St. Marys Under Water

Our home town in Ohio was in flood stage last week. The pictures below came from some of Ann's relatives through her sister Randi.  Luckily Ann's parents' house and my dad's house were far enough away from the St. Marys River that they didn't have any serious problems.

This is the city office building. It sits right next to the Miami and Erie Canal. The trees in front are part of Memorial Park.  The area at the far right of the picture is what you see in the second picture.

If you were standing right in front of the city office building and looked to the right you would see this (when it wasn't flooded). The canal boat is there for historical purposes. When I was a kid, this building was the library. When I was in high school (1960's , pre-internet), I spent a lot of time at the library. Coincidentally, my future wife did too. I'm pretty sure we spent all that time doing our homework.

This is the football field at the old high school.  There was a new high school built outside of town two years ago. We would have been given extra sprints if it was this muddy, on the premise that since we couldn't run as fast as usual, we needed to do more of them.  The fact that your shoes weighed five pounds each didn't matter. And you'd better not bring any of that dirt into the locker room!

The St. Marys Trading Post is across from the old high school. We walked across the street from the school to eat lunch there many days when it was the Murphy's five and dime. Now it sells all sorts of antiques and crafty things. Upstairs, my kids used to go look for Star Wars figures to buy when they were visiting Grandpa and Grandma. Their Uncle Steve worked there for a while with a fellow model railroad enthusiast.

Just south of this intersection is where my Dad grew up in St. Marys in the twenties on the family farm.

Things seem to be in pretty good shape now, but for a while there Rte 66 headed south past the Goodyear factory was flooded and you couldn't get to New Bremen to go to the Dairy Queen. Not a good couple of days for my Dad (who is 89), who claims that he goes to the YMCA in New Bremen first to exercise and stops at the DQ for lunch on his way home.  Sure, Dad.