History

A Paper Rose for Mr. Spoons

Katie Laur — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:40:00 GMT

Mr. Spoons doesn’t sound much different than he used to. Oh, he’s a little older, but when I talked to him by phone recently I was amazed that his voice didn’t have any of the tell-tale scratch of a vinyl record, and that his perspective was as fresh as a young man’s. It was hard to believe that Mr. Spoons is 77. Even harder to believe that it had been decades since he left off playing in Cincinnati bars and took his talent to the streets of New York. “A lot of people wonder if you’re still alive,” I told him. “Whatever have you been up to?”  

“Well,” he said with a laugh, “I’ve spent most of my life making up stuff about myself, so I don’t mind doing a little bit more of it.” He reported that he was living in Simpsonville, South Carolina, where he is helping his sister care for his brother-in-law, who is struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. His brother is in Arizona, dealing with heart disease.

“I don’t want to live that long,” he said, musing on the misery of others, seemingly unaware that he already had lived that long. “If I can’t get around, I sure don’t plan on sticking around.”

I met Mr. Spoons—his real name is Joe Jones—back in the 1960s, about the same time that I discovered bluegrass, when all things seemed possible, all doors half-open. I got to know him pretty well, since he often showed up where I was singing. Then, in the early 1980s, a woman from Manhattan saw him perform, whisked him off to the Big Apple, and married him. Stories trickled back about his New York career—playing in the subway, touring, cameos in movies like Married to the Mob and Sweet and Lowdown. But when we talked now, it was as if we had only spoken yesterday, and we fell easily back into our old friendship.

“I went on that America’s Got Talent show with Jerry Springer. Then I did an ice cream commercial,” he told me in his pleasant stream-of-consciousness fashion. “I went to Japan 11 times and went to Germany as well. I was part of a series called Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors in the New York City Underground. I met a woman and we did flute and rhythm duets. It was challenging.”

“Challenging?” I asked, trying to imagine the flute-and-spoons musical dynamic. “Yeah,” he said. “Let me tell you, there are some strange people in New York City.”

Having performed in New York a half-dozen times myself, I knew what he meant. Still, it was funny to hear that from a man many people considered to be Cincinnati’s all-time greatest character. Mr. Spoons has been gone so long that multiple generations have cycled through the neighborhood where he made his name, and clubs and bars have opened and closed, replaced by new clubs and bars. But there has never been another Mr. Spoons.

He danced into my life one night at Aunt Maudie’s, the bluegrass bar at 1207 Main Street. I was young and new to town and mesmerized by what I was hearing: a blast of a cracking five-string banjo playing something I recognized as “Salty Dog Blues,” and at the chorus, three voices blended in a baritone, lead, and high tenor trio so true and so authentic I was dumbstruck.

Let me be your Salty Dog,
Or I won’t be your man at all,
Honey, let me be your Salty Dog

So they sang, accenting certain syllables with runs on the guitar. A chubby guy with a flattop haircut was playing upright bass just a hair ahead of the rest of the musicians, giving the music a kind of hard rhythm. “Folk music in overdrive” is how one critic described bluegrass, and I still believe that’s about as accurate as you’re going to get. My fascination must have been obvious, because a man leaned over to me and said, a little boastfully, “Just wait til ol’ Spoons gets here.”

Sure enough, he came in around 10, carrying a flat board on which he’d pinned hand-made corsages. His spoons—large tablespoons he claimed he’d stolen from the Salvation Army—were in his back pocket. He looked Irish but with a biscuits-and-gravy accent. His hair, which he dressed with Vitalis, fell into sausage curls around his face. He laid his board of corsages carefully on an empty table and began to tap lightly on his knee with a couple of pairs of spoons in each hand to warm up. He held each pair back to back, so that their curved bowls made a rhythmic click-clacking sound.

He kept up a running patter with the customers while he played—old country ribaldry, ancient jokes, corny lines. “I’d come over tonight,” he said to a bashful woman, clicking his spoons up and down her arm, “but I’m afraid your husband would come home early from work.” Then he moved on to another patron, maybe a college kid out with his Saturday night girlfriend: “If he don’t treat you right, honey, I will.”

Spoons started picking up speed, adding four spoons to the four he already had in each hand. He worked them like castanets, clicking up and down an arm, then arcing between his upper leg and his extended hand. They seemed to fly of their own accord, like something out of Harry Potter. “Go, Spoons!” someone shouted, urging him on.

He tap-danced a little as he worked, moving gracefully, pretending to click the spoons against someone’s hand or head. As he warmed up, he waved the spoons in arcs and danced harder. When he started throwing the spoons in the air and catching them like a baton twirler, the crowd got going. One man did an ancient “hambone” jive, slapping the back of his hands on his knee. “Let’s see you do it, Spoons!” someone yelled. Then Mr. Spoons added more spoons until he was up to 20—10 in each hand. The room was an orgy of rhythm.

When Mr. Spoons got winded, it was time to do a little business. The custom was, if you’d enjoyed the act you bought a corsage. In 1975, photographer Cal Kowal published a coffee table book about Mr. Spoons entitled A Book Full of Spoons. In it, Kowal says the performer once sold 69 corsages in one evening. My old friend, Becky Hudnall, who discovered bluegrass and Mr. Spoons when I did, recounts how she received her original Spoons corsage.

“I was sitting at the table watching him, and a guy everybody called Fast Eddie handed me a corsage,” she says. “‘Thank you very much,’ I said, surprised and touched.

“‘It ain’t for you,’ Eddie said. “It’s for him.’”

When it was over and Spoons had left the building, the bandleader, Jim McCall, his cowboy hat tilted on the side of his head, called for a slow song. “Here’s one to rub your belt buckles to,” he said. McCall was no fool; he wasn’t about to follow Spoons with an up-tempo tune.

Mr. Spoons, I would come to learn, had grown up in Over-the-Rhine. He lived in various parts of the neighborhood with his mother, his brother, and his sisters. His father had left by the time Joe was 8 years old, and the boy helped his mother put food on the table. He had a knack for music and rhythm and had found his instrument: According to legend, little Joe reached for his first set of spoons before he was 5. In his adolescence he became a drinker and a sinner, passing out—he once told me—on the bridge to Newport. His mother never gave up on him; it was she who spotted the genius in what he did. And it was she who helped him create his flashy “Nudie”-type suits out of ordinary polyester jackets, adding fringe and embroidering his name in bold letters. Dressed in splendor, he became the main breadwinner of the family.

He worked in a place where characters were thick on the ground. One wall of Aunt Maudie’s was decorated with a mural of the bar’s regulars, and I quickly got to know them in person. I noticed a woman in skinny blue jeans and a short, sassy haircut, wearing a black leather Harley motorcycle jacket, chain-smoking, drinking beer, and laughing and cussing in a raspy voice. She was Lin Gibson, a crackerjack writer who worked in ad agencies and greeting card companies as long as she could stand it, then got back to her real life, which was writing songs and hanging out with bluegrass bands. She was easy to pick out among the caricatures—full of vigor and confidence. A woman whom everyone called Mother was also among the figures—a bottle blonde in an apron with “Mother” embroidered across the front. Her dark black eyebrows met over her nose in a kind of fashion statement I’ve rarely seen since. The band was depicted beautifully in the pictures, too, bellies hanging over their belts in outrageous exaggeration.

Then there were the regulars who regularly formed tableaux in the room. I recall watching a group of Appalachian women sitting like a Greek chorus at the pool table, rehashing a sad litany of the faults of men.

“Harold don’t even take me to the durn doctor no more,” one of them said with a little pepper in her speech.

“Jimmy don’t even let me go to the doctor any more,” the other one said. “Jimmy says he ain’t havin’ no man look at me like that, even if he is a doctor.”

She had a bruise on the side of her face, and was dressed like the other women, in a tight Spandex tube top and shorts. The strange thing was that they all had their hair wrapped in pink foam curlers. Bill LaWarre, an ad exec I met there, asked me once, “Where do you suppose they were going after Aunt Maudie’s that they had to roll up their hair?”

I suspected that they did it for church the next morning. Saturday night was for drinking and running around, but Sunday morning was a time to repent, a time for family, and most important, a time to forget playing music.

My first night at Aunt Maudie’s was followed by many more. I was a good harmony singer, and the bandleader started asking me to do back-up singing. Before I knew it, I was a full-time bluegrass performer, traveling around the country in the back of a Ford Econoline van, and my Saturday nights of being a spectator as Spoons clacked his heart out were over.

It must have been sometime in the early 1980s when I saw Caldonia, the city’s wickedly good, singularly-named tap dancer, and I asked her if she’d heard anything about Mr. Spoons lately. “Aw,” she said, “he done won that Gong Show, and he’s all over the place.”

We were at Arnold’s Bar and Grill on a Thursday night, and Caldonia had arrived with her tap shoes in a cardboard box tied with rough twine. She looked a little like a Frenchwoman, with black eyes and an expressive face. Small, compact, and wiry, when she put those tap shoes on she became a star. She was genuinely gifted, a woman who could gyrate her muscles like a belly dancer. Whenever she showed up in a bar and began an impromptu performance, the waitresses would pass around a hat for tips. If the take did not satisfy Caldonia, she would make her way to a table, turn around, and contract the muscles in her buttocks, one at a time, until the gentlemen watching coughed up a sufficient amount of cash.

“Now,” she’d say triumphantly, “let’s give Caldonia a standing rovation!” And they did.

