My Childhood Friend Is Gone

I just received word that my childhood friend passed away on December 17, 2009.  Since I don't live in the town I grew up any longer, it is sometimes difficult to keep up with the news from home.  My oldest sister no longer lives in Circleville and of course other friends I keep up with don't live there any longer as well.  My sister notified me by email and sent me the obituary that sadly reminded me how much Larry Kegg was a great friend of mine while growning up.  After receiving her email, all day my kept wandering back to my childhood days when Larry and I were growing up.

We lived next door to one another while very young and played together often.  His parents, Maxine and Carl (everybody called him Tony) were always great to be around and both of them treated Larry's friends like royalty.  Larry was handicapped but you would never know it.  Larry never let that hold him back.  He played touch football with all of us on Town Street.  Larry was one of the toughest guys I ever knew.  My friend never allowed adversity or his handicaps interfere with his positive mental attitude.  I can also remember he had genuine love for music and cars. In fact in high school he had a band.  I am sorry to say I can't remember the name of it but I do remember he could play the drums and he and his band would take me on a gig or two.  So much fun back then!  Thank you Larry!  Larry's  parents and he many tmes took me along with them to their vacation home on Lake White  Larry's thoughtfulness and his of course his humor was derived from his fun loving parents.  It was sad that both of them died in a tragic accident so many years ago.

Larry graduated in 1968 and I graduated in 1966.  After I graduated I spent more time with my girlfriends and other buddies and Larry and I saw less and less of each other.  Why?  I don't know but that happens sometimes.  Other relationships starts to overtake the other and then the other becomes a faded photograph.

I eventually entered the United States Army and made it a career while Larry attended Northwestern Medical University in Chicago and then graduated from Cerritos College in California with a degree in Orthotics and Prosthetics. Larry worked with some of the best Orthotic and Prosthetic facilities in the country before starting the family firm of South Central Orthotic and Prosthetics Center in Chillicothe, Ohio. Larry was instrumental in bringing State Licensure in Orthotics and Prosthetics in the State of Ohio.  Larry was very successful and loved by all his patients.

I found Larry's sister on Classmates.com and wrote to her several years ago.  Kris was about two years older than me.  She wrote back and gave me his email address but also his phone number and told me to call not to email because he very seldom checked his email or responded.  Well I kept putting off that phone call until it was never made.

In the late 1970s I ran into Larry and his new wife,  Denise at the Pumpkin Show.  I spent a few minutes talking to him and then went my way with my family.  I never saw Larry again.

While home for a funeral in 2002, my cousin,  who was a member of the Elks as was Larry, My cousin told Larry I was home and  Larry agreed to meet us at the Elks.  I don't know what came up but Larry didn't show.  Back then I didn't know that I probably had lost my last opportunity to see Larry for the last time.  I will say this once again.  As we grow older, the friends we make in life later do not compare to the friends we had as children.

Larry, thank you for all the great memories while growing up.  I wish all of us could be as tough, fun loving, positive, and generous as you have been to all those you came in contact with, especially me.  I pray that you forgive me for not taking that extra time to pick up the phone and say 'hey friend, remember me?"

You can read more about Larry by clicking here.

There's No Place Like Home

In "The Wizard of OZ" Dorothy had to click her heels together and chant "there's no place like home, there's no place like home" to return from the Land of Oz to Kansas. All I had to do was catch a Southwest Airline flight to make my way to Circleville, Ohio to visit the Circleville Pumpkin Show. This year we grew a record size pumpkin of 1,635 pounds.

I hadn't been to the king of all festivals for 7 years and it was great to get back home just in time to see the beautiful foilage and again arouse my sense of smell to the aroma of all the food being prepared at the Pumpkin Show. That was one of the main reasons to make the trip and try to once again rekindle my young at heart spirit and try to recall way back when I didn't have to wear glasses to read or wear hearing aids. As I wondered and looked around everything wasn't the same. Yes the young of heart was there, the little ones were enjoying the rides and the fun as I am sure I did when I was their age. Instead of standing and watching the parades I could sit thanks to my friend Ron bringing chairs to sit on along the parade route. His exact words were "I'm too old to stand." Wow! I am a few months older than he. So I must be too old to stand also.

Before arriving at the downtown festival Ron and I drove over to the old neighborhood where we were part of the hellraisers at that time. All was not the same. Our stomping grounds have deteriorated to the point we were ashamed of how it now looked. Houses that were once the best homes in the neighborhood were some of the worst. The trees that once lined the streets have all been removed now and looked bare. "There's no place like home" did not have much of an impact anymore. I continued to think about the looks of the street where I once lived as we wondered downdtown hoping to catch some old friends and acquaintances. What happend in the last 45 years? Like everything and everybody it just aged. The magic of being home never materialized.

