To search anywhere in this book for a word or phrase, use the "Find" command on your browser. For example, if you use Netscape, click on "Edit" (at the top left corner of the screen), and when the "Edit" window opens, click on "Find in Page". If you are using AOL, click on "Edit" (at the top left corner of the screen), and when The "Edit" window appears, click on "Find in Top Window". If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, click on "Edit" (at the top left corner of the screen), and when the "Edit" window appears, click on "Find (on this page)". Most other browsers work much the same way. The "Find" command will work its way through the entire document, highlighting each instance of the desired word or phrase.


*****************************************************


This is an excerpt from a chapter in a yet unpublished book manuscript I wrote some year ago.
Olde Northfield Preservation Association. The segment on the Northfield schools begins about half way through this piece.

Jeff Knowles



THE BUILDINGS



The structures of our lives are the perishable parts of our past. The land stays forever--buckling, submerging, foresting, but always there. The people come and go, but they have clever ways of perpetuating themselves in words, events, and the leavings of their lives. But the vast majority of our dwellings, be they for business or pleasure, are terminal from their first brick, block or board. They will last only as long as they serve some useful purpose, or until someone comes along with a bright idea which requires some of the world's most finite commodity--space. There's the rub. Discarded human bodies can be disposed of at little inconvenience to the rest of society, but not so the edifices which housed them when they breathed life. A house will usually outlive its builder, but seldom its usefulness.

Buildings are almost always seen that way, strictly in light of their service to men and women. Occasionally, one manages to get sufficiently in the way of great art or significant history such that we allow it to stand alone, on its own merit. But these are the rare exceptions. We generally proceed on the assumption that people make buildings, not the other way around.

Sometimes, I wonder.

The Cuyahoga Valley has had its share of notable buildings. It is momentarily tempting to take the tour guide approach of listing the headliners--Cleveland Stadium, the Terminal Tower, or the Quaker Oats Building in Akron. There are hundreds of good stories soaked into each of them, and not too many people in the Western Reserve have managed to avoid all three. But this is not where most of us really lived. If you want to know about them, take the tour bus.

Closer to the mark are the smaller but more substantive structures which have carried with them important stories over great periods of time. Wilson's Mill (or, its newer moniker, Alexander's--pick your era) still sits beside Old Lock #37 along the extant section of the Canal on the way to Cleveland. It wasn't too many years ago that the mill was using the water from the lock spillage to help drive the waterwheel and the business, and Saturdays still see cars in the parking lot. That kind of building has met the commercial needs of the white man's eras in the Valley. A stone's throw away along Canal Road are the Hynton House, probably built around 1809, long before its more famous Hale House neighbor in Bath (with which it shared a common architect), and a smaller stone house at Stone Road built into a hill and over a natural spring, probably in the early 1820s.[1] Farther south, in our part of the Valley, sit several look-alike houses in the B & O crossroads town of Jaite, across the River from Red Lock Hill. With nearly all of the Twentieth Century’s years under their belts these houses witnessed the death throes of both the Canal and the Railroad, and withstood the frequent floodwaters of that grand river which enticed boat and steam engine to the Valley. The houses hit a bit of good luck in what otherwise would be their declining years, having been chosen as the federal administrative offices for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Other buildings have left only the outlined traces of their foundations to hint at their glory days. Somewhere in the tangled underbrush at the foot of Pine Hill, below the Rt. 82 Bridge which spans the River’s Pinnery Narrows, are the scattered pieces of a Civil War ammunition dump. The research on it is as tenuous as the remains, but Joe Jesensky, who knows the Valley's story about as well as anyone, identifies the site as "Crazy Man's Hollow," a name derived from the Civil War veteran who slowly lost his mind while on assignment at the lonely post. Some say the veteran filled his walls with bizarre formulae and drawings of mechanical contraptions not of his century.[2] At Brandywine Falls, which now hosts a fashionable bed-an d-breakfast, stone foundational remnants are all that testify to several structures which lived off of the power of the plunging waters--a distillery, sawmill, and woolen factory.

As kids we were much intrigued by ruins, probably because they teased our imaginations into overdrive. A perfectly formed and maintained structure entertained no questions, admitted of no possibilities, but a collapsing wreck was a half finished novel. Deep in the woods we once stumbled upon a small, weather-worn house with the windows and doors all boarded up and covered with some faded warning signs. Mom or Dad later said to stay away from it, that the place had been fumigated, then apparently abandoned. But my mind never abandoned it. I still wonder about the inside of that house. What kind of creatures lay dead on the floor? Wouldn't it have been a great place for robbers to hide out? Did even a single shaft of sunlight ever penetrate its murky darkness? Somewhere else in those same woods I once saw a small coop of some sort, probably for chickens. I didn't explore that one, either, just gazed at it in wonderment, tantalized by the prospect of this little bit of cozy order in the natural chaos of the woods. For the remainder of my childhood after that one sighting I looked for that coop, like a dream-walker in search of a vision which was there only a moment ago, hungering to explore its tiny space, wondering endlessly why such a thing would be built in the middle of the woods, and haunted by its disappearance. I never found it. It was probably knocked down and cleared away during one hour of some man's chore-filled morning, nothing more than a thought finally fulfilled: "I better get that old shed out of there today; I've been putting it off for years." But he couldn't knock it out of my mind. There, it had been built to last.

