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10/18/24 01:04 PM #6722    

 

Philip Spiess

STONE LIONS, STONE EAGLES:  Petrified Creatures from Cincinnati’s Past

Two Academic Lions:  Although many of us did not attend the University of Cincinnati, almost all of us are surely familiar with the two guardian marble lions of McMicken Hall at the University:  “Mick and Mack.”  Once they faced each other, but now they face away (did they argue?).  Most people are aware that the one on the left, as you face McMicken Hall, is “Mick,” and the one on the right is “Mack.”  And everyone is pretty sure that “Mick” is named after Charles McMicken, who left a large portion of his fortune to found a college for white students [!], which was chartered as the University of Cincinnati in 1870, and for whom McMicken Hall is named.  But they’re not so sure about the naming of “Mack.”  (I posit that “Mack” is named after William McMillan, one of the first settlers and surveyors of Cincinnati and Delegate from the Old Northwest Territory’s at-large district to the U. S. House of Representatives in the Sixth U. S. Congress.  Further, McMillan Street in Clifton Heights, which borders the University on the south, is named for him.)  The lions are copies of larger versions carved in 1600 by Flaminio Vacca in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy, which in turn were copies of a lion sculpture from ancient Rome.  Because the lions’ tails have been broken off and replaced numerous times, the university keeps molds of the tails in order to re-create them as needed.  There is no truth to the legend that the pair roars whenever a virgin walks by – at least, the lions have never roared.

The lions originally were part of the extensive collection of classical statuary that graced the gardens of Jacob Hoffner’s estate in Cumminsville.  He was a real estate and business speculator who often traveled in Europe and had copies made of sculptures which he saw there.  He died in 1894 at the age of 96, leaving everything to his wife Maria, but stipulating that his statuary was to be donated to the city of Cincinnati.  When Maria died in 1904, the statuary passed to the city, and the city placed the lions at the original McMicken Hall (1895-late 1940s), the first university building built on the Burnet Woods campus.  More recently, the lions have been a prominent feature of the current McMicken Hall, built on the site of the old one in 1950.  They have been adopted as the official mascots of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association.

Two Hopped-Up Lions:  For many years, as we were growing up, if you rode west on Central Parkway past the main YMCA at Elm Street, you came up abruptly on a gigantic 5-story brick building and had to turn north to continue on the Parkway.  This giant was the old Windisch-Muhlhauser Brewing Company, better known as the “Lion Brewery,” founded in 1866 on the Miami & Erie Canal by the brothers-in-law Conrad Windisch and Gottlieb Muhlhauser, who emigrated from Bavaria and who operated the brewery until 1922, when Prohibition shut it down.  (After Prohibition ended in 1933, the Burger Brewing Company set up shop in the old brewery in 1934 and operated there until 1973.)  Called the “Lion Brewery” because of two giant stone lions that could be seen way atop the twin gables of the brewery building, Windisch-Muhlhauser was Cincinnati’s second-largest brewery.  Each sandstone lion weighed 10,000 pounds and neither (it was found when they were taken down) actually was attached to the building – they were just sitting up there on concrete slabs!  The two lions, much later to be named “Leo” and “Leona,” were brought from Germany to grace the brewery and are calculated to be about 150 years old; each is about 10 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 6 feet high.  Removed from the building for safety reasons by the Doran Transfer & Rigging Company circa 1952, the lions ended up guarding the entrance to the Doran family’s property in the 4800 block of North Bend Road in Western Hills, where they could be seen for many years.  The brewery building itself was first repurposed after Burger Brewing closed in 1973; since then, the building has been razed in sections over the last fifty years.