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What Ever Happen to the Cool Jocks?

Driving down the main drag with the radio blaring and listening to the top music of the day was quite a memory! What characterized those great days of the 60s was the cool disc jockeys that jammed the airways during that era. Whatever happend to them? Todays' radio DJs cannot come close to the jocks of yesteryear. The radio personalites today have to use explicit language to get listeners instead funny but innocent pranks that those of yesterday used. The 60s jocks' gift for gab was instrumental in keeping us tuned in. Not only the hit music but their talk kept us coming back.

In my home town of Circleville, Ohio, most of us tuned into 1230 WCOL. It was a very small radio station that broadcasted from Columbus with only 500 watts of power. You lost the station at night so we picked up drifted station which broadcasted with larger watts, like WLS, Chicago, WABC, New York and my favorite WHK of Cleveland, Ohio. At Cleveland, there was a DJ from Florida named Johnny Holliday. His opending monologue went something like "welcome and this is Johnny Holliday, your refugee from the Sunshine State." His craftmanship as a DJ resulted in him being selected for the "Cruisin" series of music featuring outstanding DJs across this great nation of ours. These tapes and CDS not only featured music but commericals, airway checks, and monologue from the DJs. Johnny Holliday was on "Cruisin 64," which I say without hesitation is the best of all the "Cruisin" Series including Robert Morgan of "Cruisin' 65" Where is Johnny today? He works for ABC sports and announces Maryland Terpin basketball games. Still today he has that great voice that so many DJs now fail to deliver.

I also remember the countdowns each and everyday at 3:00 from WCOL. Of course,the countdown usually didn't change but once a week but you listened anyway just to groove on the music and the commentary. It was common back then, if you remember, for a song to be interrupted for fast breaking news, like a bank robbery or something. It was so sensationalized.


Recalling back to the New Year's eves of the 60s, I recall WCOL FM station doing the countdown of the top 100 songs of the year and all my buddies would gather in the basement of my friend's house to celebrate New Year's while his folks had a party upstairs. We would make our bets on what song would be the number one song for the year. The number one song was played right before midnight.

The craziness of the jocks never ceased and they would upset Ma Bell with their telephone promotions that would tie up the phones. The phone systems were not as intricate back then as they are now. They would give away money, concert tickets and yes automobiles. What zaniess and fun was the 60s.

My old WCOL radio station now is a country station. Nothing wrong with country music, in fact I love country music but I still recall the crusin', parking, and just relaxing while listening to the fun radio of the 60s. Do you have a memory? If so please leave a comment.



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Remembering the Chaos of Daylight Savings Time in the 1960s

At 2:00 AM November 4, 2007 we turn our clocks back to standard time from daylight savings time (DST). Does that mean one more hour of sleep or does it mean we just get out of bed an hour earlier because our bodies has just adjusted to when the clocks were turned up an hour? Do you recall the chaos it caused in the early 1960s?

A Brief History of Daylight Savings Time

Daylight savings time (DST) has been around in some form or another for quite sometime. The idea of daylight savings time originated from Benjamin Franklin really as a humorous and witty comment.He first spoke of the idea publicly in an essay titled "An Economical Project" which he conveyed as an American delegate while in Paris in 1784. His original intent with the essay was to be whimsical, by poking fun at the tendency of the French to sleep until noon. The essay pointed out that if 100,000 Parisian families burned half a pound of candles per hour for an average of seven hours per day, they would use a total of 64,050,000 pounds of candle wax, costing an immense sum of money that the city of Paris could save every year by implementing a Daylight Saving Time. Many of his friends an acquaintances became fasinated with the idea and continued to discuss it with him.

Then in London, around 1907, a builder named William Willett was the first to seriously try to persuade officials that setting clocks ahead by 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April and retarding them by the same amount on the four Sundays in September would be beneficial to everyone in helping get some extra daylight time over the summer for work. Willett lobbied mightily and spent a fortune trying to convince others, but most just laughed at him and he died about one year before it became a reality.

From 1945 to 1966, there was no US federal law about daylight saving time. By the early 1960s, observance of daylight saving time was inconsistent, with some states on DST, and no agreement when to change clocks. In 1961, when studies made by the committee for time uniformity studied the issue found that along a 35-mile stretch of highway between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, every traveler passed through no less than seven time changes.

Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U.S. locality could start and end Daylight Saving Time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore—but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles! The situation led to millions of dollars in costs to several industries, especially those involving transportation and communications. Extra railroad timetables alone cost the today’s equivalent of over $12 million per year.