Perhaps that explains our juvenile fantasy affair with building forts and cabins. These structures, seldom more than a couple of old sheets tacked to a tree or some scrap lumber nailed together, were palaces in the unencumbered architecture of our childhood imaginations. Anything we could crawl into qualified as a success, whether or not the rains were very much slowed by what was overhead. Our most memorable effort was a fort we constructed in the uncleared portion of Uncle Frank's front yard. In addition to the standard tent-like sections it also included a "room" actually made of boards. The room was probably not more than eighteen inches wide, and you could only crawl in far enough to say that you had been there before having to exit the same way using reverse gear, but to us there was only a difference in degrees between it and our real bedrooms. As we weren't quite ready to tackle plumbing, we simply dug a little ditch outside the fort and called it a "leak bed," figuring that nomenclature was close enough to the leach bed Dad had to dig behind our house a year or two earlier. Cousin Dave, older than Lloyd, Jack and I and always ready to go one up on us, threw himself into the construction of a fort with a basement. He dug a large hole not far from our effort, but soon thereafter abandoned it to the frogs who gratefully filled it with their presence and songs each spring for many years to come. One thing David did complete, however, and which drew our unlimited admiration, was the mounting of an old faucet into the side of a drum such that he could effect running water with a turn of the handle. We could only shake our heads and marvel at that kind of ingenuity.

* * * * *

The Cuyahoga Valley's best known and preserved homestead was built by Jonathan Hale. Both the man and the means behind the Hale House story are appropriate reflections of the early development of the Western Reserve. Here was no Alfred Kelley, builder of canals and railroads, nor Samuel Huntington, Seaboard political transplant who would gather up the Governor's Office and several others along his ambitious way, nor even David Hudson, the wilderness visionary. The only place Hale shared similarities with these men was on the same westward trails they took from the East to the three million acre dream on Lake Erie's southern shore known as the Western Reserve. He was a large, raw-boned man with an enormous capacity for work and heartbreak and hope, yet he could also be found drifting around the Valley directing church choirs and taking occasional stabs at poetry. With apologies for the anachronism, there was always something of the literary Charles Ingalls in him, a quietly talented and deeply religious man who chose to plow his human gifts into the ground at his feet rather than ride them to peaks of what is usually thought of as achievement. Even "Old Brick," his historic three-story mansion which set a precedent for dwellings in our part of the Valley, was pragmatic in nature, expanding with incremental spurts of construction as need dictated, and begun only after years of seven-family member living in a former squatter's cabin.[3] Hale House was less a monument to architecture than a reflection of Hale's practical arrangement with the new land. The house was big because Hale had a big family. Every cubic inch teemed with life.

Many might think that the fabulous homes along Euclid Avenue were better testimonies to the Western Reserve's story. Author Peter Jedick hints that during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century many people considered that Avenue to be the most beautiful street in the world, easily rivaling the Prospect Nevsky in St. Petersburg and the Champs Elysees in Paris. Home to the likes of John D. Rockefeller and Senator Henry Payne, and host to a glittering stream of renowned visitors with names like Grant, McKinley, Taft, Carnegie and Morgan, Euclid Avenue was a freeze-frame of the seemingly unlimited possibilities of America's Gilded Age. The unimagined personal wealth which spread itself ostentatiously under the Avenue's stately elms subtly screamed the Reserve's success story to the world. The 33-room mansion of crude oil refiner Samuel Andrews, three years in the making including castle towers and turrets, was built in the confident expectation that Queen Victoria would see fit to christen the place with a visit. Much of the Valley’s best and worst was woven into the golden brick that paved Euclid Avenue.[4]

Big money can be its own worst enemy, not infrequently because it encourages similar greeds. Some lesser entrepreneur managed to squeeze a dry goods store on a downtown corner of Euclid Avenue, and the seeds of destruction began to germinate. Andrews' castle was headed toward a future as a miniature golf course, while Rockefeller's home was ironically destined to be knocked down in order to make room for a gas station. Euclid Avenue did not last because the transitory values of unlimited and unconscionable capitalism did not--could not--last. But Jonathan Hale's house was built of sterner stuff. There is at least a piece of the Hale House story--and virtually none of the Euclid Avenue story--which has been reenacted in thousands of the homes built in the Cuyahoga Valley. In some ways our home in Northfield was an heir to that legacy. Jonathan Hale assumed a huge risk in undertaking Old Brick. On the plus side he had a moderate degree of prosperity, good standing as a landowner, and the news that the proposed Ohio-Erie Canal would plow right along his property line. But prosperity in the early Valley days was a tenuous thing, hard money was scarce, and the prospects for the Canal were still seen as somewhere between boon and boondoggle. For a long time the house was only a whisper away from being "Hale's Folly." Mom and Dad took an even greater risk when they decided to build "out in the country" in 1953. There was no squatter's cabin or large chunk of property to fall back on if the thing failed.

Too, our home was always inextricably linked to the land. Not in the strict economic sense of the Hales, of course, where limestone was quarried for sale and ground clay used for brick-making. But where Hale sold casks of lime to the infamous John Brown's father in Hudson, we sold our black raspberries to Virginia Smith and Emma Copen. And the humble ranch style box we dropped unobtrusively onto the plot of ground at 848 Glencrest Drive was never as small as the walls. Its boundaries included a ballfield, waterfalls, a woods, and a stand of crabapple trees. It was a package deal.