However, for the lions it’s been a different story.  Dan Doran of the Doran Transfer & Rigging Co. family, and Dale Rack of the V & G Rack Co., recall playing around the lions in the 1950s and 1960s, often sitting on them.  It is believed that the lions were separated in the 1980s, when the Dorans moved one lion (“Leo”) with them as they moved around; the Rack family got the other lion (“Leona,” once called “Kitty Cat” by Dale Rack’s father).  At present, the Racks’ lion can be seen in the 5000 block of North Bend Road in front of the family business; it is practically across the street from where it and its partner once stood.  It is painted yellow and brown and sits on a custom-built stone pedestal.  As for the Dorans’ lion, “Leo” (which they do not wish to move with them to Florida) has just gotten a new home.  In the 19th century, the Muhlhauser and Christian Moerlein families owned and operated farms in Butler County, Ohio, where they grew grains for the brewing of beer; they also had summer homes there.  In 1881, a timber-frame barn was constructed for the storing of grain on the Muhlhauser farm on Seward Road in Fairfield.  In 2002, this barn was donated to West Chester Township; moved, rebuilt, and restored, the Muhlhauser Barn now stands at 8558 Beckett Road in West Chester Township’s Beckett Park.  And it is there that the Windisch-Muhlhauser lion “Leo” will sit on a path outside the Muhlhauser Barn – and where children can sit on the old stone lion once more.

Two Eagles of Commerce (and Two More):  The Melan Arch Bridge (named after the Austrian Josef Melan, designer of the bridge’s reinforcing system), the oldest reinforced concrete bridge in Ohio (1894) and the second-oldest reinforced concrete bridge in the United States [see "Forum" Post #2531 (12-15-2016):  "Early Concrete Architecture in Cincinnati:  The Ingalls Building and the Melan Arch Bridge"], spans Eden Park Drive near where it joins Victory Parkway at the northeastern entrance to Eden Park, close by the Twin Lakes Overlook.  Prominent as part of the overall appearance of the bridge today (but not part of its original design) are four 5-foot tall elegant stone eagles, which stand on pedestals at the base of the bridge’s arch, one at each of the four corners of the bridge.  These eagles were part of the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce and Merchants’ Exchange building (1889-1911), designed by the renowned American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and which stood on the southwest corner of Fourth and Vine Streets downtown.  The eagles, of pink Milford (Worcester) granite (as was the rest of the building), flanked the peaks of the two large dormer windows which stood at the roofline of the north and south sides of the building, crowning glories of this massive and turreted carved stone building in the Romanesque style.

But alas!  The famed architect had planned not wisely but too well:  in order to make the main trading floor completely open, he had suspended the two main floors from truss girders at the top of the building.  Thus, when a grease fire broke out in the restaurant on the evening of January 10, 1911, the girders, weakened by the fire, could not sustain the weight of the building’s interior, and the whole building collapsed inward, crashing down on itself.  Because the building’s stones were massive and some beautifully carved, there was an effort made to save them.  The Cincinnati Astronomical Society salvaged 3,000 tons of the stones to build a new observatory in Cleves, Ohio, to replace the one in Hyde Park, but it ran out of funds and nothing came of the project, the stones languishing in a field off of Buffalo Ridge Road in Cleves for nearly sixty years – all except for the dormer eagles, which were donated to the Cincinnati Park Board shortly after 1911.  (Some of the more attractive stones became part of the UC College of Design, Art and Architecture’s student-led H. H. Richardson Memorial in 1972; it stands at the southern edge of Burnet Woods park, adjacent to the College of Design, Art and Architecture classrooms.)  In 2016 a car hit one of the pylons in Eden Park and the eagle fell off and cracked, but it has now been repaired and put back in place.

Two Garden Gateway Eagles:  Jacob Hoffner and his Cumminsville (some persist in calling it Northside) estate (corner of Hamilton Avenue and Blue Rock Street) are summarized above in the second paragraph of “Two Academic Lions.”  A late 19th-century photograph of the entrance to the Hoffner estate and its house has been published on the Internet; it shows two stone gateposts with what look like bedraggled stone eagles on top of them (are they really eagles?).  Numerous articles on the Internet and elsewhere copy each other in stating that these are “the eagles that were placed in Eden Park.”  Nonsense!  They look nothing like the Eden Park eagles [see above, “Two Eagles of Commerce.”].  However, they must have come to the city of Cincinnati in 1904 under Hoffner’s will with his other statuary (the Chamber of Commerce eagles were still on the Chamber of Commerce building at that time); I don’t know what became of them.  Hoffner’s estate in Cumminsville (minus the house and statuary) became the Northside Playground, and then eventually Jacob Hoffner Park.

