RIPLEY in REVIEW

I was talking with some family members, reminiscing about Ripley, and we recalled there used to be something like five or six grocery stores in town, as well as four gas stations, a dress shop, hardware store and photography studio, among other thriving businesses. That got me to wondering about Ripley of the past, so I visited the Ripley Library and asked if there were any copies of the old newspaper, The Ripley Review. Jackpot! There are years, whole decades, of Ripley Reviews stored in boxes and boxes, forgotten and crumbling. So with the gracious permission of librarian Nancy McIntosh, I carefully took a look at some of the 1940s editions.
I was specifically looking for an April copy of the news back then and found an April 2, 1942 issue. In it were advertisements for the following grocery/food stores: Red & White Store, owned by Curley Grover; C. A. Patterson; H. D. MacNee; and Ross D. Wolf. Now this was back in 1942. In the mid 1950s, when I was a young child, I remember another store called Johnson & Day, located out West Main Street, past the Hamilton estate. We lived on North State Street at the time, opposite Ross Street, and when I was four years old (although my mother swears she can’t believe she’d do this) Mom would send up uptown, with a note in my hand, to get a few things from the store. I’d walk in and the owners would greet me and ask what I wanted. I would ask for some “Shep BoyRDee please,” they’d put the groceries on our tab, and I’d walk back home. Parents wouldn’t dream of letting their young children walk that far to a store these days. It was a simpler time.
Ripley had The Hat Shop, run by Mrs. Greeley, and Parlor Millinery & Gift Shop, run by Viola Jones as well. I have vague memories of one of those stores being located in a green house next to what was Rice’s Hardware. And I was amazed to see an ad in the paper for the Ripley Telephone Company. I hadn’t realized we once had our own phone company, but I chuckled as I saw, placed at the bottom of some ads, “phone 88” or “phone 7.” The price of goods was unbelievable of course.
There are lists of Ripley’s men being called for military service, and small snippets about the war, like “Ripley may have another scrap iron day sometime this month once the snow allows farmers to gather up their scrap iron lying about. Uncle Sam needs it because he sold too much of it to Japan before we got into the war” and “A 40 inch rainfall in New Guinea retarded and drove back the Japanese advance and rendered the terrain unusable for two months, which may help the Allied cause some.” My favorite part of perusing that old paper, however, was the personal articles. “Shower for Bride to Be – A miscellaneous bridal shower was given by Mrs. Winston O’Dell at her home at East Ripley in honor of Miss Beatrice Post whose marriage to Richard O’Dell will take place in the near future.” It’s interesting to note that Winston O’Dell’s name was on the list of men to be called up in May or June of that summer. I had the pleasure of meeting Bea O’Dell when I first moved back to Ripley, and it made the article in the 1942 paper all that more meaningful.
I’m hoping to research more of the treasure trove of information those old Ripley Reviews hold. Perhaps I’ll make bits and pieces of the old newspaper articles a regular part of my column. Let me know what you think.

Meeder’s - Where Everybody Knows Your Name
I’ve become a semi-regular at Meeder’s Restaurant. The real regulars are there every day, at the same time, with the same people, at the same table. There are those of us who frequent the place often enough that the waitresses recognize us by name and usually know what we’re going to order before we say a word, but we’re not hard-core regulars. It seems most of the serious regulars are men. I love watching “the boys” at their usual tables, laughing, joking with each other, exchanging insults or advise. It occurred to me the other day that they probably haven’t changed all that much from high school. Sure, they’re older, grayer, maybe a bit heavier, but they love hanging out just like they did back then.
There isn’t much secret at Meeder’s. If you want a private conversation you sit at the far sides of the restaurant, away from the crowd, but most people, and especially “the regulars, “ sit where they can see and be seen, hear and be heard. Their conversations range from politics to farming to the weather to cars and back again. There’s a great deal of shooting the bull at these morning confabs but a fair amount of wisdom as well. They help solve each other’s problems, give each other support and, most of all, friendship. Sometimes I watch these guys and smile, picturing them young again, excited about their cars, their exploits, and their adventures.
I find myself looking for the child within all the people I see, like the movie “Hook” with Robin Williams. Williams plays Peter Pan and in one scene a Lost Boy is holding Pan’s face, looking intently into it, and finally bursts into a smile and says, “Oh, THERE you are Peter!” That’s how I feel when I see someone I haven’t seen since high school, some 40 years ago, and recognize the person I once knew. No matter how many years have passed, no matter what life paths we’ve taken, there is still a kernel of familiarity we share. I’ve tried very hard to remain young at heart, full of wonder at the world around me, and not take life too seriously. After all, none of us are getting out alive, so we may as make the most of the time we have and enjoy it. Sit long, talk much, laugh often.