Caldonia always said she had been discovered dancing for dimes on the street corner in Louisville by bandleader Louis Jordan, and that he wrote the song “Caldonia” (you know: “Caldonia, Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard?”) for her. I have no way of knowing if that’s true or not. But it makes me smile to remember Caldonia and her sassy confidence, Mr. Spoons’s rhythmic brilliance, and Johnny Rosebud, the flower vendor who sang “Kansas City Blues” in bars all over town where he sold long-stemmed red roses. Johnny Rosebud didn’t know any other songs, just “Kansas City Blues,” but he could really belt it out if anyone gave him a microphone and a chance. And every Saturday night, someone in some bar did. Cincinnatians were like that. If you had something that needed doing, some singular talent that begged for an audience, this was the place for it.

The most unique performer I ever saw in town was the man who played the potato chip bag. He came into King’s Row—a club in the Gaslight section of Clifton—one night when things were a little slow. I didn’t know him, but he was instantly welcomed by the boys in the band. “Come on up when you’re ready,” one of the musicians offered.

“Just let me get a bag of chips,” the man said.

I sang a chorus of “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (and a Lot Less Rock and Roll),” which was one of my specialty numbers, then the man stepped up on the bandstand and began blowing up an empty potato chip bag until it was as big and as taut as a balloon. The band started in on “Dueling Banjos”—which was what they usually played when they were dealing with an unusual musical situation. The banjo player picked out the first couple of bars of the challenge: Dum dee dum dum Da Da dum dum dum. And then, believe it or not, the potato chip bag rang through the microphone like a kazoo: Dum dee dum dum DUM. In the great tradition of Spoons and Caldonia and Johnny Rosebud, he brought down the house.

Talking with Mr. Spoons again after so many years summoned up memories of those days, when a sense of humor could help a performer endure long after his sell-by date. “Only men get old,” he said, when I asked him how he felt about life. “Women don’t get old. Women can always find a young lover.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems to me that older men have an easier time”

“But an easier time at what,” he said, and I laughed at this impudence.

The tales that flew around about Mr. Spoons in New York were mostly true. He became one of that city’s iconic street performers. When _The New York Times profiled him in 1996, his marriage was over and he was augmenting his income by working as a janitor at Macy’s. But he was still playing the spoons.

About a dozen years ago, he returned briefly when I booked him into the Bockfest celebration in Over-the-Rhine—a tradition that got new life in the 1990s thanks to the clubs and coffee shops and art galleries proliferating on Main Street. When he arrived pulling a karaoke machine behind him, I groaned a little. I had wanted Mr. Spoons for his unamplified talent—the way I remembered him performing back when we first met. I had imagined him tapping in and out of the bars along Main, dancing a little to get things going. But he had a new schtick—the karaoke machine—and he was as proud of his new hardware as we were of the trendy clubs, the crowds in the streets so thick the cars couldn’t get through.

At the end of the night, when I went to pay Mr. Spoons, I couldn’t resist asking him what he thought of the new, improved Over-the-Rhine.

“What do you think of my new karaoke machine?” he answered, looking at me impishly.

We walked past Neon’s and Jefferson Hall and Kaldi’s. The windows were so clean they squeaked, and lights glittered from behind the glass. “What I think is it will be bars, because it’s always been bars,” he observed. “A leopard don’t change its spots.”

I followed him up Main Street as if we were in a bubble. The young men and women swaying down the sidewalks in expensive suits and chic high heels were far away from us, and we were as distant from them as if we were mere players and the stardust of our memories was in another place entirely.

Originally published in the October 2011 issue.
Photograph by Cal Kowal

Letter from Katie: American Pickers

Katie Laur — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:00:00 GMT

For some years in the 1970s and the early 1980s, I earned a living playing bluegrass festivals. Bluegrass festivals are weekend musical events mostly held in the spring and early summer, and I’ve always loved performing at them; it’s a little like working for the circus.

All kinds of people attended. I’d see farmers wearing overalls so new the britches made a whipping sound when they walked, and city folk in expensive Nikes, wearing aviator-style sunglasses and carrying mandolins or guitars worth a small fortune. One summer day when we pulled into Renfro Valley Bluegrass Festival, I saw a man who was a part-time musician leaning on a Porsche chopping chords on a mandolin, the cuffs of his white dress shirt rolled back precisely at the wrist. He was good, and my old friends from Louisville, Edna Mae and Cody Wolfe, were part of a small group of people gathered around to listen. Edna Mae wore a housedress and a hairnet, and the corners of her thin mouth were turned down slightly. We hugged and I said, “Edna, I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“Well, I wrote you day before yesterday that we was a’comin’,” she said. “Come on over where we’re camped and I’ll feed you. I’ve been cookin’ for two days.”

Sure enough, by the side of their old station wagon Edna and Cody had laid out a supper to make your mouth water: a ham, baked beans, potato salad, cakes and pies, a tub full of banana pudding, and a great big jar of iced tea. If the surroundings had been a little more elegant you might have called it a tailgate party.

The food set on Edna Mae’s old-fashioned dishes was always welcome to the musicians who had difficulty getting to the concession stands between sets. What with handing out autographs and participating in the “shake and howdy” part of the weekend, attending backstage rehearsals and the stomach-twisting anxiety of the performance itself, it was just plain hard to get anything to eat if you were a performer. So the hospitality provided by Edna Mae and Cody was important in a way few people understood.

Nowadays bluegrass festivals are big business, and folks like Edna and Cody Wolfe could hardly afford the price of admission, much less the expense of feeding musicians. Besides, most festivals offer food as part of the musicians’ contract “rider”—the part of a contract that covers extras like red M&Ms and bottled water. In those early years, though, it was fans like the Wolfes who sustained players, and their support laid down a fine foundation for bluegrass festivals and bluegrass bands and musicians.

On a warm spring day, when the earth smells new, when the dogwood and redbud trees are in bloom, and the white fluffy clouds dance across the spring sky, I start to think about parking lot pickers and open-air stages, and about people like Edna and Cody who’d go just about anywhere to hear the music they loved, who fed their own souls while they dished out baked beans and potato salad to the rest of us.

Bluegrass festivals began in the mid-1960s, when Carlton Haney produced the first one in Fincastle, Virginia, as a tribute to Bill Monroe. The ticket prices were about $25 for the weekend in those days. Now they can run over $200 for three to five days. Still, they’re a great value. Where else can you hear a dozen or more bands, sit in on a bunch of jam sessions, and stand behind an entertainer in a Nudie suit waiting in line for a Port-O-Let?

Here, the season kicks off in May, on Mother’s Day weekend, with the 44-year-old Appalachian Festival at Coney Island. Our festival was started—believe it or not—as a project of the Junior League of Cincinnati, an organization of affluent women committed to doing good works. Approximately 34 percent of Greater Cincinnatians are of Appalachian descent. Back then, Cincinnati was just beginning to acknowledge its mountain roots. In 1970, Junior Leaguers set out to make the city aware of this slice of its cultural pie via a stunning music and crafts festival. There were incredible crafts—art quilts you’d sooner hang on the wall than put on the bed, beautiful pieces of pottery glistening with colorful glazes, and the kind of handmade baskets destined to be displayed on the polished wood of a Hyde Park dining table.

The musical groups were spectacular, too. Roy Acuff was the headliner at the first festival, but I remember the Osborne Brothers best from those early days. Bobby Osborne had a high tenor voice that would shatter glass, and he and his brother Sonny had a hit in the late 1960s with their recording of “Rocky Top.” By the time the Appalachian Festival got underway here, “Rocky Top” was a theme song of colleges all over Tennessee, and no self-respecting band at a country wedding could get through an evening without playing it at least once. Audiences drove bluegrass bands to distraction with their requests for the hit. Bands took to putting up signs saying, “We don’t play ‘Rocky Top,’ ” and the Red Clay Ramblers actually wrote a number called “Play Rocky Top” just to address the hysteria over the piece.

The song had a refrain—Rocky Top, Tennes-see—ee-ee—ee—that proved to be irresistible, and the Osborne Brothers (originally from Hyden, Kentucky, then residents of Dayton, Ohio) became one of the first crossover groups in bluegrass. Their appearance at the Appalachian Festival here drew visitors from far and wide, visitors who bought tickets and stared at quilts draped artfully on hay bales, standing alongside college professors, Junior Leaguers, and first-and second-generation Appalachians who were part of the mainstream for the first time.

Over its four decades, the Appalachian Festival has moved around from Cincinnati Gardens to the Convention Center to its present home at Coney Island. It’s still held the second weekend in May, and at under $10 a day, it’s the best bargain around.

Just south of us, the Lexington Festival of the Bluegrass is held on the second weekend of June, at the Kentucky Horse Park. The stage is large and shady and set atop a slight rise, with a plywood floor out front for folks who just can’t keep from dancing. From the stage, where I have played myself many times, you can see hundreds of festival-goers and lines of merchandise booths—a stretch of real estate where you can buy records and CDs, get a new leather banjo strap or a floppy suede hat.

Promoter Bob Cornett and his wife, Jean, started the Lexington Festival of the Bluegrass in 1974, and it had all the makings of a great festival even then, with terrific performers, food, and down-home merchandise. But this festival’s real claim to fame is its outstanding reputation for “parking lot picking”—the informal jam sessions that make bluegrass festivals different from any other musical event.