Two Lions at Rest:  High on a hill in Section 57 of Spring Grove Cemetery is the Jacob Hoffner family burial plot and monument. The monument is a tall, narrow, open Gothic spire with a lady (angel?) inside; she looks to the south.  The hill this monument is on, on the cemetery’s eastern border near Winton Road, is steep; a steep set of stone stairs descends the hill from the spire’s eastern side – but the steps descend only part way down the hill (there was once an iron fence along this boundary of the burial plot); you cannot reach them easily from the bottom of the hill (I know; I’ve tried).  If you take the drive around the hill to its western and more level end, you can approach the monument on foot through Section 57A.  This monument is singular in itself, but the pleasing part of the monument (if you can reach it!) is at the foot of the stone stairs:  on either side a large pair of stone lions recline on pedestals, looking as if they are sleeping – or perhaps they are in their eternal sleep.  And there they can stay, for they do not need to guard the steps or the monument – you cannot get to either easily!

Two Metal Eagles:  In our youth, when one went west on Hopple Street from Central Parkway, one immediately passed, on the north side of the street, the great Haffner Brothers “Eagle” Tannery.   Over its entrance, surmounting the tannery, was what proposed to be a sculpture of a great wing-spread eagle, but which frankly looked more like a ruptured goose from the street below.  When the tannery went out of business after 102 years in 1959, this 85-year-old hollow zinc sculpture eventually ended up in the backyard of Louis Haffner’s daughter, Mrs. James Headley, at her residence at 8280 Kugler Mill Road in Indian Hill.  (It’s since gone from there, I don’t know where; the tannery itself was torn down to make way for the Mill Creek Expressway, now part of I-75.)  A much more modern-styled eagle is “The American Eagle” (a.k.a. “Victory Eagle”) on the John Weld Peck Federal Building at 550 Main Street downtown.  Made of cast aluminum and sculpted by Marshall Maynard Fredericks (1908-1998), this rapidly descending “neo-Art Deco” eagle is 21 feet high and has adorned the Federal Building two stories above its entrance since 1964. 

One Lone Stone Eagle:  So far our eagles have been more or less in pairs.  But there is one lone eagle we should mention; it stands atop a designedly broken fluted column, just inside Spring Grove Cemetery after you pass under the Railway Arch, in Section 20.  The eagle is bowed in grief with a laurel garland in its beak, mourning a life cut short, for it is the monument and grave of Mexican War and Civil War General William Haines Lytle, the last descendant of Cincinnati's Lytle family, for whom Lytle Park is named.  General Lytle was something of an anomaly:  he was more famed as a poet than he was as a military man.  Among many turgid and sentimental verses was his most famous poem, often set to music in the Victorian era -- "Antony and Cleopatra" (1857), also known as "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying!" and "Listen to the Great Heart Secrets."  Here is a sample from its first and last verses:  "I am dying, Egypt, dying! / Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast, / And the dark Plutonian shadows / Gather on the evening blast; / ... / Ah, no more amid the battle / Shall my heart exulting swell; / Isis and Osiris guard thee, -- / Cleopatra, Rome, farewell!"   General Lytle never married; he died in 1863, mortally wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, while leading a counterattack on horseback.  Confederates, knowing his poetry well, placed a guard over his body and recited his poetry over their evening campfires.

Lytle's  funeral cortege in Cincinnati was so long -- from Christ Church on Fourth Street to Spring Grove Cemetery in Winton Place -- that it did not reach the cemetery until dusk.  His monument there (1865), formerly of Italian Carrara marble and carved by sculptor Louis Verhagen, by 1915 had suffered such severe damage from the weather and acid rain that a copy was made (the present one) in Vermont granite.  At that time, a bronze plaque in relief by famed Cincinnati sculptor Clement J. Barnhorn was added; it depicts Lytle leading his troops, the 10th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, into battle.  Lytle is one of forty Civil War Union generals buried in Spring Grove Cemetery.

