Breweries of Dayton

Dalton, Curt. Breweries of Dayton: A Toast to Brewers from the Gem City: 1810-1961. 2nd Edition. Dayton, Ohio, 2002.

There has been increased interest in the 1920s and Prohibition.  So much so, that if it has not already happened, the major networks will start bringing out historic dramas set in the 1920s, similar to HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.  From a history lesson approach, Ken Burn’s documentary Prohibition retells the story in pictures.  In literature, there has not been an explosion of Prohibition-based novels that I know of, but ex-pats living in Paris at the time is having a moment with Paula McLain’s Paris Wife and the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris. Paris at the time being the antithesis of Prohibition America. I thought I should jump into the conversation and talk about Ohio Breweries, again.  I know, always with the breweries, even when Ohio was the center of the Anti-Saloon League.  One day I will find the right book to talk about their story.

Prohibition is such a complex and odd issue.  The breweries were the evil big business with political clout, but at the same time the drys very much succeeded in much of the country running a KKK platform against immigrant, Catholics who were more prone to support the “wet” movement.   I find it hard to get my hands around it in a standard narrative.  But, one point that came up in Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition that I find fascinating is how undemocratic local government was at the time — even for white men.  In state government, there was no One Man One Vote.  Each county, regardless of population, had equal representation.  So, even though a majority of Ohio voters (white men at the time) rejected a referendum, the passage of the 18th Amendment steam-rolled through the statehouse (see Hawke v. Smith for the legalities – federal Constitution trumps state constitution in this case).  The ethnic, urban population, who was very wet, really didn’t have much say in the matter.

Builders of Ohio

Van Tine, Warren and Michael Pierce. Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History. Columbus, Ohio; The Ohio State University Press, 2003.

As the subtitle says, Builders of Ohio is a history of Ohio told through short biographies of 25 Ohioans from early settlers to Dave Thomas.  As the editors state in the introduction, “history is not simply the interplay of impersonal social and economic forces: it is how individual actors responded to these forces to create the worlds in which they lived.” (viii)  Ohio is told through its builders.  In reading Builders of Ohio, it becomes quite apparent how difficult it is to tell 250+ years of history through the lives of 25 individuals.  But, the editors, who use a wide selection of academic historians to tell this tale, have strung together a series of essays the read well alongside the others.

There are many names left off of these essays: no Rockefeller (though B. F. Goodrich fills in for the Gilded Age industrialists), no Mark Hanna, no Wright Brothers, and no Pete Rose.  None of the presidents from Ohio make the final cut [though two failed wartime Vice Presidential candidates are included in George H. Pendleton (1864) and John W. Bricker (1944)].  We are given a diverse group of residents that cover a lot of ground.  (The editors do acknowledge there is a disproportionate number of white males).  I have read many books about the history of Ohio, and there were at least five names I was not familiar with and I’m not ashamed to admit this.  Cleveland from the late 1800s onward may get over-representation, but Cleveland was once the sixth largest city in America.

Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown

Safford, Sean. Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University Press, 2009.

The title of Sean Safford’s Why your Garden Club Could not save Youngstown is not in jest.  This book truly is an attack on the Garden Club of Youngstown.  It is commonly believed that economic factors beyond the municipality’s control led to its economic demise in the late 1970s (it was known in the 1950s that manufacturing steel in Youngstown cost 55% more than in nearby Cleveland).  But Safford argues that economies like Youngstown did not necessarily have to devolve over the last few decades.

The author uses the steel-dominated Allentown region, the Lehigh Valley, as a foil to the Mahoning Valley.  He argues that in 1970, Allentown and Youngstown were very similar in terms of economic concentration, access to markets, education, state and federal policy, and even histories.  Today, Allentown is now one of the fastest growing cities in Pennsylvania.  Youngstown population in 2010 has dropped to under 67,000, less than half of its peak of 170,000 in 1930.  Why Allentown?  All of Youngstown’s social connectivity was tied up in the Garden Club.  

Guided by Voices

Greer, James. Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-one Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll.  New York; Black Cat, 2005.

“They are just making music I would make, if I could make music”

- Steven Sodenbergh, from “In Lieu of an Actual Introduction”

 

One of the best bands to come out of Ohio (Dayton) over the last 20 years, Guided by Voices emerged on the national scene in 1993 — during the height of alternative rock — with the albums Propeller and Vampire on Titus.  Eventually GBV became an international cult classic, signing to Matador Records and gaining notoriety for their long drunken live shows.

