometimes they had buses that they called “cattle cars.” And they didn’t even have seats, they had leaning posts. And you’d lean, and they were not very good at all. And of course, mechanical services were not as good, during the War. I can remember one time, I was on the bus coming from Dayton back to Miamisburg, and the bus just came piece by piece, clink, clink, falling apart on the highway. And pretty soon it stopped, and there we sat until another bus came along. So you never knew what was going on, it was quite and adventure.
Bill Daily
My dad was one of the first persons who ever had a radio, starting out with the crystal radios from KDK, all the other places you could get programs. And then later on, he had a better radio, but one of the big things was the neighbors who came in to listen to our radio. We’d invite ‘em in, seems like we ere always having people come in to listen to our radio. Because they didn’t have one at home, so it was sort of an attraction in itself. And they all watched the radio. I can also remember, I was about five years old, the first time I was in downtown Dayton as a kid. We were visiting for some reason or other. And I saw all these lights, and all the light posts, they had four or five globes on them, and they were all up and down the street. I fell in love with Dayton that day, and always wanted to go back to Dayton and be there. In fact, the high school yearbook I said I wanted to be an architect at Third and Main in Dayton, that was my goal in life. I did eventually get there, but it was surprising how such a little thing could start you out, way, way early.
Ray Roberts
I think for this particular type of meeting, it’s important to kind of position what the past really means to people. I have a copy of an old Reader’s Digest, I have no idea how long ago it was a part of Bill Moyer’s speech that he made, “The past is no row of bare facts waiting to be memorized by schoolchildren, nor doe it stand in our back yard like an old picket fence, slowly and silently rotting. The past is a real world, inhabited by villains and heroes and regular folk, passing this way on swift journeys. Their story is our story, the tie that binds each generation to all others.” That just seems so appropriate for what we’re doing here.