Times being what they were in 1953 our family was not able to enjoy the luxury of moving into our new home all at once. Instead, we did it in stages, advantaging ourselves of time, money, and the aid of others as they occasionally became available. To my knowledge the only formal training my dad ever received was as a sonar repairman during WW II, while Mom used those same three years to gain her professional training as an x-ray technician. Neither of those experiences was likely to be of much help in building a house. Yet they assumed that burden as easily as I now might buy a car or plan a vacation. Hardship and delayed gratification were accepted parts of the American Dream at the time.

A few hundred borrowed dollars for a load of lumber and a how-to book were all that Dad had to get started on the house. I'm not sure how much time, if any, he spent worrying about the consequences if this little project blew up in his face. With their limited resources and the vanishing opportunities in the recession-bound, post-war economy such a failure would, in all probability, have buried them for good. The financial world has often been less forgiving of other little people for smaller mistakes. Today the idea seems so ill-advised, risky, primitive. But today is the world of wedding-present homes and starter-mansions; Mom and Dad's "today" was 1953. Into that year they carried two broken homes, the modern world's worst depression, history's most terrible war, a long string of hospital bills from Mom's emotional troubles of 1948, and the same flickering hopes which have teased 29-year olds for a hundred years--maybe a thousand.

The big home-owning gamble would have never had a chance had it not been for Uncle Frank. Five years older than Dad, Uncle Frank, with college degree in hand, had been the first of the Knowles boys to escape Cleveland and carve out a toehold in what was then known simply as "the country." Somehow he had been able to grab a piece of land in Northfield, 15 miles to the south, after which he set about the business of settling on it. Here, things got a bit tricky. He could not, of course, get a home loan without significant collateral, and he could not hope to show such collateral without a home. Therefore, he hit upon a plan which was both brilliant and in keeping with his sense of humor. He decided to begin building a house, or at least something which qualified as a structure, stop at some point when the thing approximated an identifiable geometric shape, then proceed to the bank for a home improvement loan. To complete even this shack he was forced to scavenge for pieces of lumber which he would nonchalantly haul aboard the city bus on his ride home. I assume he did all of this with a reasonably straight face, although the same assumption can not be made for his fellow bus passengers or the bank manager. At any rate, it worked. By the time his little brother was ready to make the move from the city Frank Knowles was ready and willing to offer him a couple of his acres next-door to his glorified box at 858 Glencrest Drive.

Thus began the phasing in of our new house. Five decades later I still remember more about what wasn't finished than what was. My four-year old eyes saved for me images of a hand-dug footer, scraps of tar-paper (now promoted to "felt") imbedded in stretches of mud, and someone's arbitrary decision to "leave that little maple there for the front yard," where the scrawny two-foot sapling would begin its slow pursuit of a shadowy 50-foot destiny etched it and the Lorence Cook Knowles family.

I also remember the unfinished floor. More than any other part of that house it was the floor that first gave notice to the surrounding wilderness that there would henceforth be some order here. The shaggy black locusts and baggy crabapples looked down upon their well-milled cousins lying in neat rows under the gleaming sun and grudgingly moved over to concede these city folks their silly, little dream. On this postage stamp of symmetry in the midst of nature's vast chaos I would lay on my back and stare up at a sky full of stars such as I never suspected existed above the perpetual dull glow of Cleveland's lights. The walls--well, they might come tomorrow or the next day, and the roof was too far in the future to think about. For the moment, the floor was everything. Next to me a bulky radio, umbilicaled by extension cords to some unseen outlet in Uncle Frank's house, sent the corny sounds of One Man's Family into the chill of the night, the title serving as a fitting testimony to the work at hand. I also liked Fibber McGee and Molly, though I can't remember why.

The exposed flooring supporting my lazy observance of God's astronomical splendor was never to see a life of quiet comfort. When Lloyd and I became rambunctious, particularly during the 11-13 year-old days when the value of everything in the house was measured by whether we could reach it with a jump, Dad would occasionally bring out the ultimate warning, "You guys knock it off! Remember these are single floors." In high school, by which time I could touch my elbow on the ceiling (though I don't think Dad knew about that accomplishment), I had visions of ending my landing thigh deep in splintered floorboards. But the floor's first adversary was my 5-year old cousin, Jack. In racing across the partially finished surface one evening Jack failed to note the subtle color difference between the floorboards and the insulation cover. He went in up to his armpits. After the obligatory questions about Jack's health there was some tight-cheeked grumbling from the men who would have to make this mess right in the morning. I don't think any of it was heard by Jack who, smiling broadly, assumed that the trouble had ended with his safe airlift out of the itchy pool. But for many years to come I suspect that my meticulous dad was feeling around the livingroom floor with his bare feet, looking for that cold spot.