They say a writer should write about what they know, which is why I write mostly about what happens in my little corner of the world; and I know a little about hometown pride. Ripley was always my home, no matter where I happened to be living at any given time. Ripley was where my heart was, and I was proud to tell people I grew up in a little village in western New York – “no, not near New York City which is 400 miles away” (forgive the estimated distance, I’m not even sure how far NYC is from us, guess it depends on which route you take to get there) – in a very rural agricultural setting. However, I am painfully aware that some folks in neighboring towns, even some who have lived their whole lives in Ripley, view the town with distain. When I moved home some people asked my why would I want to move back here!
Now, I don’t pretend to understand the politics and factions that exist in Ripley. In fact, I don’t care to know. I’d rather go merrily along in my ignorance of who the “right” or “wrong” people are. What I do know is that it is the people in any town or city that make it what it is, both the good and the bad. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some people in this town who exemplify what “hometown spirit” is all about. These are men and women who are so filled with pride in their community that even though they recognize the drawbacks and foibles, they are willing to put forth herculean efforts to make it a better place. These are men and women, who even though the population is declining, continue to run their businesses year after year in the face of a disastrous economy. These are people who organize and build monuments, and parks, and playgrounds and civic pride. There are people in this town who never left; some because they couldn’t, some because they had no desire to be anywhere else. Then there are folks who came here for whatever reason, made it their home, and contributed what they could to the community. We’re all part of the fabric of what makes us unique.
I have heard it said Ripley is a dying community. The center of our social activity, the school, is in imminent danger of ceasing to exist as we know it. It is understandably upsetting to face the loss of this icon of our existence. What happens to it remains to be seen. I’ve heard it asked, without the school what do we have? Granted, we don’t have much in the way of gathering places, no bowling alley, no movie theater, and no book stores. But what we do have is a library that is underutilized and yet utterly devoted to benefit us all. There are several events planned each month by our library board, from computer classes to “dinner theater” to lectures given by local notables. The face of our town is changing, and we need to change with it. Folks, we have each other. Get involved. Volunteer your time to our many organizations, be it the fire department, the Veteran’s Roll of Honor committee, the library, or any of the many other endeavors that exist here for the benefit of the town and US. Be a part of your community. Be proud.

I finally found a wallpaper border for my kitchen that I like, and as importantly, it fits! I never realized until I started looking, the majority of wallpaper borders are 6" wide or wider. The space I have to cover can't take more than 51/4". Ever since we moved here I've wanted to paint the kitchen and get away from the pepto-bismol pink. It's not really that bright, but it's not my first choice in kitchen colors. Now a year later (can you believe we've been here a YEAR?!) I'm finally getting closer to painting and papering. Bob, of course, sees no reason to change the colors, mostly because he hates to paint and he can't visualize the new scheme, but we've got all kinds of company coming this summer and I want to change things so they reflect us, not the previous owners.

I'm still swamped with writing projects and the video production of the vets monument. I'm hoping by the end of May it will let up some. I'm not sure I can, or want to, keep up this pace.

Where the deer and the antelope (used) to play

Every evening Bob looks out the back windows for deer in the pasture behind us. Last night there were a total of 23 of them! They just seemed to keep coming out of the woods. We watched for quite awhile and about 10 of them wandered right up into the corn field directly behind us. I couldn't sleep well last night and about 3 in the morning I heard coyotes howling out back. They weren't right up by the house, but close enough that I could make out about four of them yipping and howling. God that's an eerie sound. I'm sure they were after the deer, and now this evening there wasn't a deer to be seen. Creepy.

