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Philip Spiess
Ann: I hear that Music Hall was included in the bond referendum. What needed to be done there? It was thoroughly overhauled (for the second or third time since it opened in 1878) by the Ralph Corbett Foundation in the 1970s. (The great Hook & Hastings organ from Boston, located center stage, played on occasion by WHHS's Robbie Delcamp [year behind us] was dismantled in the early 1970s and its handsomely carved wooden panels by Fry -- part of a Cincinnati-based wood-carving school of the 1870s, centered at the Cincinnati Art Academy -- were relegated to the Music Hall orchestra pit; are they still there?) Are all of the city's historic relics falling apart? Why were the Union Terminal murals moved out of Greater Cincinnati Airport and packed up? Expansion?
When I planned and ran the tour for the 1978 annual meeting of the national Society for Industrial Archeology (the convention began its meeting in Louisville, but I convinced the board of directors to move the tours to Cincinnati because of our superior industrial sites!), we ended our tour in Cincinnati Union Terminal. We had a complete run of the building, from the Rotunda balcony to the executive offices and the lower-level freight terminal spaces. It was great! (We guys could even get in to see the linoleum wall decorations in the Women's Restroom -- and vice versa.) My extensive "Guide to the Industrial Archeology of Cincinnati" made the memorable comment on the then-existing Amtrak station down on the riverfront among the gravel and garbage heaps (is it still there?) "To enter Cincinnati by rail today is to enter the city through its nether cheeks." [And by the way, the Palladian facade of the Albee Theater, hanging, if I recall, on a south-facing wall of the Convention Center, is really Neo-Georgian (i.e., early 20th Century), not Art Deco. At the Albee, in the 1970s, I heard Gaylord "Flickerfingers" Carter of Hollywood play the great Wurlitzer theater organ as it rose, amidst palms, out of the orchestra pit for him to accompany "silent movie" revivals.]
Dale: I, too, mourn the passing of the Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, General Store; I was there at least once, I believe. But more importantly I mourn the passing of all such general stores; quaint and nearly unique to their neighborhoods, they were the 19th / early 20th Century grocery versions of the bar in the "Cheers" TV show. The collection of stuff that they carried and sold, too, was unsurpassed: many items that one thought no longer existed could be found there, and many of such items were surprisingly needed, practical and "necessary," even.
The personal special general store of my own youth was the general store in the felicitously named community (like the community at Rabbit Hash) of Gnaw Bone, Indiana. Located on State Route 46 between Columbus, Indiana, the county seat of Bartholomew County (and the self-described "Athens of the West"), and Nashville, Indiana, the county seat of Brown County (oh-so-folksy and ever-increasingly a tourist trap), Gnaw Bone was also just west of Stoney Lonesome, Indiana, and somewhat east and south of Beanblossom, Indiana, and the town of Trevlac, perversely named, for whatever reason, as the reverse of "Calvert," as well as north of the community of Stone Head (yes, there is a folk-art stone head there, marking the spot).
Gnaw Bone (barely there even in the 1950s, but still on the maps today) consisted of three precious artifacts: the General Store, the Swinging (pedestrian suspension) Bridge over the local creek, and the Sorghum Mill, across the highway from the General Store. It was the General Store that held the whole community (very much farm; there were pumpkins growing along the highway in autumn) together. It was where I first met Dr. Pepper, out of one of those soda coolers where you put in your coin and pulled the bottle along the hanging rack until you could, with a great heave against the machinery, yank it out at the end. There was also a chocolate-flavored drink ("Chock-cola"? or something else?) and plenty of Nehi soft drinks on tap -- a standard stopping place on the way to the Brown County State Park swimming pool -- which is where I learned to swim.
The Swinging Bridge (we only saw it as we passed through Gnaw Bone; we never essayed to cross it) looked like a miniature version of the bridge described in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey: it always looked in an imminent state of collapse (and, indeed, I don't think it's there anymore; I used to traverse Route 46 from Cincinnati to Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1970s, where I was in graduate English at Indiana University). But the Sorghum Mill, across the way from the General Store, was a major autumn feature for a good number of years. You could see the sugar cane -- actually take the raw stalks and chew it for the sugar it contained -- and watch it being ground through the mill, the sap sugars dripping into the boiling and skimming pans, and the whole rest of the process, not too dissimilar from that of processing maple sugar. I love good sorghum; it's great on pancakes and waffles (more intense even than blackstrap molasses), but it's also good on tuna steaks!
Alas! When Indiana State Highway 46 was "straightened," circa 1959, it cut off Gnaw Bone and its General Store, and spelled, I assume, the doom of that community. The General Store is no longer there, nor am I sure that that community, though it still is marked on the map, is as well. As my graduate classmate Mary Means, former Midwest regional director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, used to explain: "When you move the historic central square courthouse of a town out to the highway bypass, you've removed a 'paperweight' holding down the community and its businesses, and it blows away." So, too, with country stores; "Ave atque vale!"
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When I asked her during our Tuesday visit if I could take her photograph she said, "Not on the Sabbath." I asked her if 100 rupees might change the calendar for her. "Yes," she said, "now you can." I never pay for photographs, but this time it was definitely worth it. She's 93, and we caught her at home, reading the Torah.