We could not, of course, live on bare flooring exposed to the sky. I don't remember much about the transition from our second story flat in a rickety Cleveland rental to the new homestead, but there must have been many trips back and forth before we were ready to make the leap to the new lillypad. One of these provided me with my first experience with injustice and anger. It happened late one warm spring evening, probably after a long day of labor on the house and with the prospect of a late night ride back into Cleveland yet ahead. Mom and Dad were enjoying a few companionable moments around an outdoor fire with Uncle Frank, Aunt Doris and--I am guessing--Janet and David, my two older cousins. Lloyd and I had been banished to the car where our orders were to "Go to sleep; it's late." The problem was that the car, parked in Uncle Frank's drive, was no more than 30 feet from the festivities. Even under the best of circumstances four-year olds don't like to go to bed, mostly because they (rightly) suspect that they will be missing something. In this case the evidence was right in front of my eyes, now filled with stinging tears. There may have been greater injustices in the history of the world but, at the time, I couldn't think of any. Lloyd's sense of judicial propriety served him better; he fell asleep.

But there was nothing cruel about putting your kids to bed in the family car. Cars meant something different in the 1950s than they do today. In some ways they were as big a part of the American Dream as were homes and land. Taking a two or three hour drive was a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment, even when you weren't going anywhere in particular. Most of the boys returned from WW II to jobs which they reached by foot, bus or train. All of them could tell you the exact hour they became owners of a family car. The car was a four-wheeled extension of the home, complete with heat, light, entertainment, storage compartments, chairs, and windows. Small wonder our parents were forever having to tell us that we couldn't play in this marvelous, miniature home. But even for the adults there was some irresistible, initial attraction which has long since been lost, probably the sense that a man who never before could claim more than few paltry cubic feet of rented space to his name suddenly could assume ownership, if only for a passing second, over car-sized chunks of America dozens or hundreds of miles from home. Here was ownership you could take with you.

I have heard many Baby-Boomers say that their fondest security memories are of falling asleep in the back seat of the family car while riding home late at night. Perhaps it was the hypnotic drone of the tires, or perhaps the secure knowledge that their dad was physically in control of this moving box, but there was something special about falling asleep that way. Many of those same people will tell you that the beginning of the end of their innocence was not a dirty magazine or some deliberate cruelty, but rather the first time they heard their parents say, upon arriving home after a long, nocturnal drive, "Get up, we're home . . . No, you're too heavy to carry anymore."

Since my brother was less than two years older than I we had some logistical difficulties with sleeping arrangements in the back seat once we outgrew the dogseat. The preferred real estate was, of course, the "inside" of the seat against the back cushion. Here the art of car sleeping reached its highest form, gaining all of the advantages of comfort, security, and warmth. The guy on the front edge of the seat fared less favorably. In that position the backward slope of the seat provided a dangerously false sense of security, especially when bleary-eyed dads broke the rules and made use of the brakes. A darting dog or a changing light had a way of suddenly effecting a curve in your anatomy which looked remarkably similar to the back floor hump covering the crankshaft. Long before we worried about going through the windshield we learned to fear that midnight catapult from the front edge of the seat into the oblivion below. My particular problem was that Lloyd was rather good at angling for the inside position after he had supposedly gone to sleep. After dutifully begrudging me my turn on the inside he would begin a slow wedging movement which would gain the favored position before the ride home was half done. When I complained or pushed back he simply continued to feign unconsciousness, a state in which he could avoid the moral consequences of his naked aggression.

It does not require a great deal of imagination to understand some rather immediate problems facing the family whose home is being completed in stages. The plumbing--I assume because it was so expensive--came later in the plan. Our necessary alternative became known as the "honey bucket." The honey bucket gave me my first steady job, that of flashlight holder for Dad who saw to the burying details each night. As silly as it sounds, there was a sense of ceremonial ritual to the procedure. Dad would carefully dig a pit deep enough to allow the newly cleared yard to maintain some dignity after the sordid affair was finished. The hole was always the same size, even in winter, when Dad's shovel served better as pick than spade. As the flashlight proved no truer than my wandering interest there were two or three predictable admonitions from him to keep the light on the spot where he was digging. And, always, there was the little, unintended dance which he would do to tamp down the filled in dirt. Dad must have kept a pretty good mental record of the used spots, for I don't remember him hitting an old mine. Years later, I would grow some of Northfield's best cantaloupes in that very ground.

The honey bucket was not to be confused with the "slop bucket," the latter being reserved for used dishwater and spitting after teeth brushing. I might have forgotten about the slop bucket altogether had it not once become the center of a dispute about physical dexterity. Lloyd was absolutely sure he could clear the fetid pot with a standing broad jump. Being skeptical of that claim, and having nothing particular to lose in the prospect, I encouraged him to give it a try. In all fairness, it was a very good jump. He soared high, higher than was necessary, but unfortunately he had not made a similar provision for distance. The result was one of those clear memory images which lasts a lifetime --Lloyd, standing uncertainly knee-deep in the bucket, giggling, though not nearly so hard as I. Mom, who usually interpreted loud noises as threats to her children, came running into the room with panic in her eyes. It was probably relief more than humor that drew a laugh from her, for she could not have helped but see that there was an unfunny mess which would need cleaning up when the laughter died away. The funniest part was Lloyd's continuing quandary. Having become a part of the slop bucket he sensed that he was not free to reassume his role as a human being at liberty to walk around the house. But staying put also seemed like a losing proposition, especially as the bucket was somewhat rounded on the bottom. He appeared to be groping for some kind of precedent which could provide a bit of guidance but, as there was none, he continued to just stand there, wobbling drunkenly like a potted tree in a strong wind. In his confusion he failed to realize that the point about messing up the house was moot anyhow since his landing had already splashed most of the noisome water out onto the floor.

