Memories from the “WABAC” Machine

( I’m going to begin this post with an old pedagogy joke: “Will everyone who is not here please raise your hand!” Actually I would like everyone who hasn’t read the email about Tuckpointing the Wall to check your mail, spam and trash included, and take a look. Thanks!) Now on with Memories from the WABAC Machine.)

Between 1959 and 1963 one could dip into a TV cartoon on Saturday mornings called Peabody’s Improbable History. In the program Mr. Peabody, a brilliant bespectacled beagle and his human, rather befuddled, sort-of-ward, Sherman would enter the “WABAC” - pronounced “way back” -  machine and zip off to, and muddle about in, major events in history.

I sort of did that a couple of months ago when my oldest friend and partner-in-crime, Dan, and I took off to Springfield, Ohio to revisit our strangely shared history. We started with the duplex where we were born 7 days apart in November of 1948. I will include that image as it seems rather like what a structure would look like 74 years after the November of our birth. But from there things got a bit weird.

Among the more normal stops along the ramble we revisited the other homes where we grew up. Mine looked rather well kept up, but the knock on the door was greeted only by raucous barking from multiple canines and a sign on the door which read: “No need to knock. We can hear that you are here.” Perhaps that was what alleviated any need to answer the door. We moved on.

Dan’s home had fared less well, deserted, weather beaten, and up for sale. His attempts to engage his sisters in an architectural rescue seem to be falling on deaf ears. However in our mind’s eyes we were able to recreate backyard baseball games where we imposed upon his younger sister to play the “way, way, way outfield,” part way back into the neighbor’s yard. The stump of the pine tree down which we would escape for late night soirées to the candy, soda and baseball cards store was discernible. Sadly, our junior high school directly across the street was but a memory faded behind a strip of bland buildings devoid of signage and of indeterminate function.

Better preserved were the homes of our high school sweethearts, whose current occupants apparently neither observed or reported our slow and subtle drive-bys. But that brings me to varied reasons to allow the past to remain the past.

Springfield, Ohio lies 10 miles down State Route 68 from Yellow Spring, Ohio, home of Antioch College, which like Dan’s house appears to have fallen on hard times. Once a cornerstone of “alternate - aka hippy - education” with several campuses, Wikipedia reports a current total enrollment of 133 students. Adieu the 60s.

But that isn’t the point. Our time along the Route 68 corridor had little or nothing to do with Antioch. Far more important were Young’s Jersey Dairy - a small (maybe 15 foot square) little Mom and Pop dairy bar with incredible milkshakes; and John Bryan State Park - home of a bucolic waterfall guaranteed to impress your date from high school.

So we set off down route 68 to recapture those scenes of our youth. We soon arrived, appropriately for the original writing of this post, at the Halloween version of both.  The two entities had formerly been separated by pastures and cornfields. They now seemed to share Disneyland-like huge asphalt parking lots featuring dual-stroller friendly paths - all densely inhabited. 

We bailed on both and instead headed down 68 a bit further to Yellow Springs proper, which seemed to have found a new identity as overflow parking for the dairy and State park. When you could find a parking place it was behind trendy little boutiques and bars. We repaired to one of the latter and were informed by a chatty patron that Yellow Springs was “the most visited village in the nation!”

She had no data for her assertion, nor could I find any online, however, the general congestion seemed to offer some support. We wandered around for awhile, eventually stopping into a cloyingly quaint garden restaurant for dinner. It eventually further distinguished itself by serving Dan the smallest filet either of us had ever seen.

We finally admitted defeat and left reality behind and returned to the kinder embrace of memory. Dan had secured a couple of “senior” tickets to a Wittenberg University - previously Wittenberg College - football game at the cost of $6.00 a head. Not a typo, perhaps a nod to the kinder and more gentle pricing of our youth, which was not reflected in the concession stand where a hotdog and a Coke outstripped the cost of admission.

(The yellow house across the playing field is the one at the top of the post where Dan and I lived the first few years of our lives.) 

The concession stand exerted a particular pull for me as both my older brother and I had hawked popcorn and the original coca-colas to the fans. Some of whom were seated - as we had been, back in the day - in the “box seats,” which at the time were concrete pads that held four folding chairs. My memories of those those days may be a bit sanguine, as the whole concession endeavor was run by a burly guy strangely named “Peaches” who was the uncle of my girlfriend whose house we had earlier cruised. Naturally I enquired at the concession window if the family still owned the operation. Blank stares.

Wittenberg won and we trudged back across the rolling lawn where Dan had squired his high school sweetheart whom he eventually married. We found the car and returned the our rented porch, made beverages that would have been illicit in the times we sought to recall, and gazed quietly out across the fields that fit more comfortably with our memories than the insistent realities that populated the world beyond. 

I do not regret having made this little sojourn in the Wayback machine, but do not think I will advocate for a repeat. Other places in our shared history may call to us, but there are, I learned again, some memories that are owned by the past, and should be left there in peace.