One year when I played at the festival, I was on stage following a freckle-faced duo—a boy on banjo and a girl on mandolin. They were joined by a guitar player, and all three were singing harmony on Bill Monroe’s “It’s Mighty Dark to Travel.” The girl had on a T-shirt that said “Mandolin players do it better” (it’s obvious that she was not particularly concerned with her wardrobe) and the trio was excellent—in tune and in time on the hot summer afternoon.

At 6 p.m. the stage emptied and there was an hour break for dinner. Then, after 7, each band came back for their second set—the all-important evening performance, when you’re expected to pull out all the stops and leave the stage to a standing ovation. But it doesn’t end there, because on the festival grounds, the jam sessions go on without interruption. So, after playing their second set and slapping on some bug repellent, the freckle-faced girl and her group ran into a bass player they knew, added that instrument to their combo, and took their place among the parking lot pickers.

It was hot and it was late, but they just swung into high gear. As a crowd formed around them, they blasted out Earl Scruggs’s version of “Train 45” at breakneck speed. “Sounds just like J.D. Crowe,” some man said.

If the players heard him, they didn’t take notice. It certainly didn’t turn their heads. They just kept playing for the pure joy of the music. But it was a compliment of the highest order. As far as bluegrass is concerned, J.D. Crowe owns Lexington. For that matter, the reach of his virtuosity extends far beyond.

Crowe grew up playing the banjo in Lexington and a kind of Abe Lincoln mythology surrounds his ability. As a boy, he is said to have practiced until the school bus arrived in the morning then picked up right where he left off when he got home. His father, who knew he was a prodigy, took him to Earl Scruggs for lessons. Scruggs didn’t know how to teach what he played, though, so he suggested that the father bring the boy around whenever he and Lester Flatt were in town; that way little J.D. could watch what Earl was doing with his right hand close-up. It might be said that Crowe learned to play the banjo by osmosis. Whether that’s true or not, he was in demand professionally by the time he was 15, and the album he and his band, the New South, released in 1975 is still one of the most influential bluegrass albums since Flatt and Scruggs took the music world by storm with “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

J.D. Crowe has never left Kentucky, never moved to Nashville or California as many other star pickers have done. The state has, consequently, lavished him with awards, recognition, even a Ph.D. Dr. Crowe is in an enviable position: he has a band he can play with when he wants, and at 75, he can take a few well deserved weekend breaks. However, you will almost always see him at the Lexington Festival of the Bluegrass. This year he will appear on Saturday with the Masters of Bluegrass on the evening show, and that alone will be worth the price of admission.

The following week, June 8 through 15, is reserved for the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana. Bill Monroe had been impressed enough with that first festival at Fincastle, Virginia, back in 1965, that he wasted no time starting his own himself in 1966, in what is now known as the Bill Monroe Country Music Park.

When I first went to Bean Blossom it was still in its “primitive” phase: There were long lines at the food concession stand (That’s stand singular: there was only one for all those people!) and the Port-O-Lets backed up. Ed Pinkston, a local instrument maker, used to say you had to practice hillbilly yoga to attend Bean Blossom. When I asked him what hillbilly yoga was, he answered, “Eat a fried egg every mornin.’ That’ll keep you out of the Port-O-Lets.”

I was there one year when the weatherman warned of a “thermal inversion”—heat the intensity of which I’d never felt before, with not a lick of breeze blowing. That weekend the level of protest about the sanitary facilities reached a new high: It was a lot like the French Revolution. Attendees wanted to drag the Monroe family off to the Bastille.

On the other hand, one of my favorite nights at Bean Blossom was a Saturday night, standing in back of the stage, listening to a group of the best fiddlers in bluegrass tearing up a tune called “Gold Rush.” That night there was a campfire, and the fiddlers stood behind a log, which they used to rest one foot on at a time when their solo was over. Fiddlers have to keep their bow arms “oiled up” and limber, and playing onstage with a band for an hour, maybe two, a day just isn’t enough practice. Consequently, at a festival like Bean Blossom, where a lot of bands converge with the same repertoire and musical background, you can count on finding plenty of jam sessions at night.

That Saturday night I heard Bill Monroe’s fiddle player, Kenny Baker, his Stetson hat tilted just so over one eye, pulling his bow over the strings of the violin like buttery toffee. I heard Byron Berline, and Tex Logan. I heard the West Virginia fiddlers Joe Meadows and the gifted young Buddy Griffin, who later came to play with my own band. I saw Ricky Skaggs that night, too—he was young and still playing the fiddle, and I heard the blood-curdling high lonesome sound of his tenor singing.

Festivals really started seeing success in the 1980s, and bigger, more complex events followed. MerleFest in North Carolina (named in honor of Doc Watson’s son, Merle) and the Telluride Festival in Colorado are now the size of small cities; transportation is required between the stages. Both festivals, and others like them, boast hundreds of bands, many not even bluegrass, and the price of a couple of tickets can be truly astronomical.

About 10 years ago I was in California at two enormous bluegrass festivals: Grass Valley Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival in northern California and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I was amazed at the thousands in attendance at each. At Grass Valley, the RVs were huge and rich-looking and lined the park from one end to the other. And that was a week before the festival even started! The price of admittance was so high that the board of trustees had to establish scholarships for talented musicians who couldn’t afford it. After all, the festival would not have earned the credibility it enjoyed with no talented amateur musicians there watching and playing along.

On the other hand, The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was free, paid for by the late billionaire Warren Hellman. Mr. Hellman, a venture capitalist who played the banjo himself, started the festival in order to highlight the city’s interest and history with the music he loved.

When I was there, I remember the morning fog made the park look like something out of a Tolkien novel: ancient crooked tree trunks, thick foliage, the distinctive look and aroma of eucalyptus. I saw an old Chinese couple doing their morning t’ai chi, unaffected by the commotion around them. The various stages’ sound systems were first-rate, and so were the performers. I was bowled over to see Dolly Parton on one of the women’s music stages, though as my old friend, Becky, later said, “She was so far away you could barely see one little sequin.”

Still, it was amazing. In my day, I used to sing on hastily constructed stages in the rain for 75 audience members sitting in their lawn chairs with trash bags and newspapers over their heads. Now I was in a strange land where the worst weather that could be thrown at me was fog, and that usually burned off by afternoon. Plus, Mr. Hellman flew the musicians out at his own expense and housed them at nice hotels. “O brave new world,” I thought, “that has such creatures in’t.”

Bill Monroe used to say that he didn’t write all those songs, he just grabbed the notes out of the air before anybody else did. At Golden Gate Park, I realized that bluegrass was magic after all.

Originally published in the April 2013 issue.
Illustration by Tuesday Bassen

Letter from Katie: Little Women

Katie Laur — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:59:00 GMT

We moved to Detroit, Michigan, from Paris, Tennessee, in 1950. My father and his brother bought two small houses five doors apart, their loans guaranteed by the GI Bill. Everything around us was new, the way things were new right after World War II, when the smell of raw lumber and sawdust hung in the air. Even the light looked new, so thin it was the color of skim milk.

We were not used to the noise of Detroit. The ambulance sirens scared us, horns blared, the traffic whirred around us like a great river of cars. We could go north into Bloomfield Hills and see vast luxury, and we could go south to downtown and see country boys in rhinestones and cheap satin shirts lying in the gutters, passed out, left where they fell. Most of them had grown up in an agrarian economy; they had never had money before. Now they were working in the automobile factories, ending each Friday with a pocketful of cash that they spent in a weekend orgy of beer, women, and flashy clothes.

My father and my uncles were rarely in evidence. They worked hard through the week, getting in as much overtime as they could, punching a time clock for their share of the American Dream, playing golf on the weekends and watching television at night. They were about as accessible as President Eisenhower. And so I came to prefer the company of my sister and my cousins—we were all girls—and the women who were raising us.

My Aunt Olyne was the mother of my cousins Sandra, a year younger than I was; Linda, an auburn-haired beauty; and eventually my cousin Patti, who was almost an afterthought. But with her long red hair, brown eyes, and spunky disposition, Patti was everybody’s favorite back then. My sister, Jackie, was blonde and so small that we could slide her through the milk chute when Daddy forgot the house keys.

In my memory, we were almost always in somebody’s kitchen. Often as not, it was ours, with music coming from the big console radio Daddy bought just before television became a craze. And there was always something going on.

“Hold still, Jackie,” Aunt Olyne would yell, exasperated, trying to pin a hem in my little sister’s dress. “You’re worse than a worm in hot ashes.”

We learned a lot about marriage in the kitchen.

“Fred Taylor makes me so mad I could spit,” Aunt Dot said once, fretting about her husband. “He gets up at 6 every morning, fixes himself breakfast, and then he paddy-foots around or jingles his keys till I’m awake.” She shook her coppery hair around her pretty face as if she were really going to leave him, once and for all. “This morning,” she said, “I jumped out of bed and started following him, putting my feet where he put his.” She demonstrated, imitating Uncle Fred’s bowlegged walk so accurately that we laughed till we were sore.

“I ought to just kill him and put him out of his misery,” she said, clicking her high heels on the floor and finally laughing herself.

“You’d better be careful who you talk about killin’,” my grandmother said. “Ruth Owens went to the pen that way.”

“What’s the pen?” I asked.

“Little pitchers have big ears,” my mother said, effectively shutting down a conversation that was just starting to get interesting.