Dad took a lot of kidding over the years about his painstakingly slow pace in finishing the house. While we did not have to grow to manhood without indoor plumbing, there was always something which remained unfinished. It could certainly be said in his behalf that since he was not a professional builder, and was building the house with the little time left over from a demanding, full-time job, he could hardly have been expected to make good time. But neither of those was the issue. Dad was just careful--agonizingly careful. Most of the jobs that he did on that house only had to be done once, a fine tribute to his workmanship. Yet even today, over half a century after groundbreaking, it might be argued that the place is not quite finished. There is a room between the kitchen and family room which has been variously called the utility room, carport (why, I don't know, since it could never have hoped to house a car), and backroom. I am still not sure what to call it.

Ours was not the only house in Northfield which was slow to develop. Shortly after we moved in, Aunt Doris took Lloyd, Jack and me on a hike through a large field just south of Highland Road a few hundred yards from our property. There, hidden by a choking patch of weeds and goldenrod we came upon a rough foundation upon which rose only two or three tiers of concrete block. Aunt Doris explained that a man had started the house years before and had subsequently run out of money, but was planning to finish it one day. I believe the remains of that foundation still lie in that undeveloped field. The man is no longer likely to finish his house. He is dead. In some neatly kept cemetery his tombstone probably reads, "Here lies a builder who was slower than Lorence Knowles."

* * * * *

Russell Scholle's feet danced six inches above the ground. His body was stretched into the shape of a lower case "t", with his freckled face serving as the top of the stem and his arms acting as the crossing bar. One hand was firmly anchored to his mother's, while the other was being pulled by the kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Steprow. As a rational adult I know that that scene could have only lasted a second. Almost instantly his knees buckled and he was kneeling on the ground. His flustered mother pried his clutching fingers from her hand. Then, Mrs. Steprow helped him to his feet and marshaled him to a seat. At that moment there were probably a hundred thousand hysterical Russell Sholles in untold numbers of American kindergartens across the land. And each of them was doing a variation on Russell's airy dance, emotionally suspended between the comfortable world of mom and the fearful world of school.

But I was not seeing things too rationally in September of 1953. What I saw was a little boy whose mother and teacher were trying to tear him in two. To my horrified eyes Russell Scholle had been suspended like that for a full fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes. What kind of torture chamber was this, anyway? And why was his mother acting as a willing accomplice to this hideous conspiracy? For that matter, wasn’t my mother doing the same thing?

I sat there frozen in stony fear, much too terrified to cry. Unlikely as it seemed at the time, the day got worse, not better. Russell's screams dwindled to a continuous whimper, the kind of thing you hear coming from death row during the last shave. Others followed suit. But most of us just sat in our chairs like unsmiling Pillsbury doughboys. One or two misbehaved marginally, but not nearly enough to make me feel more comfortable (especially after watching Mrs. Steprow whittle them down to size).

Thus did I stumble into my scholastic career in Northfield, Ohio. It would continue to be a rather severe struggle for me until well into my fifth grade year. Mom tells me that during the first year or so I used to cry each morning before the school bus came. I don't remember that, but I do remember the anxiety which was my companion much of the time. To this day I can feel some of the residual dread which automatically begins seeping into my blood when the late summer sighs in weariness of her burden. Mom probably never suspected the shot of icy Adrenalin which accompanied her annual first-day-of-school rendition of:

"School days, school days, Golden, golden rule days. Readin and Writin and Rithmatic, Taught to the tune of a hickory stick." That hickory stick stayed stuck up my spine for many Septembers.

There is a mystique about school buildings unmatched by any other kind of structures in our society. Some churches come close, but not many, and not often. Any one of a thirty million of us can walk into our old grade-school classrooms, which we have not visited for decades, and be at a total loss for words to describe our feelings. There is no small piece of us here. The eight year-old within you, which (to your continuing surprise) never quite went away, invested a thousand enormously impressionable hours inside these walls, and now that child leaps up inside of you at the smell of pine cleaner and crayons, the sight of the cursive alphabet circling the room atop the blackboards, and the sound of tinny bells and a hundred scuffling feet. You look at the room and wonder, "Which part of me left, and which part of me stayed?"

The older the school the better the mystique. Mrs. Steprow's kindergarten class met in the basement level of the Northfield Elementary School in the heart of Northfield Center. With the exception of our well-lit classroom the basement held a "Phantom of the Opera" aura of murkiness, with a shadowy stairs giving way to a dark open area which, in turn, led to the restrooms. Everything was high-ceilinged, giving a further sense of being deep in the bowels of a cavernous dungeon. Here, the school janitor would hang himself a year or two later, an act which I always thought fitted the mood of the place.

Upstairs, where I would spend my fourth and fifth grade years, the rooms were large and bright, compliments of the vast window surface needed to climb to the level of the high ceilings. In the fall those windows wore pumpkins and witches, while Christmas saw them dressed up with triangular green trees, silver stars and snowy cotton. The walls were covered with the obligatory pictures of the Presidents, a bulletin board with blue, red and gold stars by our names, and hooks stolidly holding our crookedly flung coats. The desks still had holes in the upper right corners for the long-gone ink bottles of earlier generations, and were permanently bolted to the floor in testimony to the last vestiges of a time when orderliness came before creativity, when rows ruled rather than clusters. Outside on the grounds we planted a tree each Arbor Day (we grumbled inwardly at not getting the day off), and gambled thousands of puries and catseyes in a two-year long game of marbles ("Last--pegs, shoots and rounds only!").