GBV was a different sort of band.  Recording with 4 and 8 track technology, they were lo-fi before lo-fi was something. And perhaps more significantly, they were old: band leader Robert Pollard taught elementary school for 14 years before being “discovered” at age 36.  GBV has made news in the last year, regrouping with the classic lineup for a small tour in 2010 and recording new material for an album due out early 2012.  What better time to look at James Greer’s band bio, written shortly after the band’s “last” show on New Year’s Eve 2004.

Reading the beginning of Hunting Accidents (as it is referred within the text) is maddening: James Greer is not your typical rock biographer.  In fact he’s more like a cult member (“[...] free will is a thing granted both by God and by Bob, and like God, Bob will only smite you if you abuse the privilege” (36)).  To the uninitiated, the megalomania that goes into the description of GBV frontman Robert Pollard is over the top.  Before we even get to the band, there are lists of Pollard’s drinking buddies and endless stories of childhood athletics, even testimony from Pollard’s son about growing up with the man as your father and pee-wee football coach.   

Under Glass

Hirt, Jen. Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees. Akron, Ohio: Ringtaw Books, 2010.

Stongsville is a rapidly growing western suburb of Cleveland; a town of less than 10,000 residents in 1960 and now a city of over 44,000.  I have driven through Stongsville on several occasions and it feels much more like the modern suburb that it has become than the semi-rural town that Jen Hirt’s great-grandfather set up the family’s greenhouse in 1915.  Hirt’s collection of essays, Under Glass, is not directly about the changes that have occurred to Strongsville, but it deals with the gradual upheavals and endings that generally follows youth into adulthood.

Though Under Glass has an overarching theme covering four generations of greenhouse keepers and the eventual sale and demolition of the buildings, the writing is very accessible to non-greenthumbed reader.  Essays on greenhouse design seamlessly discuss divorce, religion, and death.

Most of the essays are good enough to stand by themselves, but Under Glass as a whole is much better.  Unlike a memoir collection by David Sedaris, where the stories can be read (or not read) in any order, Hirt’s selections have a natural flow to them.  Though the author states in the introduction that the essays are “each on a theme, not at all chronological’, there is a straight (though expansive) story from the family history and childhood memories told in ‘A Girl with a Thousand Christmas’ to the reflective ‘Near a Fine Woods’, where she completes her grandmothers history of their home; several years after the home has been demolished.

In the Fullness of Time

Nicolosi, Vincent.  In the Fullness of Time.  New York; Fonthill Press, 2009.

 You stayed home, so you don’t know what it’s like out there, do you? Amongst all those wolves. You don’t know how they are or what we’re up against. The only thing you know is Marion. Out there, they’ll take any little thing and bend it into something it isn’t. They’ll use everything they can to destroy the President, to destroy his good name. – Fictionalized Florence Kling Harding in In the Fullness of Time as she burns the late President’s public and private papers (271).

In 1920, Warren G. Harding won one of the most lopsided elections in U. S. Presidential history over fellow Ohioan James A. Cox.  Harding was Marion, Ohio.  His career before politics was as the editor of the Marion Star.  What is remembered from his electioneering is the “front porch” campaign, with speeches delivered from his home in All-American Marion, Ohio.  By 1923, the President has suddenly died and the Teapot Dome scandal, amongst others, has brought shame up on the White House.  Today, Harding’s name frequently appears on historians lists of worst presidencies.

Vincent Nicolosi’s In the Fullness of Time is about Marion at its peak and the town after everything falls apart.  It becomes Marion against the world for those left behind (at least for our narrator).  Told through the memories of Tristan Hamilton, a well-to-do busybody who sees the world through Marion colored glasses.  Or, at least, that is how he portrays himself.

A Little More Freedom

Blocker, Jack S.  A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860-1930.  Columbus, Ohio; The Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Though the title refers to 1860 to 1930, the bulk of A Little More Freedom covers the years leading up to the Great Migration (sometimes referred to the First Great Migration from approximately 1915 to the Great Depression.  The Second Great Migration would refer to the years 1940 through 1970) of southern African-Americans to northern cities.  The big question Blocker puts out is why the migration pattern switched from African-Americans moving to small towns and cities predominately prior to 1890 and then almost exclusively to larger urban centers (cities of over 100,000 people in 1900 — in Ohio, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo).