Being in the kitchen with the women was like attending a meeting of the UN General Assembly. We learned about power struggles, border skirmishes, and ultimately about helping one another. When Aunt Dot had one of her headaches, it was Mother and Aunt Olyne who understood it and put her in a quiet room. Aunt Olyne sent some pot roast home with Dot that night so she wouldn’t have to cook supper, and Mother wrapped up half a chocolate pie.

“May as well send something for Fred,” Aunt Olyne said, looking serious. “If it were Clarence Haley,” she reflected on her own spouse, “he wouldn’t know how to turn on a burner on the stove, much less cook anything.”

As the eldest of the girls, I was the first to go to school. I have hazy memories of first grade at Robert Burns Elementary in northwest Detroit: drawing a big red apple and furiously coloring it in, making a chain of construction paper loops, coloring a picture of a turkey. That first year my Mother drove me to school. Having come from the country, where being prompt at school wasn’t a priority, my parents weren’t obsessive about time and I was late a lot. Each day I was tardy I had to go to the principal’s office to explain what had happened to prevent my timely arrival. I don’t remember what all my excuses were—usually it was some kind of invented car trouble (not that we had to invent car trouble)—but there I was. I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when we arrived 10 minutes after the bell. I began to realize in a somewhat hazy fashion that there was a difference between me and the other children in school. And my teachers didn’t know what to make of me.

Once when the women were gathered in the kitchen I asked about being different. “Why do they make fun of how we talk?” I asked. “And why do they make fun of our clothes?”

“Put your head back in the oven,” my Mother said firmly.

“You’ll get pneumonia,” my aunt said.

Mother was drying my hair. She saw a definite correlation between a wet head and fatal disease. Hand-held hair dryers had not been invented yet, and going outside with wet hair was tantamount to a death wish, so every Saturday afternoon we got our hair washed and our heads shoved in the oven.

It was my grandmother who offered a retort to the school humiliation. “Ask ’em what banana boat they came in on,” she snorted.

“No,” Aunt Dot said. “Tell them you come from Tennessee, and you’re proud of it.”

The next year, my cousin Sandra entered the first grade, and we walked to school together, braving the bullying and the teasing along the five-block trek. My hair was curly, and I was called “fuzzhead.” Sandra was spared the embarrassment of a nickname, but she had her own shame: she couldn’t understand a word anybody said because they talked so fast. Her teacher sent her for a hearing test.

In those days women dominated our education. Our classroom teacher, Miss Moran, was charged with preparing us for life in the Atomic Age. She showed us a movie about what to do if we were hit by the Bomb and instructed us to walk through the wings of the auditorium towards the back where the gas masks were stored. (Don’t run, don’t shove, and raise your hand to talk.) Under the circumstances, the auditorium might have held traumatic associations. But I remember it fondly, because it was where we put on plays and talent shows and where I sang “My Buddy” on Veterans Day.

My piano teacher was a woman, too. I liked piano lessons, but I hated the recitals. At my first one, I had a fever. I walked out on the stage in my taffeta party dress, sat down at the keyboard and could not find middle C. I tried one note and fumbled to follow it with the tune I’d memorized, but with no luck. My teacher patiently hissed at me to start again. My ears were roaring, Aunt Dot died a thousand deaths, and the auditorium was as still as the tomb. I tried again. Still no middle C. Eventually I found it and sped through my song with feverish panache, finishing with a flourish, crossing my left hand over my right for the final note.

Even music instruction was thwarted by cultural misunderstanding. My cousin Sandra and I were enrolled in violin lessons under the tutelage of a Russian immigrant named Ara Zerounian. When I showed him my violin, a prized gift from my Tennessee grandfather, he became slightly apoplectic at the discovery that there were rattlesnake rattlers inside—a practice of old time fiddlers, who used them to keep their instruments “mellow.” Instead of being impressed, Mr. Zerounian began to speak angrily in another language. I was forced to get a new violin from Montgomery Ward’s—one, mind you, that I felt had an inferior tone.

Once Sandra and I had learned to upbow and downbow and play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” we were sent to District Junior Orchestra. One day a week we took the bus to the junior high for rehearsal. Here my enthusiasm for the violin dimmed.

The way you advanced in Junior Orchestra was to challenge the player sitting in the seat in front of you. Both the challenger and the incumbent played passages from the repertoire and the conductor made a judgment call. Two boys sat in back of Sandra and me, and even though we were in elementary school, they fell under the spell of her perfect blonde ponytail and big blue eyes. They wanted to sit next to her, so I was challenged, and I lost. I remember the hot shame of it. I walked out of the rehearsal hall and took the bus home all by myself.

The world opened for me when I discovered the school library and the miracle of books that could be checked out, taken home, and read morning, noon, and night. “Get your head out of that book and go outside and play,” my Mother said at least once a day. So the thrilling stories of children shipwrecked on islands or hiding in secret gardens fueled the games we played in the backyard. My sister and my cousins would set up adventures under a willow tree, draping the branches with blankets and quilts, turning the willow into cabins or desert island hide-outs or royal palaces. We liked the idea of being marooned, of being thrown back on ourselves. We played at being pioneer women living in the mountains, using our dolls for babies and washing our clothes in an imaginary mountain stream, always on the lookout for Indians.

We lived across the street from a large high school, and in the summer the grounds were ours. We set up forts in the bushes of the front entrance and executed our own military maneuvers. Whatever the imagined scenario, there were never any husbands. Since we had no male siblings, it seemed natural. For us, boys were the most foreign of creatures in the strange land that was Detroit.

Somewhere along the line, Sandra, Jackie, Linda, and I outgrew our tomboy ways, and we organized ourselves into the singing Haley Sisters. We had fallen in love with the Lennon Sisters on Lawrence Welk’s television show, and since singing came so easily to us it was a natural move, something we didn’t really even have to talk about. We liked singing together; we found that people liked hearing us sing together, and by the time we were on the precipice of adolescence it gave us a new way to express ourselves.

Our mothers stitched us the kind of dresses fairy tales were made of: blue organza with crinoline petticoats starched into voluminous shapes; yellow satin gowns with cummerbunds and corsages. Our youngest cousin, Patti, who wasn’t even in school yet, sang too, with ribbons draped in her long red hair to match our dresses.

Now the men entered our lives—fathers and uncles who hadn’t taken much interest in us before were now getting us “gigs” at church services. They even learned to cram crinoline petticoats into car trunks without crushing them.

We started out singing church music, but we ended up doing popular music and show tunes as well. Eventually my piano skills were taxed, and we got an accompanist, Mr. Tremaine, who taught us some of the finer points of performance, how to breathe together, how to relax and smile. My sister, Jackie, turned out to have a voice like an angel. In no time at all, Mr. Tremaine had her soloing on songs like “Indian Love Call,” her lovely voice echoing on When I’m calling you…oo-oo-ooo-oo-o....

The stomach-churning nerves of piano recitals were gone; singing was something different—a joyous kind of tension and release that grew out of something we’d been doing all our lives and knew we did well.

We entered a contest and met Hank Williams’s widow, Audrey, and his son, Hank Jr., who was just a boy himself, a little younger than me. Audrey Williams was a judge for the contest, and she sat in a framed compartment draped in purple fabric. “The purple means she’s in mourning,” Aunt Dot whispered behind her hand. Onstage Hank Jr. was playing the guitar and singing his father’s songs—“Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Lovesick Blues”—in Hank Sr.’s voice and style. I remember watching him and worrying about him. His mother was a mess, his father was dead from a drug overdose, yet Junior had to stand up and try to sing and play the guitar just like him.

My cousin Linda remembers that Audrey thought we were cute. We won the contest, which meant we got to appear at Cobo Hall when stars of the Grand Ole Opry came to Detroit. We met Minnie Pearl in the dressing room and hit the stage singing “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” After that, we made a record and began to be paid occasionally for our appearances.

But the adult world intervened. In 1959, my father was transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, to work on the space program. We cried and begged but the grown-ups were adamant. We had to break up the act.

The farewell scene at the airport was a soggy mess of tears and tissue. Aunt Dot tried to be brave. She was dressed in a new navy suit with polka dot trim, her best high heels, and her perkiest hat. Our grandmother was sad, and we had never seen her sad before. She could always make everybody laugh under the most tragic circumstances, but this time she didn’t have a card up her sleeve. Our cousins were as shattered as we were, and when we boarded the plane, it was like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. We vowed to be best friends forever, but it was never the same; it never is.

That first summer in Alabama was lonely, the heat so stifling we could hardly breathe much less come up with games or activities. When fall came, my sister and I went off to different schools; she made friends with a girl named Peggy, and they talked on the telephone for hours after school, her bedroom door closed over the telephone cord. Our game of Pioneer Women was over, our campsite broken up and our lives scattered.

We all survived though, and now the five of us enjoy being together when we have the opportunity. Except for the exigencies of age, we are all the same girls we were when we played in the back yard, protecting our dolls from hostile invaders while keeping our clothes clean (Aunt Olyne would have insisted on that). On April 10, Aunt Dot’s birthday, we all try to go shopping together, which would have pleased her greatly.

My mother is the only one of the grown-ups left, and we all try to see her as much as possible. Her smooth, olive colored skin and her gentle voice remind us of the strength we all have at our disposal, and the gentleness that we can choose as well.