Ruminations - 3/26/09

Not that I have a lot of time on my hands, but I was looking at the Title Abstract to our house the other day. It’s fascinating reading. I don’t understand all the “land belonging to (so-and-so) thence westerly on the center of said road 2 chains and 7 links…” but the litany of names is interesting to look through, and occasionally a partial will is included in the abstract. This property was originally sold by the Holland Land Company (the same Holland Land Company I found boring in U.S. History in school) to a Joseph Ellicott in 1811. It was a pretty decent size piece of land back then, and either there was something wrong with it, or it was a really good investment property because in the following 50 years it was resold a total of twelve times! It’s unclear to me on first perusal when a house was actually built here, but it seems likely sometime between 1840 and 1864. I’ve heard talk that the house here was a one room affair with an attic for sleeping, and a three-seater outhouse. (Don’t ask me why someone would build a three-seater; perhaps they were an extremely close family.) I can see the original house from the attic, which is more like a tall crawl space, and I can visualize the one room below it, mostly where the floors take their roller-coaster ride under my feet. Most fascinating to me however, is the stone basement. It’s positively beautiful, or could be with some money and imagination. I wish I had the wherewithal to renovate it, keeping the sparkling pinks, grays and blacks of the granite. As it is, it will simply remain a haven for mice and voles to explore.

I love stories about old houses. There’s a book called Dreaming in the Dust by Katherine Chrisman that I found when living in Minnesota. It recounts the renovation of a lovely old place on Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis and you can tell the author loved that house. I’m sure hundreds, if not thousands, of poems and stories have been written about houses and homes. You may recognize Joyce Kilmer as the author of “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree…”) but he also wrote a rather lengthy poem about an empty house, “The House with Nobody in It.” When I was very young, two or three years old, I can remember my mother holding me in a big wicker rocker and reciting that poem… “Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track…” and it wasn’t long before I could recite it word for word myself. It always brought tears to my eyes when we got to the part about the house with a broken heart. My siblings had the same experience and at one time or other we could all recite it.

But there’s another poem, not famous, that is very near and dear to my heart. My great-great-grandmother, Lucinda Shaw Near, lived here in Chautauqua County in Ellicott (isn’t that interesting, the same name as the man who first owned my property) in the mid to late 1800s in a big rambling farmhouse. And as things are wont to happen, the porch on the house needed repair, or perhaps demolition. Many hours were spent on porches back then, when the world was a slower place, and that old porch meant a lot to her. Generations of family shared that porch; she raised seven children there, and lost a young daughter to one of the many deadly childhood diseases. She wrote the following poem about her beloved porch and I want to share it with you.

The Old Porch Floor by Lucinda Shaw Near

They have torn up the boards in our old porch floor.
They have scattered them near and far;
And never thought as they threw them aside,
How dear to me they are.

And now, tonight, with my work all done,
As I sit by the open door,
I think with a sigh of the years that are gone
Since we laid that old porch floor.

There grandpa sat in the summer time,
And I fancy I almost hear
The sound of his feeble step, as he goes
O’er the porch to his old arm chair.

Then in after years, when the babies came,
Some less than half a score;
They laughed and played with their dolls and toys
And romped on the old porch floor.

I love every one of those old pine boards,
Every inch of that dear old floor,
From the place where the matching is all worn through,
To the knot by the kitchen door.

But alas! One day that knot fell through,
And left a hole in the floor;
And knives, forks, spoons and clothes pins
Went through it by the score.

And there today we have found them,
Old and rusty they look;
But to me they tell a tale of the past
As plain as a printed book.

But now my darlings have all grown up,
And gone from their parent’s door;
And one has gone to never return
Over the old porch floor.

Now as I sit alone tonight,
I wonder o’er and o’er,
Who will think of me kindly when I am gone,
As I do of The Old Porch Floor.

Busy, busy, busy

News Flash! I Am A Procrastinator!

Okay, now that I've got that off my chest...I finally got the last article written for the Blue Eagle and got it proofed with Dawn and sent to the powers that be. They'd better not want it redone! After I get it back from the printer next week I can take a breather for a couple days.

I spent last evening video taping Bob McIntosh for the veteran's production. We did three takes and then figured we had enough to get by on. Hope so. I haven't seen the video on a screen yet. I have Roger Testrake coming over tonight to video in my "blue" room. I think he's a little more prepared, but we'll see.

I talked to the editor at the Westfield Republican today as well. Finally got a pay scale for my submissions to the paper. Three different amounts depending on whether it's my column, a news article or a photo. I'm happy. It's not much, but it's paid work.

My summer is shaping up to be pretty busy. Bob's daughter and family are coming for a week long visit in mid-June. It'll be fun to see Max again (he's almost 7 years old), although I don't know what I'm going to do about entertaining him for a week. Then in July a friend from England and his wife are coming over, visiting three different families. I will host Stephen and Hazel for the last leg of their visit. And I'm still awaiting word on my third visitor, also from England. I can't wait to see them all!