Reading the description of this title reminded me of another read a few years ago, James Loewen’s Sundown Towns.  In fact, just prior to the publication of A Little More Freedom, Sundown Towns was published (which was mentioned in Blocker’s introduction).  Loewen hypothesizes that starting around 1890, European American populations in many small towns and cities throughout America (but particularly in the Midwest) actively blocked and eliminated diversity through intimidation and violence.  This was the era of the end of Reconstruction, Plessy vs. Ferguson, eugenics studies, and European American initiated race riots (included riots in Springfield in 1904 and 1906 and Akron in 1900).  Blocker acknowledges Loewens argument and does not disagree with it, but argues that there are more reasons why migration patterns ended up as they were.  In general, where intimidation was absent (or not as immediate), economics trumped other reasons.  This was especially the case industrial cities in northern Ohio after 1915.

High Stakes

Curry, Timothy Jon, Kent Schwirian, and Rachel A. Woldoff.  High Stakes: Big Time Sports and Downtown Redevelopment.  Columbus, Ohio; The Ohio State University Press, 2004.

One of the recurrent themes spoken by developers and civic officials in Columbus as reported in High Stakes was that getting an NHL team would make the metropolis a Major league city.  I don’t know if there is any way on measuring a Major League city (other than having a major league team), but Columbus landed the Blue Jackets expansion team in 1997 (starting play in 2000-01), adding it to the expanding list of new “Major league” towns.  These cities (such as Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City in Basketball) join the old guard of major league cities which were well established as major metropolis at the turn of the 20th Century (though maybe not so much anymore).

High Stakes tells the story of how Columbus landed a hockey franchise by looking  at one of the most instantly forgotten historic events – the failed referendum.  In 1997, the residents of Franklin County rejected a 50 cent sales tax increase that would go towards paying for an arena (for hockey) and a soccer stadium for the already established Columbus Crew of the MLS.  (The Crew played at OSU stadium at the time).  From the jaws of defeat, within a week, a new franchise owner and arena deal was procured through private (with some public) funding.  Eventually a soccer only stadium was built through mostly private funding on the state fair grounds.  Everyone won, including those consumers who would have needlessly (it seems) paid higher sales taxes to build such stadiums.  A main point throughout High Stakes, is that a strong opposition is healthy for referendum issues.  

Odds and Ends Summer Wine Overview

To do something different and to acknowledge that summer (July 4th) has arrived, I have put together some wine sources (book and not book) for tourism, shopping, business, and general knowledge.  Returning readers may know that I looked at Roger Gentile’s Discovering Ohio Wines, which looked at all of these aspects of the grape industry from 20 years ago.  I discovered a few new resources that fill the gaps on modern wine making in Ohio and I have a business proposal at the end.  Enjoy the summer!

Seeing, drinking, and buying wine from the Winery:

Latimer, Patricia. Ohio Wine Country Excursions, Updated Edition. Akron, Ohio; Ringtaw Books, 2011.

Updated in 2011 (and printed by University of Akron’s Ringtaw Books imprint), Latimer has a concise overview of the wine industry in Ohio with information on 80 wineries.  The title would indicate that this is a travel guide, but I feel that the book covers the whole wine industry in Ohio and could be used as a reference source by a consumer at the liquor store and general geeks of the wine industry.  

The Green Bay Tree

Bromfield, Louis. The Green Bay Tree.  Wooster, Ohio; The Wooster Book Company, 2001 (Originally published in 1924).

Every time I pass the Malabar Farm sign on I-71 near Mansfield I think, “One day I will visit there.”  Instead, I finally got around to reading a work of the farm’s one-time operator, Louis Bromfield. Though known as an early conservationist and Ohio writer who knew many celebrities today, Bromfield was a literary star as a young man in the 1920s.  His novel Early Autumn won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927.  He continued to write, branching more into non-fiction, up until his death in 1958.  He established the before-mentioned Malabar Farm in 1939.

Over the last decade-or-so, The Wooster Book Company has reprinted a selection of Bromfield’s work, including many of his early novels and later Malabar Farm-related writings.   Many of these titles appear to have been long out of print, so now is a time to learn the Bromfield way.

The Green Bay Tree is the authors first published novel (1924).  For a first work, its scope aims towards the grand, encompassing the industrial revolution in the Midwest, a World War in France, and, to a lesser extent, truly knowing oneself.  This  all told through a reclusive widow, Julia Shane, and her two daughters, Irene and Lily.  Plot-wise, the novel can be over-simplified as the daughters choose (for completely different reasons) to not get married: Lily for the idea of love and Irene due to piety.  The Shane’s refuse to play by the Town’s rules.  Bromfield’s focus is on the female characters, with the few males left incomplete.