Noted Chaos

This chaos of changing the clocks had an effect on my family. I remember walking to church holding my younger sister's hand and arriving when church was just letting out. Some "smartass" high school kid said "kind of late aren't you." My sister and I walked home a little embarrassed and of course our mother wondered why we were home so early so we explained our embarrassing experience. Mom said it was daylight savings time and she didn't know if Circleville, Ohio of all places was observing it. She set the clocks up an hour that Sunday morning. On Monday we went to school and we were an hour early as she was for work. This was a situation that was normal across the entire state of Ohio in 1960 or 1961. Part of the town observed it and other parts did not. I imagine the problem existed throughout the nation.

A man, born just after 12:00 a.m. DST, circumvented the Vietnam War draft by using a daylight saving time loophole. When drafted, he argued that standard time, not DST, was the official time for recording births in his state of Delaware in the year of his birth. Thus, under official standard time he was actually born on the previous day—and that day had a much higher draft lottery number, allowing him to avoid the draft.

DJs in Ohio and TV comedians everywhere made fun of daylight savings time and the chaos and humourous situation it caused. This continued until 1966 when Federal laws were enacted governing the implemetation of daylight savings time.

Not all states observe daylight savings time. Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which _does_ observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three states." This presents problems because you have to try to remember how many hours they are behind or ahead of you especially if making a phone call. I have called my daughter in Phoenix getting her out of bed because of the time difference which normally on standard time is hour but with DST it is 2 hours as she has late at night waking me up.

Don't forget to turn your clocks back before you go to bed on November 3.

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The Haunted Bridge Near Yellowbud

I was sitting here at my computer one day working on my 60s site, when my mind wandered back to a time when I was a sophomore or junior in high school in Circleville, Ohio. I was thinking about the haunted bridge near a place called Yellowbud close to Williamsport, Ohio.

Yellowbud was a very small town probably with a population of less than 500 at that time. I have no idea what the population today would be, but I would imagine it couldn't be much more than that now.

There was nothing unique about Yellowbud except it sat off on a state highway to Chillicothe. It was a typical farming town. Many of us used its back roads and easy access to park and neck. So when asked what college are you planning to attend we would jokingly say Yellowbud Tech. Of course no school by that name ever existed. That line got so famous that T-shirts were made with a Yellowbud Tech logo.

There was a covered bridge near Yellowbud that many students from high school and other places would go and hang out, park, sneak a six-pack of beer (3.2 beer then, you only had to be 18 to drink but could only buy the lower proof of beer) and enjoy some innocent fun.

I really don't know how they spread, but rumors started like wildfire that the bridge was haunted. Many kids and some adults claimed that they had seen ghosts of a man and woman from the 1800s hanging around the bridge. (I had been there a couple of times and hadn't seen anything but my imagination sure went round with the sounds of the night) Folks claimed that a woman and man who had lived nearby died under suspicious circumstances back in the 1800s and were trying to find their home which had long since been torn down.

It was the talk at school whic resulted in the traffic to the bridge increasing tenfold as everybody wanted to see the ghosts. As the story continued to grow and be stretched beyond believability, so did the volume of people visiting the site. Now there was no privacy for your parking, necking and beer drinking. Everybody was stumbling over each other. This place was becoming a tourist attraction!

This is where the story really gets wild. If you can remember back when you were a teenager, you can really take advantage of this opportunity for some real fun; that's what four classmates of mine did.

On the weekend they would head out to the bridge before nightfall long before others would arrive. These pranksters would dress up in something scary and hide in the rafters of the bridge and make weird haunting sounds and throw things down on cars crossing the bridge and sneak up to parking cars where couples parking and scare the holy crap out of them. You can imagine what that would do to anybody, especially with the rumors of the bridge being haunted.

As I continue to look back, I also remember a sheet being dropped from the rafters onto the windshield of an auto as it was crossing the bridge. What these haunters didn't count on was that this car belonged to a resident of Yellowbud, so the sheriff was called to investigate which for a short period of time created a patrol to the area. Now the pranksters were gone but the sheriff was there and breaking up the parking and necking.

When the patrols stopped, the pranks began once again as the rumors continued to fly from people seeing the ghosts. Many described them as a young couple dressed in amish clothes who actually spoke to them. This didn't stop the pranks until one night all four of these pranksters swore on the good book they saw the ghosts. The pranks stopped immediately.

I never saw the ghosts and I had been there. Did they exist? I don't know. There were plenty of credible people who saw them. What I do know is the bridge is no longer there as this one many like them disappeared over the years. It was just too costly to keep them maintained. One thing is for certain the covered bridges themselves were ghosts of our pasts. It's funny how you remember these insignificant events of our lives. Man what fun we had back in the 60s. Wouldn't you like to re-visit that time for just one more day?

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