Originally published in the February 2013 issue.
Illustration by Tuesday Bassen

It’s His Party and He’ll Cry if He Wants To

Daniel Libit — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:52:00 GMT

The snow had been falling all morning in big quilted flakes when John Boehner walked into the fusty and formidably chandeliered grand ballroom at the Capital Hilton. It was mid-January and the minority leader of the United States House of Representatives was slated to deliver the keynote address at the second day of the Republican National Committee’s winter meetings. But Washington traffic had been backed up, and an early conference call with the White House ran long, and now he was scurrying into a seat while his two-person U.S. Marshal security detail stood watch at one of the exits. As Boehner situated himself, Jo Ann Davidson, a former speaker of the Ohio statehouse and current cochair of the RNC, was recalling their years together in Columbus. “We were in the minority then in the Ohio House of Representatives,” Davidson said, “pretty deeply in the minority, I’d say, and John was the ranking Republican member of the commerce and labor committee. It was fun to sit back and watch all the trouble that he gave the Democrats who started messing around with the American free enterprise system.”

When Davidson finally called Boehner to the podium, the applause wasn’t exactly thundering but the audience rose to its feet. At that moment, with the Republican presidential nominee still uncertain and George W. Bush little more than a millstone around the party’s neck, Boehner was in more than just title the Republican leader. All eyes were—and are—on him to figure a way out of a mess that could well banish his party to the political hinterlands for years to come. “He’s critical for the long-term health of the Republican Party,” says John Kasich, the former Ohio congressman and Fox News personality. “If he fails at this—which I don’t think he will—but if he fails at this, the party fails.”

Boehner stood crisp and gleaming on the stage, looking like a bank manager back from two weeks in Barbados. His style of dress evinces the power of a corporate boardroom: a well-pressed white shirt (which he washes and irons himself), a well-tailored dark suit, and a well-dimpled power tie. The chandelier lights glinted off his tightly coiffed, dark brown hair and warmed his unseasonably tanned face. Here was a man of status, a creature who might well have popped out of an injection mold in GOP headquarters. The image truly clicked when Boehner began to talk, his voice deep and smoky, sounding as if he were blowing his words through a bassoon.

He recapped his party’s success of the previous 12 months, insofar as he optimistically conceived it, and delivered his speech with a confidence and poise that would have been impossible to muster the previous year, when he addressed this conference on the heels of the Republicans’ staggering 2006 election defeats. But then there came a jarring fracture in this picture of perfect command and orderliness. At an applause break a few minutes into his prepared remarks, Boehner reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a white handkerchief, and blew his nose. A loud, wounded-goose heeee-yonk. There was something quite captivating about this—the incongruousness of it, the unpretentiousness of it. The hankie would be summoned again about 10 minutes later, as the speech crawled to its conclusion.

“I continue to believe that America’s best days are ahead, not behind,” Boehner said, his voice beginning to wobble and crack. “And I came here to ensure that my kids and their kids continue to have a better shot at the American dream than I did. The challenge is: Will we as a party and we as a nation do what we have to do in order to ensure that a brighter future is ahead for all our kids?”

The audience stood once more and applauded, but only Boehner seemed overcome with emotion. He walked off the stage dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief, and if you weren’t familiar with his history of public waterworks, you probably would have been a bit stunned by the scene of a man crying—in particular, this man crying—at such a drab affair.

“I never get too excited and I never get too down,” Boehner told me two weeks later in his office in the U.S. Capitol. “I don’t know why, I just don’t. But I was a pretty happy camper right before Christmas after what had been a very tough year. I would argue it was the most effective year any minority party has had in the 18 years I’ve been here.”

It takes an impressive reservoir of positivity—or cunning—to deliver such an upbeat assessment when your party is so clearly in the doghouse. But as the words spilled out, Boehner sat steady as a statue, the only motion coming from his left arm, which shepherded a cigarette between his mouth and an ashtray. An inveterate smoker, Boehner would go through four more in the next hour while an air purifier hummed beside him. He has made a few attempts to quit smoking, but the inclination has never taken hold. He has come to accept this failing. He is who he is, he says.

And who is that, exactly? First and foremost, John Boehner is an organization man, and his one-and-a-half year reign as Republican leader on Capitol Hill has distinguished itself most by its emphasis on managerialism. Back in Cincinnati, in his pre-political life, Boehner’s success derived from bringing order to chaos. Like many before him, he came to Washington viewing government as a dysfunctional business that he was determined to fix. But history has affirmed over and over that disruption and disorder have their beneficiaries, and few contemporary politicians on either side of the aisle know this better than Boehner, who has ascended the Republican ranks in the midst of some bewildering political turbulence.

If former Ohio Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens hadn’t been caught having sex with a minor 18 years ago, Boehner might very well not be in Congress at all. And if Florida Congressman Mark Foley hadn’t been caught sending sexually explicit messages to Congressional pages...and Jack Abramoff hadn’t been caught bribing politicians...and Tom DeLay hadn’t been caught up in conspiracy charges—in short, if the Republican Party hadn’t seen its best-laid plans go up in scandalous smoke over the last two years, then Boehner likely wouldn’t now be in leadership, let alone the minority leader. But here he is, the top Republican in the House, with the potential to either be a modern political paladin or a goat for the second time in his career.

Boehner has been a hard man for members of his own party to peg. Philosophically he is a committed right-winger; The National Journal rated his voting record as one of the most conservative of any House member last year. And yet at times he has bristled at encroaching conservative ideologues and taken issue with the social wedge issues they’ve pushed. “I’ve been endorsed by Right-to-Life in every election I’ve run,” Boehner says, by way of example. “I’ve told thousands of audiences, ‘I’m sure it wasn’t convenient for my mother to have 12 of us. But I’m sure glad she did.’ I’m Catholic; I believe life begins at conception. But I don’t talk about it unless people bring it up because it’s a divisive issue in American society.”

Boehner was never more upset about Washington than on the night when Republicans in the House tried to intervene in the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case in March 2005. “We should not have involved ourselves,” he sternly asserts. “I am a common sense Midwest Republican. I am not an ideologue in any way, shape, or form.”

Perhaps he’s not, but Boehner has had his moments of strident partisanship. After all, he made his bones as a backbench hellion in Newt Gingrich’s army. But after enduring the disjointedness of Gingrich’s reign as Speaker, and then being shoved to the sidelines by the ravenously power-hungry DeLay, Boehner looked forward to bringing some good old-fashioned order and calm to the leadership. So far, his adjustments have been modest but consequential. He instituted a daily leadership meeting to rave reviews—a morning bull session at which minority whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, conference chairman Adam Putnam of Florida, and National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, among others, discuss party business and strategize mission plans. Unlike his one-time mentor, Boehner preaches inclusiveness; he’s not opposed to hearing other people’s ideas. And having previously served as conference chairman under Gingrich—that is, the head of party PR for the House—he places great emphasis on consistency and continuity in the party’s message. “He sympathizes with the challenges embedded with this job,” says Putnam. “He basically walked in my moccasins. We have had an opportunity to have his ear and total support.”

Tapping his own business DNA, Boehner recently launched a somewhat amorphous “re-branding” initiative—soberly dubbed “Reasons to Believe”—to associate Republicanism with more positive ideas than, say, Jack Abramoff. An article in Roll Call in April reported that the party would roll out an agenda “based on plans for tax relief, health care, border security, energy, and earmarks,” and quoted Boehner as likening it more to a “refurbishing” than a re-branding. As part of this undertaking, he brought in the man who created General Electric’s “We Bring Good Things to Life” marketing campaign as a consultant. Members say it has helped to reboot the party’s mindset. And, remarkably, Boehner’s managed to engage these issues without enraging his colleagues.

Boehner likes to say that he’s just a regular guy with an important job. He prefers that no one address him as “Congressman” but instead call him “John” or simply “Boehner.” Close friends and colleagues, President Bush among them, endearingly refer to him as “Boner.” “His willingness to poke fun at himself helps,” says Rep. Thad McCotter of Michigan, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. “A lot of times when you have people in leadership positions, because of the [time] crunch and all the other pressures, they tend to be so focused on things. For Boehner there is a sense of proportion. He’s able to joke about himself.”

Despite all the choruses of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Boehner is well-versed in the realities of Capitol Hill: Those who operate most effectively do not squelch chaos, they manage it. He may be atop his party, but his party is in the minority, so he must find a wedge through which his party can reclaim power. Which is why his theatrical efforts at disruption grabbed attention last year, even as they left some wondering if he’d been co-opted by the same partisan single-mindedness he criticized.

Last August, during the so-called “stolen vote” incident, in which Democrats ruled that a Republican motion regarding taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants had failed even though an electronic scoreboard in the chamber showed differently, Boehner stormed up the aisle of the House floor, took the microphone, unleashed some indignant words, and then led his troops in a walkout. When the smoke cleared, Republicans were galvanized in a way they hadn’t been for a while.

As the year unfolded, Boehner kept his party unified in opposition against Democrat-sponsored bills that attempted to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP) and tie Iraq War appropriations money to predetermined benchmarks. The real win came in December when Boehner employed all manner of legislative expedients to force Democrats into meeting Bush’s budget demands. He headed off to winter recess with renewed confidence. As he looked back on the year, he felt he had toughened significantly since his first leadership stint a decade ago.

“Some people are driven by always wanting to win,” he told me. “Some are driven by a fear of failure. In my case, it’s a blend of the two. I always wanted to succeed because I could not live with failure. It just is not who I am. So many days it’s not winning that’s the goal, it’s avoiding failure that becomes the goal.”