The only other old school I attended was the junior high school in Macedonia, formerly the Macedonia High School before the four communities (Macedonia, Sagamore Hills, Northfield Center, and Northfield Village) consolidated school systems. It, too, was a fascinating though unimposing structure, with dark halls and trophy cases containing pictures of dorky-looking World War II era students. Both schools still stand, but neither is being used as a school. The Elementary School is now the office headquarters for the Board of Education--even the new school added to it long after I left is not in school use--and the junior high school has been turned into some kind of tiny office park. Sacrilege! Its few little businesses look as natural there as cats in a swimming pool. As soon as you stick your head into the building your ears hear a thousand faint whispers speaking of dances and homework assignments and basketball games. That building can never be anything other than a school.

First grade was another jolt to my little system. After finally warming up to the snacks and naps and sandboxes of my half-day kindergarten world I learned that my first grade sentence would be served at Lee Eaton School far up in Northfield Village, which is as far as you can get from my native Sagamore Hills without leaving the school district. No doubt the opening of Lee Eaton was a great moment for School Board members, community planners, teachers and, of course, old Cyrus Eaton, himself, the multi-millionaire industrialist who, I surmise, planted a pile of money in this building which would bear his daughter's name. (Eaton, who gained Cold War notoriety because of his chummy relations with Nikita Krushchev, was one of two reasons people may have heard of Northfield, the other being the racetrack.) I was somewhat less than enthralled with the grand opening.

But the bulldozers which carved up the vacant field in Northfield Village in preparation for the Lee Eaton Primary School were also cutting the beginnings of a road which the community-pride zealots had probably not foreseen. It was a road which led away from the Old Northfield of Friday night football games, Memorial Day parades, and bobby-soxed teenagers at the Varsity Isle, and toward the mist-shrouded outlines of shopping malls, housing developments and rows of mailboxes bearing Polish surnames. Thousands of other American communities were beginning to cast curious glances at similar roads running through their town squares, wondering at the clamor that seemed to be growing along the far end of that road just over the horizon line. The whole process was tied to the unique terms and phrases of the times, "white flight," "mobile workforce," and "urban decay." In our rural neighborhood these things meant that dust-covered Glencrest Drive would now be tarred and extended all the way back around to Boyden Road, that the car coming up our road probably wasn't coming to our house, and that kids we played with named Smith and Bean and Mansy would now be joined by others named Kenesky, Subotnik and Papara. The little barbershops, bakeries and hardware stores which lined "The Center" of 150 year-old Northfield began to lose their tidy sense of centricity as the psychological foci of place slipped out into the gray somewhere of a dozen new sub-divisions and the new Northfield Village Shopping Center. (Across from the Shopping Center on Rt. 8 I noticed a new restaurant one day, with yellow arches cradling a marquee which bragged that the newly formed national chain had sold over three million hamburgers.)

My class was always at the cutting edge of the turbulence in our burgeoning and over-matched school system. We were shuttled around to seven different school locations in twelve years, including a Baptist Church, a Masonic Temple (a large hall curtained into quadrants, a situation which led one mother of a fifth grader to complain that her child was learning more about sixth grade than fifth, thanks to the loud-voiced teacher on the other side of the curtain), and two new school buildings which we helped to christen. The first of those, Lee Eaton, was not quite ready for us in the fall of 1954, a circumstance which stretched my summer vacation for several days, perhaps a couple of weeks. Naturally, I was pleased with the prospect of a reprieve, but the delay really wasn't enjoyable. Lloyd was already back in school in Northfield Elementary (I don't remember why Lee Eaton didn't take third graders that first year.), as were most of the other kids. The hiatus only prolonged the sense of doom dripping from the lingering heat and humidity as I sat listlessly inside the house. It was like a temporary halt at the front of the school shot line while the weary doctor and nurse pause behind a tray loaded with vicious syringes to review some glitch in the paperwork--"Just a moment, young man, we'll be right with you."

The smell of a new school building in the 1950s was as intimidating as the sight of it. That smell would make a reappearance each first day during the succeeding falls, but never again would it cut so deeply into my sensory world. Every part of it was fresh and razor-sharp--the clinging pages of new textbooks, the wax on the floors, the hint of drywall lime, the paint on ten thousand square feet of surface. Then, when the institutional smell seemed no longer tolerable, some bleach-faced kid would make the first human contribution to the essence by throwing up all over his desk. Enter the brow-furrowed janitor with his rolling gray pail and powdery, green deodorizer, and we were at last on the way to making this building into something that smelled like a school.

"Jeffrey, you're in Mrs. Flea's class," said the woman behind the table near the front door of the building. She used the clipped, clear tone reserved for kids who can easily misunderstand the simplest of instructions. "Go down the hall to that classroom just beyond the big clock."

