After dinner tonight, Ann and I decided to go for a drive. Now that may seem like a minor event, something relegated to Twitter perhaps, but it is much more than that. When we were kids, going for a drive was a big event. It was the fifties and being in a car was a bigger deal than it is now. And there were always two parts to going for a drive: where we would go and what the treat would be. There was always a treat involved with going for a drive. Most of the time, going for a ride meant going out towards the lake. In St. Marys, Ohio, the lake was a big deal. Grand Lake St. Marys was a 13,500 acre reservoir (about 9 miles long and 3 miles wide) dug by hand in the 1840's to supply water for the Miami - Erie Canal. The canal was the principal waterway between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. Lake St. Marys was the world's largest man-made lake until the reservoir for Hoover Dam (I think) was built. When the railroads became big in the late 1800's, the lake became less important for transportation and eventually became a recreational area and state park. There were beaches and boat docks that occupied much of our summer when we were kids. On our way out to the lake (a two mile drive) you passed the Dairy Queen, the Rootbeer stand (a fifties drive in similar to Dog N Suds where the waitress brought your tray out and hung it on your car window), and other places to stop and get a treat. After the treat, we drove slowly through the state park area looking for bunnies, then headed down State Rte 364 past the East end of the lake (the St. Marys end, Celina was at the West end - they were our archrivals in high school sports). You would go past the Bulkhead where my brother Alan and I went fishing. Actually he mostly fished, I walked across the road to the little grocery store and got pop and candy bars. Next up is the fish hatchery; just as it sounds, the newly hatched fish were released into various Ohio lakes to improve fishing. Then a left turn that would lead you past Greenville Road on the south side of town where my dad grew up. And back through St. Marys to our place amid the farms a mile north of town. About 6 miles total, but it would take half an hour. Lots of stories about who lived where and who was married to whom. When we were kids we called that green-shuttering: the adults would start off talking about a specific person, but eventually it would become "You know, they lived in the house on the corner with the green shutters, their daughter married that guy whose dad worked in the press room at the Goodyear factory."
So today we started over. We drove up through Fox Lake and stopped at the Dairy Queen (a requirement of the drive), then headed up State Park Road. We passed Chain of Lakes State Park, where both Nate and Mike worked for a while in the summer (concessions and boat docks) and eventually got up towards Wilmot, where we used to drive Mike and his friends to go snowboarding. West on Rte. 173 into Richmond, past Hunter Golf Course, which is a very nice place to play (Terry Napolski once drove a ball into the clubhouse off the first tee, a drive of 15 yards perpendicular to his swing). We passed a giant turtle (I didn't believe it at first either) standing alongside 173. At first glance I thought it was a tire, but Ann agreed it was a giant turtle. Down past Anderson's Candy Store which is worth the trip any day. Luckily it was closed at 8PM so we could stay on our diets OK. Then down Rte 12 through Spring Grove past the site for the Illinois Storytelling Festival. The Festival was a major yearly event when our boys were young. A beautiful park filled with the best storytellers Jim May could bring in: Jackie Torrence, Kathryn Windham, Ed Stivender, and Bobby Norfolk came there. We came home every year with new tapes for the boys to listen to as they went to sleep. Unfortunately, hard financial times have reduced the Festival to a shadow of its former self. We haven't been back there since they moved the Festival to September. So we told stories and remembered things as we did our drive and after about 45 minutes, we were home. Where did we go? You could say "No place in particular." But the purpose of every drive like this is to go back in time. And to get a strawberry sundae (with nuts). Feels like old times.
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