And a Sphinx!:  Yes, there is a sphinx in Spring Grove Cemetery, a bluestone one on a granite base.  Davis Bevan Lawler, one of the founders of the cemetery, erected a rather Greek sphinx (although in an Egyptian headdress) on his family’s plot in 1850.  (No, it does not ask riddles, as in antiquity; you have to go to Riddle Road in Clifton for those).  The monument created a controversy at the time:  it was not a good Christian symbol, you see – but neither were all of those Egyptian obelisks and Greek Revival mausoleums.  Lawler (1786-1869), whose father was a mayor of Philadelphia and a sugar refiner, is buried with his wife (Augusta Kreutz Lawler), parents (Matthew Lawler and Ann Bevan Lawler), and other relatives.  The Sphinx is located in Section 45, Lot 49, Space 5.

 

"Mick" and "Mack" at McMicken Hall, UC.

Windisch-Muhlhauser "Lion" Brewery, Miami & Erie Canal (Central Parkway), lions on top of gables.

"Leo" the Brewery Lion being loaded to be removed to Beckett Park.

One of H. H. Richardson's Chamber of Commerce eagles in Eden Park.

Jacob Hoffner's estate in Cumminsville, droopy eagles on pedestals beyond the gate.

The Jacob Hoffner monument, Spring Grove Cemetery, sleeping lions at foot of staircase.

One of the sleeping lions at the Hoffner family gravesite, Spring Grove Cemetery.

The Haffner "Eagle" Tannery eagle being removed, 1959.

"The American Eagle" on the Federal Building, downtown Cincinnati.

     

(1) General William Haines Lytle.  [During my first summer at the Cincinnati Historical Society (1965), I, being more lithe in those days, dressed in Gen. Lytle's uniform -- this very one -- and the secretary announced me to the Director, "General Lytle to see you, sir!"  You can imagine his reaction.]  (2) Gen. Lytle's monument in Spring Grove Cemetery, eagle atop.

AND . . . The Sphinx on the Lawler family burial plot, Spring Grove Cemetery.


12/06/24 12:55 AM #6723    

 

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

Laura Reid Pease notified me that Gary Beck passed away last night at his home. He had been under Hospice Care. Gary was the husband of our classmate Mary Jo Smith.

I will post Gary's obituary once it is available.

Another classmate no longer with us. Such sadness. Carpe Diem.


12/06/24 12:29 PM #6724    

 

Bruce Bittmann

Just read about Gary Beck's passsing last night.  Very sad moment for me.  Gary was my best friend at WHHS.  I met Gary in 7th grade, and we became life long  friends.  Fortunately, Gary called me last week to update me on his health., which was not good.  We had a nice long chat - basically a 'good by' call.  A great friend, man, husband, father and grandfather.  I will miss beyond words.


12/06/24 05:05 PM #6725    

 

Sandy Steele (Bauman)

I was so sorry to hear about Gary Beck. My husband and I sometimes saw Gary and Mary Jo during holiday breaks from college. Mary Jo was in our wedding, and we saw her a few years ago while visiting Nantucket. Gary did not feel well that day, so did not come into town. He will be missed.

 


12/06/24 05:47 PM #6726    

 

Nelson Abanto

Gary was a superstar. He made us all proud to be associated with him. He will be sorely missed. 
 


12/07/24 03:41 PM #6727    

 

Charles Judd

Very sorry indeed to hear about Gary' Beck's death. We roomed together during the summer after our senior year, studying french in Swtizerland, on a trip organized by Walnut Hills french teacher Mme O'Neil. He will be missed.


12/08/24 11:49 AM #6728    

 

Dale Gieringer

    Sad to see yet another WHHS alum in today's NYT obituaries - Richard Hamilton, a mathematical genius who helped solve a fundamental problem in three-dimensional topology.  He was 81, three years ahead of us, but skipped his senior year.  Does anyone remember him?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/science/richard-hamilton-dead.html


12/12/24 03:41 PM #6729    

 

Laura Reid (Pease)

Gary Walter Beck Obituary

Gary Walter Beck

 

 

Gary Walter Beck was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on November 27th, 1945, and died in Cincinnati, Ohio on December 5th, 2024. He is survived by his high school sweetheart and wife of 55 years, Mary Jo, his son Charles Beck (Stacey), and daughter Katherine Wojcik (James). Gary was preceded in death by his parents Walter Beck and Augusta Fischer Beck. He leaves behind four adored grandchildren (Owen, Will, Reese, and Mary Sloane).