I turned and moved mechanically toward the room which had been so unmistakably identified for me, dreadfully aware that I was exercising my last option as a free boy. Once I entered that room--"just beyond the big clock"--I would be in for a full year of full days. There would be no going home for long afternoons with Mom this time. This was first grade in the Big House, full term. I was a lifer. The clock was half as big as I was. I jumped as it ticked off a minute by clicking its big hand backward a half notch then forward to its new position, like a marionette soldier presenting arms. How I already missed the warm hum of the electric clock in our kitchen at home. Every minute of every school day for years to come would be announced by the loud, backward-and-forward jerks of that clock and others like it, and they would provide a fitting reflection of my disjointed progress through the halls of public education. "Just beyond that clock" became a destination that was almost beyond my endurance.

Mrs. Flea was an entirely forgettable teacher. For the most part I have obliged that quality in her, remembering only snippets of first grade, save that memorable long walk down the short hall on the first day. I don't remember her smiling, even one time. With a name like hers I suppose that you end up with either a great sense of humor or none at all; she had apparently opted for the latter. I was enchanted by something called the "cloakroom," a hall-like sliver of space running parallel to the main classroon with openings at both ends. Naturally, Mrs. Flea expected us to hang up our coats therein (she insisted on calling them "wraps" or sometimes “cloaks”), but we saw this as the least exciting possibility for this luxury which had not been afforded us in kindergarten. Clearly the space would serve much better as the backstretch for chases, a haven for words not meant for Mrs. Flea's ears, and a vantage point for eavesdropping or simply hiding out.

My worst moment came a short time later during that rich piece of first-day ceremony known as "the rules." Mrs. Flea had decided to talk about lunches, and even without the benefit of a G.E.D. I was smart enough to figure out that my sack lunch had marked me as an odd man out that day. A desperate scan of the other kids' desk tops confirmed the dreaded realization that most of them were planning to buy what she kept referring to as "hot lunches" in the cafeteria. Mom had packed my lunch neatly into a little white bag. Though Mrs. Flea never came right out and said so, I got the distinct impression that she believed sack lunches to be inferior to "hot lunches." You could tell that by the way she kept saying "hot lunches," as if they were a standard part of American virtue, and the only alternative to them was cold sewer carp.

I might have been able to weather that traumatic lecture had it stopped there. At lunch time I could have quietly sought out the other first-grade dregs who had brought sack lunches, and we could have collected ourselves unobtrusively at the end of some unwanted cafeteria table, there to nibble away at our shameful fare (trying desperately not to rustle the offending bags), while stealing glances at the normal kids eating their hot lunches. But I was not afforded even that crumb of comfort on this comfortless day. To aid her in making her point about what was and was not preferable in sack lunches (I noticed she made no such analysis of hot lunches) Mrs. Flea took my lunch and exhibited its contents before the class. She held up a couple of cookies Mom had wrapped in waxpaper and told the class that cookies were probably not a very good idea--why, I don't remember. She did not say this in a demeaning way, but it made little difference. I don't remember if she analyzed anyone else's lunch or if she thanked me for providing the means for her demonstration. My head was buzzing, and my stomach felt as if it were housing a water-logged softball. Eating any kind of lunch that day had become a moot point for me.

My luck with lunches did not improve much during the ensuing days. Mom had made the considerable gesture of buying me a glass-lined thermos, a scientific advance which I found quite exhilarating since it freed me from my only other dietary dependence on the school, that being those three-cent, half-pint bottles of milk which looked as if they belonged in a somebody's dollhouse. Unfortunately, I was not sufficiently impressed with the fact that this liberty was dependent upon my ability to keep the thermos from harm. One day it died where it had lived, in my lunchbox. Of course, it wasn't really my fault. Every grade schooler in the 1950s knew that lunchboxes were only secondarily employed to carry lunches, and that their main value came in banging other kids over the head or falling noisily to the floor during spelling tests. You would think that lunchbox designers, knowing this, would have made them with exterior foam rubber cushions or miniature airbags which inflated on impact. But in that age when Ralph Nader was only a few grades ahead of me in school the lunchboxes were made of thin metal which inevitably assured the destruction of any fragile contents. (A generation later I would note that the lunchboxes were still made of metal, but the thermoses had graduated to plastic.)

After my lunchbox's long fall to the floor I quickly sorted through its jumbled contents and grabbed the thermos and unscrewed the twist-on cup-cap with an instinctive sense of dread. Under the cup I was confronted by mound of splintered glass, billowing up like the globe of an ice-cream cone. The advanced maturity afforded by my first grade perspective allowed me a full three or four seconds before exploding into tears. It was more than having ruined a wonderful thing. Somewhere in the emotional logic of six year-olds I managed to draw the conclusion that when I broke the thermos, I had also broken a part of Mom.

It seemed that we frequently had substitutes that year. I suppose that poor Mrs. Flea was often sick with whatever it was that never allowed her to smile. While I have no research to substantiate it, I have a theory that subs in those days were a different and more dangerous lot than today's breed. Modern subs are often entirely competent educators who either choose not to teach full time or actually prefer the challenge of being plunged into a different environment each time they enter a classroom. Not so, I think, with the subs of 1954. Many of them bore all of the marks of the bottom of the professional barrel. Even as single-digit graders you got the impression that many of them saw their occasional calls to service as opportunities to counterattack against the system which (so rightly) kept them out of the full time classroom. I suspect that the only thing which convinced principals to make those disagreeable early morning calls for subs was the slightly worse prospect of having to sit for the teacherless classes themselves.