Republicans have conceded that the Contract with America, born of a desperate ingenuity that followed four decades out of power, was a once-in-a-generation thing. Furthermore, John Boehner is neither as visionary nor as domineering a leader as Newt Gingrich, the chief architect of the 1994 Republican Revolution. Then again, as some members caution, now is not the time to go for broke. The idea behind the “Reasons to Believe” re-branding scheme Boehner has hatched is to lead his members back to the principals of the Contract and to the orthodoxy of Republicanism, and to take voters with them. How America responds to this ideological reawakening will rest, in no small part, on his salesmanship. “That was the one thing I always thought we were lacking in,” says Iowa Rep. Tom Latham, “and John is a very good spokesperson for the conference.”

Since the 2006 election, 29 Republican congressmen have announced their retirement (as of early April), so success from now through the November election must be judged, for Boehner’s sake, with lowered expectations. At the moment, the party is in his corner, but it has been known to be fickle before. “I think the real challenge will be if he is challenged for leadership by one of the ideological conservatives,” says Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Can he imagine a road back to the majority soon? Just being in opposition mode may get old after a while. And let’s say if someone like Obama comes into office and really makes overtures [to Republicans], or even McCain tries to work with Democrats. [Boehner] may find it very difficult to preside over the Republican party, part of which will be tempted to do business while others will try to keep the ideological polarization of the party alive and well.”

Whatever his leadership capabilities, Boehner knows how to stay poised. He was born that way. “I have more patience than any human being I know,” he says, “and at some point in my life I looked up and said, ‘I know why.’ My mom and dad were the most patient people in the world.”

In a house with eight brothers, three sisters, two bedrooms, and one bathroom, conciliation was key. Older siblings instinctively learned to look after younger ones, and everyone knew to pitch in. Boehner didn’t relish the close-quarter hubbub as much as his mother, Mary Ann, nor could he ignore it as easily his father, Earl, who oversaw the household with impressive equanimity when he wasn’t off delivering food to the homeless or running Andy’s Café, their family owned bar in Carthage. By early high school, young John had become something of a neat freak.

“I want things where they belong,” he says. “Organized. Clean. It wasn’t a priority for anybody else except me. I would be yelling at everybody: ‘You do this! You do this!’ In an hour, the place was perfect. I can’t handle things not being where they belong. I don’t think my wife has ever picked up an article of my clothing off the floor in 34 years.”

After graduating from Moeller High School in 1968, Boehner found work as a janitor at Merrell Dow, where he met his future wife, Debbie, while mopping the floor of her workspace. They married in 1973 and he started taking business classes at night at Xavier University, while rising from maintenance duties to the credit department; eventually he left the company to work for Nucite Sales, a small manufacture representatives business that dealt with packaging and plastics. Not long after he was hired there, the owner died, leaving Boehner in control of a mess. The deceased had all but run the business into the ground. With the principals and the company’s few remaining clients griping, Boehner took over ownership and swiftly righted the ship.

In 1977 he graduated from Xavier with a degree in business marketing and moved into a new house in the West Chester subdivision of Lakota Hills. A baby, the first of the couple’s two daughters, would soon be on the way and for the first time in his life, Boehner’s financial situation improved. The prime indicator was a new and abiding interest in the game of golf. Boehner had caddied in high school but rarely played; after inheriting his first set of clubs from a dying friend, he turned into a committed golfer. At 57, he’s even more avid. And good. He has a 6 handicap (meaning he shoots regularly in the 70s), and those who have played with him say he’s easygoing on the course but competitive. “All of this is a way to really get to know people,” he philosophizes. “You can’t hide who you are on a golf course.”

By the spring of 1979, life was good. The working-class boy who once freighted other people’s golf bags for tips had become a business owner who carried his own bag for pleasure. Then, tax time rolled around and Uncle Sam took a big slice. Boehner says he wrote a check to the IRS that year that exceeded his gross pay from two years prior. “That is when I became a follower of Ronald Reagan,” he says.

While fiscal conservativism would come to chiefly define his politics, it’s not what got him into the game. He had to be nudged. Friends pushed him to run for a seat on the Union Township Board of Trustees in 1981, which he surprised himself by winning. Three years later, at 34, he surprised himself again by winning a seat in the Ohio state legislature. Affronted by the level of pork barrel politics in the statehouse, he learned a lot but did not impress his colleagues as a man-on-the-go.

“If you told somebody in Columbus that one day John would be the Republican leader in the House,” says Barry Jackson, Boehner’s former chief of staff, “they would have guffawed. Nice guy, right on the issues, but they just never saw him that way.”

But the 1990 election coughed up an exquisite hairball of serendipity for a fresh-faced challenger in Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District. The race included the spectacularly shamed Republican incumbent “Buz” Lukens—who ran for reelection despite his sex scandal—and Tom Kindness, who had formerly held the seat. It quickly became a two-person contest with Boehner assuming the role of underdog to Kindness. “He had 99 percent name identification,” Boehner says, “I had five. Anybody can get five percent.”

In need of significant brainpower to counter Kindness, Boehner found a gifted chief strategist in Jackson, whom he met through a mutual friend. Jackson hadn’t anticipated joining the campaign, but in a preliminary two-hour conversation Boehner won him over completely. With Jackson’s help, Boehner was able to upset Kindness in the primary and win the election. It was the beginning of a decade-long partnership that ended in 2001, when Jackson was hired by the White House. He now has Karl Rove’s old job.

Shortly after he arrived on Capitol Hill, Boehner joined Gingrich’s Conservative Opportunity Society. It was here that the pair forged their initial bond. “He is a visionary and he’s a very strategic thinker,” Boehner says of Gingrich. “And one of the lessons from those early years is that there has to be a mission, a vision of why we’re here. A big goal you’re going after.”

What really got Boehner noticed was his involvement with the “Gang of Seven,” a group of Republican congressmen from the 1990 freshman class who unearthed a scandal involving members overdrawing their House Bank office accounts. Seized upon by the Republican leadership, the scandal eventually led to a number of members losing their seats, the lion’s share of them Democrats. “I think John, in contrast to the rest of us, was really interested in moving up through the leadership structure,” says former Wisconsin Congressman Scott Klug, a fellow Gang of Seven member. “John saw the opportunity early on to be a change agent.”

Gingrich soon deputized him to help craft the Contract with America and later threw his support behind Boehner’s successful run for Republican conference chairman. His swift rise would not be without snags, however. Gingrich was a pugilistic politician, a disposition Boehner was uncomfortable with. Moreover, he found Gingrich’s capriciousness as an idea man and his deficiencies as a day-to-day manager frustrating. (Gingrich declined to speak for this article.) Boehner had an even more contentious relationship with former Texas Congressman Tom DeLay, who served as majority whip under Gingrich and later as majority leader during Dennis Hastert’s speakership. “It was just oil and water from the beginning,” Boehner says. “To this day I couldn’t tell you—different personalities, different styles. I don’t know whether he saw me as a threat.”

DeLay engineered the K Street Project, a Republican-led effort to meld lobbying firms with Congress in a mutually reinforcing system of quid pro quos. Boehner himself wasn’t directly involved, but his closeness with moneyed interests over the years has often prompted comparisons between the two, especially from the left. “DeLay was relentless in pressuring K Street to pony up,” says Thomas Mann, as opposed to Boehner, who “just sees it as a natural alliance and works it to his and his party’s advantage.”

Boehner often felt like a lone hand in a leadership structure he viewed as “over-aggressive.” He says he made his differences known privately but kept a tight lid on his feelings in public. “Our goals were the same,” he says now, “[the difference] was how we were trying to get there.”

The entropy that Gingrich harnessed in the early 1990s to power the Republican Revolution eventually boomeranged with destructive force. And when the Speaker’s hold on the House began to crumble amid a flurry of ethics charges in 1997, Boehner found himself in the middle of the meltdown. First came a surreal incident in which a Florida couple picked up a telephone conversation over their police scanner between Boehner and other party members, who were discussing Gingrich’s woes in less than diplomatic terms. (In April a federal judge awarded Boehner $1 million to cover the legal fees he incurred from the lawsuit he brought against Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington for leaking the tape of the call to the press.) Then Boehner got mixed up in an unsuccessful coup attempt against Gingrich.

Boehner admits he participated in conversations with the coup’s three principals—DeLay, former New York congressman Bill Paxon, and former majority leader Dick Armey—and on the day of the attempted overthrow, the four reconnoitered over lunch. But that was as far as his involvement went. “The participants tried to rope me in as a coconspirator,” he says, “but I didn’t have a clue.” (Paxon confirms this account. “He was never interested in overthrowing [Gingrich],” he says.) Still, after Gingrich eventually resigned, a seething Republican conference was looking to place blame. Boehner, who hadn’t self-inoculated as successfully as others, paid the price. When the next round of leadership elections were held, he lost his post as conference chair to J.C. Watts of Oklahoma.

In the aftermath of his first real professional setback, as he walked out of the chamber with Barry Jackson by his side, Boehner tried to look at the loss as a blessing in disguise. Over the 1998 Thanksgiving recess, he asked Jackson to put together a memo that charted a course back to leadership. “Did it hurt me to stand on the floor of the House at the beginning of the next congress when the guy who beat me was sworn in to be conference chairman?” Boehner asks. “Yeah, it was awful. But I was never going to let the bastards see me sweat. I just smiled and went to work and helped out where I could.”