 

Gary graduated from Walnut Hills High School in 1964 in Cincinnati, where he met his future wife in ninth grade French class and moonlit as a drummer in a rock n' roll band called "The Torquays." His summers in high school were spent as a trooper at Culver Military Academy, where he developed his love for horsemanship. He proudly returned to Culver in college as a riding instructor with the famed and historic Black Horse Troop. 

 

Graduating from Harvard University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1974, Gary also proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Air Force (1968-1972).

 

Gary began his professional career in 1974, when he joined global real estate investment company Gerald Hines Interests in Houston, Texas. There, he contributed his unique retail skills and ingenuity to the creation of major shopping centers and hotels in Texas and property management in Cincinnati for more than two decades. As Senior Vice President of Retail Development, Gary relished the opportunity to work with celebrated architects on projects like expanding the Houston Galleria and leading the creation of the Dallas Galleria. 

 

As a young professional, Gary enjoyed mentoring and leadership, supporting causes like Big Brother Big Sisters of America as a Big Brother. 

 

A vacation on Nantucket in 1975 would set off Gary's nearly 50-year love affair with the people and places of the island that became the family's annual summer home. He went on to purchase a small fishing cottage there in 1985 that he would eventually transform into a beautiful family retreat. Creating something that will continue to provide treasured memories and friendships for generations to come was his life's most prized project.

 

As humble as he was accomplished, Gary was a man of deep and diverse talents. His hobbies and interests ranged from sailing and skeet shooting to woodworking and coin collecting to train modeling and boating to pheasant hunting and home designing to landscaping and financial investing. He enjoyed time spent over the years at his much-loved Stump's Boat Club, the storied Nantucket Wharf Rat Club, the Nantucket Yacht Club, Sycamore Sportsmen's Club, and the Cincinnati Country Club. And as a nongolfer, he delighted in tending to the 9-hole golf course he built himself on his Indian Hill property, merely for the enjoyment of others.

 

Above all, he cherished his many friends and beloved family. They cherished his quick wit and practical style, his easy but endlessly interesting conversations and amusing storytelling, his always thoughtful and reliable counsel, his deep convictions and sharp intellect, his incomparable integrity and his unfailing loyalty.

 

A private burial will be held next summer on Nantucket. Memorial gifts may be made to: the Culver Educational Foundation/Colonel Whitney Fund, 1300 Academy Road, Culver, IN 46511 or online at www.culver.org/makeagift

 


12/12/24 03:51 PM #6730    

 

Laura Reid (Pease)

Here is the link to Gary's obit; it has a wonderful photo of Gary.  As you all know, Gary was married to Mary Jo Smith.  Mary Jo is my husband's first cousin; Chip's father and Mary Jo's mother were siblings.  Mary Jo said, "I was the luckiest Walnut Hills grad to marry Gary and be together for 55 years."  I will always remember Gary for that twinkle in his eye and his wicked sense of humor.

Happy holidays to all my wonderful classmates....

https://www.springgroveobituaries.org/obituaries/Gary-Walter-Beck?obId=34045218

 

 


12/13/24 07:53 AM #6731    

 

Philip Spiess

All of you above might want to put your very valuable sentiments and memories of Gary in the "In Memory" section of this site for posterity.


12/21/24 11:44 PM #6732    

 

Philip Spiess

Season's Greetings to all my Classmates!  Here is a seasonal present for all of you:

A TRADITIONAL WASSAIL BOWL:   [From a recipe of Cedric Dickens, Charles Dickens' great-grandson]

Ingredients:          3 pints Ale     1/2 oz. ground Ginger     1/2 oz. ground Nutmeg     8 oz. dark Brown Sugar

1/2 bottle of Sherry or Madeira Wine     2 Lemons     3 lumps of Sugar     12 Crab Apples or 6 small Red Apples

Directions:          First, roast the apples:  slit the skin for easier cooking, and bake the apples in a moderate oven [350 degrees F.] until their texture looks soft and mashable.  (During the cooking, baste with a little ale if the apples appear to be becoming too dry.) Second, place 2 1/2 cups of the ale in a saucepan; add the ginger, nutmeg, and brown sugar, and bring to a boil.  Rub the lumps of sugar on the outside of one of the lemons, removing all the zest; thinly slice the other lemon.  Add the sugar lumps, the sherry or Madeira [I recommend the Madeira], and the rest of the ale, to the saucepan, and make it very hot, but do not boil.  Place the lemon slices in a large punchbowl, and pour the hot liquid over them.  Add the sizzling roasted apples [this is the origin of Halloween's "bobbing for apples"], and enjoy! 

