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Philip Spiess
Becky: You are quite correct that 1953 was the year of the Ohio Sequicentennial of statehood (it was also the year of Eisenhower's first Inaugural and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom's Coronation -- how she does go on; she's beaten out Queen Victoria for longevity on the throne!). I had no idea that the O-High-O bit was a song (never heard it), just a riddle. (All I remember, when it comes to jingles, is, "When the value goes up, up, up, and the prices go down, down, down, Robert Hall is in season to show you the reason -- low overhead, low overhead!")
Margery: I have just this evening sent an e-mail to Elena Fuentes (if that's whose e-mail I now have; I last saw her about sixteen years ago in the Krohn Conservatory); she apparently went to Aiken, so if I've got the right e-mail, I'll send it to you. For a while I was in a carpool with Becky Hamlin; her father had been the Librarian at the University of Cincinnati. I had forgotten about Anne Keating, who I knew well at the time; thank you for bringing her back into my memory.
On "Please": I don't know whether we have a folklorist or a linguist among us, but our discussion of this subject is catnip to them; I hope they are listening (or reading). I've never been identified as a Cincinnatian by using "Please" (as I've noted above, despite Miss Scarborough's best efforts, I've never used it), but once, in the 1970s (I think it was), at a wedding party in White Plains, New York, while dancing with a young lady from my (now) wife's graduate class at Cooperstown, New York, a distinguished elderly woman observing from the sidelines suddenly tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You're from Cincinnati, aren't you?" Surprised, I said, "Uh, yes," and she said, "I knew it! Only boys from Cincinnati dance that well!" I was taken aback by this information, not thinking that Cincinnati was known as a dancing town, otherwise I would have quizzed her further about her knowledge; I knew Madame Federova's was legendary locally, though I myself had attended the George Gallus (am I getting this right?) dance studio. (It was, no doubt, my superb cha-cha that tipped her off, though my Viennese waltz is, or was, exemplary. Or maybe it was the Charleston.)
And now to more local linguistics: In the years when I was Research Associate at the Cincinnati Historical Society in Eden Park, we received an inquiry about two terms, which the inquirer claimed were supposed to be strictly local to Cincinnati, and wondered if that was true; he also wondered what the terms really meant. Those terms were "Jack salmon" and "pony keg." The staff, stumped, promptly turned the question over to me (that's what I was being paid for). And first, because I could not find nor establish more than local lingusitic use for these terms, I assumed that they were, indeed, local to Cincinnati. Second, after some intense but stultifying research (read: "dead end"), I more or less established that "Jack salmon" referred to the "walleyed pike," which is not, in fact, a pike, let alone a salmon, but a perch (well, huh!), according to The New Food Lover's Companion (4th Edition). As to "pony keg," the term "pony" is well known to tipplers, bartenders, and mixologists alike, as being a 1-ounce bar measure -- but this did not explain the term inquired about. Only research on the ground around town determined (and this provisionally) that the term "pony keg" applied to stores that supplied beer and wine (stronger spirits being restricted to sales at the Ohio State liquor stores) and ice in quantity for purchase to take out. There was a well-known one for years in Corryville just west of and down the hill from Vine Street, which I'm sure served the University of Cincinnati community (I know it served Clifton); whether it's still there or not, I presently cannot say.
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