I remember one such sub. She marched around under a pile of straw-spiked, black hair sticking out wildly in several directions (fifty years before the style became faddish) and squinted out at the world from behind stern, dark-rimmed glasses. Physically she was built like half of a Saturday morning tag-team match. Somehow she managed to make the absent Mrs. Flea suddenly seem warm and loving. The lady ("lady" was my best guess; I was never really sure) once nearly yanked my hair out when I dared to get too close to the class dollhouse. I felt my feet actually left the ground. Another of our subs came to approximate a human being only when she was having us sing through a silly song about a fat lady sitting on someone's hat. She would laugh her way through that song, smiling condescendingly at us as if having done us some great favor in allowing us to learn it. "Christopher of Columbus, what do you think of that?"

Macey Johnson was as lively as Mrs. Flea was lifeless. She was not one to let any of her students stand timidly by the edge of the pool. So, in second grade, during Lee Eaton's second year, I got wet. In many ways the dousing was less than enjoyable, but there is little doubt that Mrs. Johnson helped give me a tougher hide for the demanding twelve year journey through public education. She had a pretty tough hide herself, and more often than not wore that junkyard dog look which effectively precluded hours of classroom trouble from kids who will always take what you give them. I have noted that it is a look which has since been perfected by harried cops and major league umpires, though it seems to have fallen out of favor with teachers.

I was with Mrs. Johnson when I first met Jerry McCauley. I had asked her if I could get a drink of water and, for some reason, she had put her hand on my shoulder and walked me to the door. Just as we stepped through the doorway together a blinding flash cut across my bow. It hit my forward striding leg and flew through the air, bouncing to a prostrated stop a good fifteen feet down the hall. The thing was Jerry McCauley. Through the years I would find that Jerry's horrendous crash was typical of the way he went through life, but at the moment I gave quarter to the suspicion that he might be dead. I had never before seen a human being (assuming Jerry qualified) take such a long dive and land in anything other than water. Mrs. Johnson was unmoved by the spectacle. She reached down and pulled him to his feet, all the while staring him down with that hard look. My first impression was that the boy had lost half of his teeth in the fall, but then I realized that Jerry's mouth was jammed full with a full quarter of an orange peel. If Mrs. Johnson was concerned about Jerry's health she didn't show it.

"Y'all tryin' to cripple mah boy?" she drawled, jerking on his elbow hard enough to give Jerry the appearance of a puppet badly out of control.

It never occurred to me that my leg might have been hurt in the slapstick encounter. When you were around Mrs. Johnson the only pain you thought about was that which she might be administering at the moment. But even then, you preferred any pain to that look. Pain was the end of the line, but that look went on forever.

After primary school I did not see her for nearly ten years. Then one day, as a high school senior waiting for my bus, I was half spun around by a firm jerk on my arm. The eyes were vaguely familiar, but beyond that I was hopelessly lost. Clearly, though, she had no similar difficulty recognizing me. She stuck her face close to mine, now yielding a good half a foot of height in the process.

"Do you remember the time you said you'd ruther not learn to talk at all, than to learn to talk Southern?" she asked. A trace of the look was still there, but now was greatly softened by a teasing smile. I couldn't believe that I had ever said that to her--I think I must have said it to Mom and it got passed along. I wouldn't have been standing there in reasonably good health in 1966 had I said anything like that to Mrs. Johnson in 1955. I also couldn't believe that she recognized me. It was, after all, a fair bet that I had changed considerably more than she during our separation.

I guess one of the marks of a good teacher is that they remember their students. Thirty-four years after leaving third grade I sheepishly knocked on the back door of Mrs. Oviatt who had ushered me through that last year at Lee Eaton. She opened the door and greeted me warmly. Before I could get half way through my prepared remarks intended to reassure that I wasn't someone trying to sell her something she waved me off with the comment, "You still have that same smile you did as a little boy." Mrs. Oviatt was a high-class teacher, the only one my mother ever specifically requested for me before the start of a school term. Lloyd, and I think Jack, had her before me which made her the only grade school teacher to have had all three of us. It was fitting that this human monument to our early educations was also connected to some of the earliest and most prestigious settlers in our neck of the Western Reserve. Her husband's name may be distantly connected to William Oviatt, son-in-law of Jonathan Hale, although there were other Oviatts in the Valley at an early date. (Mrs. Oviatt downplays the probability with the comment that those Hale-Oviatts of William were the ones with the money.) Just around the corner from her house sits the small building which once was Little York School, one of the first in the area.

I have not been back to Lee Eaton School since I left it one spring day fifty years ago. It is difficult to accept that it is, as schools go, probably approaching mid-life. I can picture it as nothing less than a new building, still buzzing with sounds of our third-grade operetta, "The Honey Pirates," (I was Drowsy Drone), and softly smiling at my first case of puppy love (Jeri Lu Davis, where are you?). Maybe it is best that I never go back there. That way, no one can ever tear it down.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]. Margaret Manor Butler, A Pictorial History of the Western Reserve: 1796 to 1860 (Cleveland: The Early Settlers Association of the Western Reserve, 1963), 23-24.

[2]. Joseph D.Jesensky, An Archaeological Survey of the Cuyahoga River Valley (Northampton, Ohio: The Northampton Historical Society, Inc., 1979), 18.

[3]. John J. Horton, The Jonathan Hale Farm (Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1961), 61.

[4]. Jedick, “Euclid Avenue,” 210-211.