And here is the present I got:  a genuine 1950s Lionel Train Set!  (It is shown as set up in my backyard.)

And may 2025 turn out to be good to and for all of us!


12/22/24 08:05 AM #6733    

 

Paul Simons

Thanks Phil, your post brings back memories from years ago of both that type of drink and that type of railroad yard. One summer a job that I had was as a brakeman about when the Pennsylvania Railroad split into Amtrak the passenger service and Conrail for freight which is where I worked, out of the Sharonville yard. Similar layout to yours - the main tracks and off to the side a number of classification tracks. One aspect - they'd slowly push a train of maybe 100 cars along past the buildings on the right in your image and I'd use the uncoupling handle to cut loose a car or two or three as required which would roll down the slight incline and be switched to whichever classification track they had to go to. The air hoses uncoupled automatically but the air valves had to closed to maintain air pressure which kept the brakes off. Major safety feature - any accidental loss of air pressure stops the train. This might have been George Westinghouse's extremely important innovation. Thanks for the holiday wishes, let me echo that to all. 


12/22/24 11:37 AM #6734    

 

Becky Payne (Shockley)

Thanks,  Phil. My brother Karl loved his Lionel trains - he had them set up on a large table my father had built for him in what I think was originally a billiard room in our attic. In order for Dad to work on it and help setting up the trains, Karl had to attend Mme Fedorova's ballroom dance classes every Fridat night at the Alms hotel. Remember those? (Karl hated them!)


12/22/24 11:40 AM #6735    

 

Becky Payne (Shockley)

PS: Karl's train table occupied just half of the old billiard room. The other half was my personal space, and I named it "Miss Lane's Club" (after my 2nd grade teacher, who I thought at the time was just wonderful!) 


12/22/24 12:38 PM #6736    

 

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Thanks Phil!
With the beginning of Hanukkah and Christmas falling on December 25 this year, I extend greetings for a joyous holiday season.

 

 

 


12/22/24 12:39 PM #6737    

 

Margery Erhardt (Schrader)

Becky and Phil...what fond memories with the trains and then Mme. Fefe's! That was a riot every Friday evening. Girls trying to climb out the window in the "powder room" though if they could where would they go? Dallas had a similar institution and both my sons attended wondering my reasoning. Anyway, I talk weekly with a friend from CPS (Miss Doherty's) (sp) and as we attended together we recall really funny episodes.


12/22/24 04:23 PM #6738    

 

Jeff Daum

Phil, nice pic of train yard.  However, my Lionel trains (and most that any of us would have known) ran on a three track system.  Those in your image are two track systems and look suspicously real, like the South Station Approaches classic picture.  My set up had grown to half of our basement in Bond Hill.  It started on a 6 by 10 foot platform that included the transformer and controls.  That part had two levels of tracks and a switching yard.  It then continued along the wall behind our furnace (initially coal then gas) along a suspended track that ran into my work area before looping back to the main table.  Fun times indeed.


12/22/24 06:19 PM #6739    

 

Philip Spiess

Okay, Jeff, you've "outed" me:  the train setup I posted is not a Lionel set, but the yard of Boston's South Station in the 1940s (station headhouse in the far background).  I did indeed have a Lionel train setup in my basement, too, but the best I ever saw (aside from the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co.'s lobby train show at Christmas) was our classmate Jim Stillwell's; it was in his basement, too (it even had running streetcars).

Becky!  I hope and trust you're back to being able to play the piano again.  Speaking of your old house in Clifton, in October Kathy and I visited Cincinnati for the first time in twenty years; we stayed for the week in "The Clifton House," the house on the corner of Terrace Avenue, across Whitfield from your house.  It is now a very nice bed & breakfast (we stayed in the 2-story carriage house on the alley across from your driveway).  We also had a great 2-hour tour of Walnut Hills High School, and the joint strings classes played two pieces for us. As to Miss Lane and 2nd Grade, there we were for the year out in the "bungalow"; I remember you playing the piano for us (it stood across a corner of the room).  I had Miss Lane for 3rd Grade as well (on Clifton School's 3rd floor); did you?