A passing glance at the walls in either of Boehner’s two Washington offices affirms the almost mythic importance of the No Child Left Behind Act in his decade-long political re-ascension. In the reception area of his personal office in the Longworth building hang three framed photographs commemorating the bill, one matted next to the pen President Bush used to sign it into law. Simply recounting the political machinations leading up to the bill’s passage is enough to set Boehner’s lip quivering and voice cracking.

No Child Left Behind represents Boehner’s crowning legislative success, not only because of the change it brought about in his mind but also because of how he put his political life on the line for it. In 2000, when then-President-elect George W. Bush invited him to participate in preliminary discussions regarding an educational reform package, Boehner insisted an invitation be extended to California Congressman George Miller. (Miller was set to become the ranking Democrat on the Education and Workforce Committee, which Boehner chaired at the time.) When the suggestion was initially pooh-poohed, Boehner says he threatened not to participate in any further meetings. Bush relented, and Miller ultimately was instrumental in getting the legislation drafted and passed. “We went through the year where I was being blasted by my conservatives and [Miller] was being blasted by his liberals,” Boehner says. “And all it did was push us closer together.”

In the summer of 2001, a few days before the bill was set to come to the floor for a vote, Boehner arrived 15 minutes late to a meeting in the White House with the president, vice president Dick Cheney, Speaker Hastert, Armey, and DeLay to discuss a package of amendments. Boehner remembers DeLay was in the midst of slamming the bill when he walked in, and he caught the president’s eye. Bush gave him a wink. When DeLay finished, the president turned to him and said, “Alright, Boner, what do you have to say for yourself?” Boehner stated his case to maintain bipartisanship on the legislation. “Anybody got anything to say?” Bush announced. “Alright, good. I’m with Boehner.” The rest of the room seemed stunned. After the others departed, Bush put his arm around the congressman and asked, “How’d you like that?”

“It was a big moment,” Boehner says, “it really was, and in more ways than one. Part of this bill was about transforming the federal role. The fact is we’re succeeding. Poor kids are getting a better chance at succeeding. But in another aspect—I ran away from this education issue for a long time. That year I spent working on [NCLB], seeds were sown on my soul, and as you probably have heard and can probably see, it’s become a very important issue for me. God knows why.”

He points across his Capitol office to two photos hanging next to the fireplace.

“As you can see, there are only a couple pictures in this room,” he says. The pictures are of Boehner posing with inner-city schoolchildren, part of his work with The Center City Consortium, a Catholic charity in Washington that he and Senator Ted Kennedy host a fun-raising dinner for every year. “I’ve been to every classroom in every school,” Boehner says, “and I love these kids.”

Tearing up, he walks over to his desk, grabs a tissue and blows his nose. Heeeee-yonk.

“Of course, I can’t go to the classroom very often because it just about kills me emotionally,” he says. Why? “No idea.”

He points again to the photos. “That picture on top, that happened about one second before I totally lost it. We were doing this thing at one school, we had Office Depot donating $100,000 in school supplies, and they had a truck there and all the kids there, and the cardinal was there, and I was trying to explain to these kids how lucky they were, except I couldn’t quite get it out of my mouth. And so this little girl comes over to hug me to try to help me. Then I really lost it.”

About three years ago, Boehner’s stock began to rise again on the Hill. The Abramoff scandal broke in the summer of 2005, followed by a Texas grand jury’s indictment of DeLay. A year later, as the mid-term elections approached, the congressional page scandal splashed across the headlines, effectively neutering Hastert’s reign as Speaker. As Republicans braced for the fallout, Boehner ran for the position of majority leader—DeLay’s old post. Squaring off against Roy Blunt, Boehner cast himself as a reformer, harkening back to his Gang of Seven work. In one particular PowerPoint presentation during the race, he went so far as to assert, “We should think seriously about bringing greater transparency to the lobbying industry.” This thought would be short-lived.

“He started out running as a reformer,” says Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “But along the way when it became fairly clear that the notion of radically reducing the role of lobbyists and, at that point, earmarks, was not something that the Republican conference wanted, he very substantially adjusted the tone of his campaign and didn’t talk about it much anymore.”

A litany of published reports at the time questioned Boehner’s own relationship with lobbyists. Eyebrows hiked over the significant political donations and privately funded trips he had taken from special interest groups, and it was revealed that he was renting his Washington apartment from a lobbyist with clients whose business interests were, as The Washington Post reported, “directly at the heart of Boehner’s work.” There was also the revelation that back in 1995, he had been caught handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to members on the House floor, a move he confesses was “stupid” and “a big mistake.” In a commentary in the political newsletter Counterpunch, former Democratic Congressman Pat Williams, who worked with Boehner on the Education and Workforce Committee, argued that his former colleague’s involvement with the Republican take-over in 1995 and his “sordid” relationship with K Street directly set the stage for the party’s corruption a decade later.

Boehner says that characterization is “just wrong,” and is unapologetic about his ties to lobbyists. “The reason I have a relationship with them is that I came out of the private sector,” he says. “What I believe in is the same thing they believe in, which is to help our economy grow and to help us have a vibrant free enterprise system in America.”

When Boehner beat out Blunt for the majority leader post, he all but abandoned his calls for reform. He adamantly opposed proposals, including one by then-Speaker Hastert, to limit or ban privately funded travel, arguing that it was necessary for congressmen to be able to educate themselves on issues. His argument was undermined by the public disclosure that he had traveled mostly to sunny golfing destinations and Europe, a number of times accompanied by his wife.

Democrats and congressional watchdogs have regularly excoriated Boehner over this. “He clearly lost his reform momentum once he became majority leader,” says Craig Holman, a legislative representative for consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Since then, he says, Boehner has become the group’s “main opponent” for lobbying and ethics reform.

The Democrats’ success in 2006 brought Boehner’s tenure as majority leader to a quick halt. But with DeLay gone and Hastert retiring, the consolation prize of minority leader was now up for grabs, and Boehner, who had once been the scapegoat for his party’s downfall, was now running as the man who could save it. His résumé and temperament matched the moment. He had the distinction of having served in both the minority and majority, and his soothing style was seen as a much-needed ameliorant. Despite a certain targeted uneasiness about his tenacity, Boehner decisively won the minority leader race over Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the culmination of a most improbable political comeback.

“The thing I found out about John Boehner is, there is no guile in the man,” Pence says. “I think his greatest strength, even in the wake of the Republican collapse, was that members of Congress see him as someone who is a conservative leader who listens to every member of the conference and keeps no records of wrongs.”

Fine praise, but it’s hard to get around that phrase “Republican collapse.” Boehner finds himself a long way from the Speaker’s office, and his patience is not limitless. Friends and colleagues see an expiration date on his time in Congress, likely accelerated by each day he spends in the minority.

Back in 1990, when he first arrived on Capitol Hill, a close confidant advised Boehner to maintain a list of things he’d want to do after politics. To that end, he keeps a yellow pad stashed in his desk for when that time comes. Of the options he has scribbled on that list, he would only reveal one to me: tour commissioner of the Professional Golfers’ Association.

Whether that ever comes to pass, there is still this year to live through. The weekend before we sat down for the second time in January, Boehner attended the annual GOP retreat at the luxurious Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, where he hoped to jumpstart the party’s re-branding effort and hash out differences over earmarks. He recalled for me the gist of what he had told members there: “A lot of you see me as someone who doesn’t have a care in the world, somebody who is easygoing, really nice, never yells, never screams. Just always understand that while that may be what you see, don’t ever think I don’t want to win and that I’m not going to do everything I can within the rules to win.”

His second year as minority leader got underway with a grand act of conciliation, as he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi crafted an economic stimulus package. But as soon as the legislation passed, Boehner followed it with an impish act of political theater. On Feb. 14, as the Democrats stalled on dealing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and instead tried to pass a resolution condemning White House aides who had refused to cooperate with an oversight request, Boehner took to the House floor.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he boomed, “we will not stand here and watch this floor be abused for pure political grandstanding at the expense of our national security.” Democrats grumbled. He went on: “We will not stand for this and we will not stay for this.” And then he called on his fellow Republicans to follow him out of the chamber and onto the freezing steps of the Capitol, which they all did, one by one. Boehner has learned that sometimes it’s beneficial to stir up a little chaos—even if you have to stir it from out in the cold.

Originally published in the May 2008 issue.
Illustration by Steve Brodner

Generation Next: Alicia Reece

Skip Tate — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:30:00 GMT

It was an ugly day. Ugly, cold and rainy. The sun wasn’t close to shining, and that worried Alicia Reece. She knew what lousy weather could mean. It could ruin everything—all of her work, all of her dreams.

For the past eight months, Reece had walked the distant corners of the city. She stood on street corners smiling and waving campaign signs at cars as they sped honking by. She wrote her own television commercials in an effort to pinch pennies. She went anywhere that welcomed candidates—even once serving as a guest ringmaster at a circus. She’d tried every low-budget, dirt-under-the-fingernails campaign tactic she could think of in order to become a member of Cincinnati City Council.

Sure she was only 28 years old, and this was the first time she’d run for public office, so the odds were probably against her anyway. And if traditional wisdom held true, rain on election day meant low voter turnout—a dagger in the heart of any novice candidate’s hopes. Each raindrop was now washing away what little chance she had.

So she did what she could. She cast her own vote at the Integrity Hall precinct, said a little prayer and walked out of the voting booth back into the rain. For the next several hours she stood in front of the precinct, smiling at people as they walked by, trying one last time to squeeze out the votes.

