Podunk Pundit

As a kid, in a previous century, summer meant neighborhood ball games, bike rides to the muni pool, a week or two at day camps like Red Ryder, and a visit to Chippewa Lake amusement park, a free perk for the families of employees at the paternalistic speed-nut factory where my dad worked. It also provided a turkey at Thanksgiving and a ham at Easter in lieu of union wages.

Chippewa was small, bucolic and pleasant, but no match for the majestic Euclid Beach with its racing coasters and one-of-a-kind Flying Turns in which you sat in one of several linked together low-slung two-person cars that traveled on rubber wheels down the inside of a looping wooden tube open on one side. It was like being inside an auto tire spiraling faster and faster and sometimes upside down, held in place only by centrifugal force.

What Chippewas did have was a Ferris wheel purported to be the fastest in the world. It was also unusual in revolving clockwise. Instead reaching the top and falling backwards, your gondola hurtled over the top and seemed likely to pitch you and your companion in a deadly arc into the middle of the lake where paddle-boats placidly floated.

My Dad took one ride with me and it gave him such a case of the willies that he never joined in the fun again. He did drive us once a year on the family trip when the factory shut down for a week in August.

Since time was of the essence, he was always trying to get another hour further down the road. This drove my mother bats since it was not unheard of to find all the rooms were taken at stop after stop. Once, on the way back from Boston, he pulled this trick and when there was no room at inn after inn ended up driving straight through to Ohio arriving around dawn, after napping briefly on the side of the road. A good time was not had by all.

Some years we rented a little depression-era cottage on Lake Erie at Port Clinton from which you could take a ferry to Put-in-Bay island, notable chiefly for a 352 foot Doric column, the world’s largest. It commemorates the naval victory of Oliver Hazard Perry at nearby South Bass Island in the War of 1812. Visitors can visit its summit, an early lesson that the view from such erections is rarely worth the trouble of so many stairs.

The main fun of the lake house was walking out the front door, down a bit of lawn and into the squishy-bottomed lake to cool off. In those innocent days no one worried about pollution, though God knows what kind of effluvium, sludge and heavy metals were drifting our way from Cleveland in one direction and Toledo in the other.

My father fished half-heartedly on a nearby jetty and relished the locally grown peaches as they came into season. One year a highlight was a fellow from an adjacent cottage killing a poisonous snake, either a water moccasin or a rattlesnake, that had taken up residence under our cottage. My mother’s reaction was not as fascinated as my own, and at some point we quit visiting Port Clinton. Perhaps the year after the snake hunt.

Instead, we began to do on drives further afield. One summer we visited what was possibly a state park in western Pennsylvania. A small pool under resinous pine trees had been shaped so that water from a mountain spring was funneled into it. It looked glorious until you stepped in.

This turned out to be a mere so frigid it might have been modeled on the one from Beowulf. My father and I could barely stand to immerse ourselves in it for a moment, and quickly exited to stand shivering on its side. My mother, by contrast, lolled luxuriously in the shallow end for a good long while.

Another year we headed up the lower peninsula of Michigan to take a gander at the newly completed Mackinac Straits Bridge. It was impressive, but to a kid of ten or so, not a big enough deal to justify a long tedious drive with nothing much to look at but pine woods. Another year we headed to Niagara Falls. At each of these Great Lakes stops we paused to look at locks — the Soo and the Welland Canal. These were of interest in those years as the ST. Lawrence Seaway project was reaching its conclusion. Again, mildly interesting ,but none of it turned a kid in the back seat with this nose in Scrooge McDuck and Blackhawk comics into an engineer.

Until recently the theme behind these disparate destinations never dawned on me, but I now suspect that my mother, who had me in her thirties, chose these sites as part of a Hot Flash Tour. In those years, she always seemed to be sweating copiously and seeking any place with cool temperatures within range of our 1957 Ford.

This quest for unseasonable cold seemed odd to a kid happy to welcome summer after a snowy winter. And Ohio summers then were hardly sweltering except for a few weeks in August. The heat was broken by booming thunderstorms off the lake, humidity was low, and the nights cool enough for window fans. Air conditioning in homes was unheard of, but made summer movie matinees a luxurious respite.

On the road during these primitive days before portable electronics of all kinds, we were forced to amuse ourselves playing I Spy or License Plate, trying to accumulate as many states as possible. Nearby states were easy, far off plates were thrilling, and long distance trucks which might have five or six different plates were a bonanza.

Along the way we also stopped at historical sites such as Edison’s birthplace, and the homes of presidents Garfield and McKinley. But the classic attraction of that booming industrial era was the plant tour. So, we visited the Kellogg plant, Ford’s River Rouge complex, and La Choy’s plant where overhead claws hoisted unappetizing loads of bean sprouts out of pools where they grew.

Summer also was the chance to use seats to Indians game which could be won for good grades. This perk was offered no doubt to fill the absurdly large Municipal Stadium with hungry, cheapskate fans. The stadium, unsuited to baseball, could seat 80,000, and most days was 80 percent empty. There, one could eat peanuts and cracker jack and watch the Tribe lose to the Yankees, the Tigers or the White or Red Sox.

All too soon, the pool closed, dad’s work resumed, a hint of autumn entered the air, and it was back to another year of school. It was a simpler time. We did not fly to Europe or sail to the Caribbean, but sat in our car along the end of the runway fence at Cleveland Hopkins to watch the planes take to the air — the Lockheed Constellations, the DC-7s and then the first of the passenger jets from Boeing — their shrill whine so different from the bass thrum of the prop planes.

Next to the airport was NASA’s hulking and mysterious Lewis Research Center. Unbeknownst to us, it was soon to play a part in putting a man on the moon. Only after the fact did we learn that, for a time, a lodger in a house a few blocks from ours had been Neil Armstrong, taking part in wind tunnel and zero gravity tests.

“So sad, so strange, the days that are no more,” as Tennyson said.