Ann:  a sad note:  we had to put down our dog Haligan in September; what we thought was a back problem turned out to be a tumor and leukemia.  He was my "nap buddy"; now all I have to share my nap with me is an old woolen blanket (not so warm and cuddly).

Margery:  I never learned dancing at Madame Fedorova's; I was part of the dancing group with Mr. Gallus.  However, we all must have done well (despite escaping out windows):  years ago I was at a wedding reception in White Plains, New York.  After observing me for awhile on the dance floor, an elderly lady on the sidelines (whom I did not know) remarked, "You must be from Cincinnati."  "I am," I said, "but how did you know?"  "All the young men that I've seen who are good ballroom dancers seem to come from Cincinnati," she responded.  Years later, my son was in Cotillion here in Virginia; he must have been good, too, for they asked him to help teach the following year.

And Paul:  tell us more of your railroad adventures.


12/22/24 07:55 PM #6740    

 

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Phil. Sorry to learn about your buddy Haligan. Wool blankets certainly not the same. As one who has experience such loss over my lifetime, it doesn't get any easier.  Even though I retired from facilitating pet loss groups on a regular basis three years ago, I still fill in from time to time. I filled in Tuesday night and it reminded me that our animals lives are so much shorter than our own, but those who love having them around make the choice in spite of it.  Hugs.


12/23/24 09:57 AM #6741    

 

Philip Spiess

HALIGAN a year ago  (you can see him as a puppy in 2014 on my Profile, 15th picture in).

 


12/23/24 04:28 PM #6742    

 

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

And what a fine dog!! 


12/23/24 10:11 PM #6743    

 

Becky Payne (Shockley)

Margery: Thanks for your memories of Madame Fifi - I never knew about girls trying to jump out the windows! (My brother referred tro he as Madame "Forty-or-over"  back then we thought age 40 was realy ancient!)

Jeff: Your model train empire sounds amazing! Very impressive! 

Phil: Thanks for your good wishes. Yes, I still play - not too frequently but at least once a month for my little (mainly retired) piano teacher group ithat meets in people's homes. Glad you re-visited Clifton. We know the Clifton House - stayed there once while visiting Karl and Susan in their house on Howell Ave. And when I was growing up it was thte Marjorie P. Lees Home (for Seniors) - now located in Hyde Park. I even played the piano for them once - as a Red Cross service project (wearing my official Red Cross uniform!) Also, about 15 years ago, I saw someone working outside 394 Terrace, so Karl and I introduced ourselves as former residents and asked if we could go through thte house. The nice man showed us around, and they had done a lot of nice updates to it, and restored parts that had suffered abuse while it was used as student rental housing at one time. Lots of memories there! Re Clifton School - I had Mrs. Phelps for 3rd grade. I don't remember playing for Miss Lane's class, but I did once bring some puppets and performed a play I had written for them. However, my script was censored: When i had one character say "Shut up!" to another one, she made me change it to "Hush up." So I learned to watch my language!

 

 


12/24/24 01:15 PM #6744    

 

Margery Erhardt (Schrader)

Becky, I also have fond memories of getting together in your living room for junior guild (?) events. Such fun and memorable times with your dear mother!!! And I have and love your book about her!!!!!


12/24/24 03:48 PM #6745    

 

Jeff Daum

Thanks Becky.  It was a fun set up, though as I got older my focus was to see how fast I could run the engines (without hauling cars) around the tracks before they flew off. laugh I only did this with engines already in need of repair while keeping the rest of the Lionel engines and cars in good condition.

Unfortunately when I left for Miami U (Oxford), my parents moved back to New York and gave my trains to my sister (WHHS class of 1960) who then gave them away without telling me.

Our sons were only breifly interested in trains and then it was "Z" and "N" gauge rather than Lionel.


12/25/24 10:18 AM #6746    

 

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Season's greetings everyone!


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