As she stood there, an elderly woman approached. Reece didn’t recognize her, but the woman recognized Reece. One Friday back in July or August, when the sun was blazing and the temperature was so high people were actually dying, the woman had watched Reece stand out on a street corner for several hours, waving at the cars.

“If you can stand in 105-degree heat in my neighborhood and ask for my vote,” the woman said, “then I can come out in the rain and vote for you.”

Suddenly the day didn’t seem so ugly.

Even though the voter turnout was the lowest this century, Reece realized then that those who were braving the rain were her voters. They were the ones she’d spoken to on the street and at the circus. They were the ones who would prove the political wisdom wrong. And they were the ones who would not only make her the youngest woman ever elected to city council, but make her one of the most intriguing new faces in Cincinnati politics since Jerry Springer.

HOURS 1 to 24:
THE SWEARING IN

On the morning, of Dec. 1, it takes Reece more than half an hour to work her way from her small, still-bare office to the council chambers just around the corner. She’s stopped by reporters and supporters, friends and strangers, new and old council members. As she finally reaches what is now her seat at the council table, she looks, just for a moment, like the family’s oldest child who for the first time is sitting at the grownups’ table at Thanksgiving. Here she is, age 28, surrounded by Jim Tarbell, 57, Minette Cooper, 52, and Charles Winburn, 48. Remove fellow fIrst-timer Pat DeWine, 31, and Reece is at least 20 years younger than her new colleagues.

While age may not play a part in Reece’s ability to do her job, other council members insist, right now it’s an issue she can’t seem to dodge. The person in charge of setting up her office computer, for instance, accidentally mistook her for an aide. And now, just minutes after being sworn in, as she stands before an overflowing crowd and makes her first remarks as a council member, she innocently stumbles over the issue herself.

“It’s nice to be working with you again, Mr. Mayor,” she says as she looks over her right shoulder to Charlie Luken. “The last time we worked together I was in high school and part of the high school program with city council.”

She pauses as she realizes how that may have sounded.

“Umm,” she adds, “not that you’re old or anything.”

Luken laughs.

It seems as if Reece has been preparing for this moment all her life. She began hanging around the marble staircases and high-ceilinged hallways of City Hall when she was 4 years old, when her father, Steve Reece, was an aide to then-mayor Ted Berry. She absorbed the atmosphere and action of the political life during those early days, and as she grew, she practiced the craft at every opportunity.

When Steve Reece ran for council in 1975, for instance, Alicia spent her days handing out Reese’s Peanut Butter cups to voters. She took bumper stickers and other campaign material to her preschool classmates. When her father joined in the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Alicia tagged along to the national conventions, watching and learning—even competing against Jesse Jackson Jr. in T-shirt selling contests. In junior high she spent her weekends and afternoons registering people to vote. In high school she was elected senior class president. In college at Grambling State University she was elected “Miss Grambling” and traveled the country as the school’s ambassador.

And when she returned to Cincinnati in 1993, she quietly slipped into the local political scene, filling roles here and there in various campaigns. By 1998, she was hired by the Ohio Democratic Party as its minority coordinator for southwest Ohio. Meanwhile, Hamilton County Democratic Party co-chairmen Tim Burke and Mark Mallory were keeping an eye on her. They liked what they saw and approached her about running for city council.

“We saw her perform in pre-test situations—organize and speak to groups, deal with candidates from the Congressional Black Caucus,” says Burke. “She impressed us. She’s very bright and wonderfully articulate with great organizational and follow-up skills. She has a lot to offer. She has the package.”

So it’s no surprise that Burke brushes off any questions about Reece’s age. Just look at the others who’ve started their political careers at a young age, he says: Springer, Guy Guckenberger, Am Bortz, Steve Chabot, Ken Blackwell. They were all in their late 20s or early 30s when first elected. Even Luken, the man with whom she is now sharing the day’s spotlight, was only 29 when he was first elected to city council.

When he looks at Reece, Luken sees a lot of himself. Both he and Reece grew up around politics; both were young when elected.

“I think she’s the symbol of the new council in so many ways,” Luken says. “There’s a freshness about her, she’s full of energy and enthusiasm and has a lot of will. And I think we’re going to see a lot of that will over the next few years. But I don’t think age will be a problem. I think for someone like Alicia this is going to come pretty natural.”

As Reece sits in her office following the swearing-in ceremony and looks back at the past year, she admits that if there was one thing that got her elected it was the shoebox.

In 1975, after her dad fell 6,000 votes short of winning a council seat, he stopped to analyze his campaign strategy. He wrote down all the things he did right and all the things he did wrong. Then he put his notes in a shoebox and filed it away. (“This was before computers,” Alicia explains.) If he ever ran for city council again, he wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

He never ran again, but when Alicia decided she was running, he dug out the shoebox and pulled out an already well calculated strategy. “Do well where I did well, and improve on the places I didn’t do well,” he told her, “and you’ll win.”

The shoebox strategy was this: Since Alicia didn’t have the money for a big media blitz, she needed to take her message to the streets. A lot of time needed to be spent in the city’s African-American community, where she’d build her base. But she couldn’t ignore white neighborhoods; while she might win in predominantly black wards, those wins would be eroded if she failed to harvest votes in every part of the city.

It wasn’t an ingenious strategy. Standing on corners and waving at cars are as basic to American politics as kissing babies or joining parades, especially in Cincinnati. Former councilman Walter Beckjord did it back in the 1970s. Steve Chabot, John Kruse, Martin Wade—they all tried it. Val Sena once had a life size cutout of herself made with a mechanical waving arm so she could be on two street corners at once. In today’s media age, however, such a strategy is not as effective as it used to be. But Reece made it work.

She had as many as 50 people out with her, making each event a party. She’s bilingual, so she would occasionally strike up conversations with people in Spanish. And once she got someone’s attention, she would then impress with her breadth of knowledge on the issues and her ability to articulate them.

“She earned her victory,” says former mayor Roxanne Qualls. “She did everything a candidate is supposed to do-hustling around, meeting people, presenting herself. I wasn’t out campaigning, but I heard feedback all the time that, without exception, wherever she made appearances those people who had not heard of her before all came away totally impressed.”

By the end of the election, she’d garnered more than 70 percent of the African-American voters, who turned out in high numbers. She finished first in the Evanston ward, second in four others, then held her own in white neighborhoods.

“If you had asked me, I might have put her in ninth place if it was a sunny day and a high Democratic turnout,” says Gene Beaupre, a political science professor at Xavier University. “But I don’t think anyone would have predicted she would finish fifth. In fact, at 10 [p.m.] I was down at the Board of Elections and she was in fifth place, but there were no results from Hyde Park or Mt. Lookout yet, and I said, ‘She can’t hold that.’”

She did. And she did it relatively inexpensively. Reece spent just $65,180 on her campaign-a fraction of that spent by some of her new colleagues. Phil Heimlich, who finished one place ahead of her, spent $504,176—more than seven times as much. Pat DeWine, who finished one place behind her, spent $363,176.

And nearly $20,000 of Reece’s contributions came in the final two weeks of the campaign when it became apparent she was going to do well. Burke called Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Leland, and the party kicked in $2,000 toward the effort. “We only do that for four or five people around the state,” says Leland. “That doesn’t happen everywhere.” Until then she had raised just $47,000. Carl Lindner gave her $15,000 the week she announced her candidacy and an additional $3,000 in August. After that, though, the contributions dropped off to $2,000 from Jerry Springer and $1,000 from a couple of political action committees.

The last-minute donations allowed her to put together a very targeted but impressive media campaign. Jesse Jackson, whom she calls a family friend, made a radio commercial for her. So did Springer and California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, head of the Congressional Black Caucus and vice chairman of the House’s Democratic Steering Committee. Reece aimed ads on WCIN and WIZ at African-American voters, on B105 and Y96 at the young, and WKRC and WSAl at the seniors.

It worked.

“Two weeks before the election 1 was telling someone there’s always a surprise in the council race,” says Luken. “And just before election day my father called and said, ‘I’ve got the surprise: Alicia Reece is in and she’s going to win big.’”

And the Democratic Party is downright giddy that it appears to have landed a candidate with legs. “City council may only be the beginning,” Burke says.

HOURS 25 to 48:
MS. PLAIR’S FIRST GRADE CLASS

“Who can tell me the name of the youngest African-American woman ever to be elected to Cincinnati City Council?” asks Yolanda Plair, a sweet-mannered teacher at Rockdale Paideia Academy in Avondale who single-handedly oversees a class of 29 first graders. “And I’m only going to call on those who are sitting down.”

Backsides go down and hands go up.

“Alicia Reece,” someone answers.

“Very good.”

Plair used the council election as a lesson for her class, and when her students found out she and Reece were friends, they asked if she could arrange to have Reece visit. A call was made, and now, 26 hours after being sworn in, Reece is standing in the Rockdale cafeteria with her right hand raised once again, repeating the oath of office as given to her by a group of 6-year-olds. “I, Alicia Reece, do solemnly swear...”

“You can be anyone you want to be and do anything you want to do,” she tells them. She then gives them each a hug as they head back to their classroom to get their coats before the final bell rings. The schedule is a little tight.

She was supposed to be at the school an hour earlier but was delayed by an orientation for new council members at City Hall. Life as a council member is now officially underway, although since the day after she was elected she’s been fielding as many as 30 calls a day from people wanting information or wanting to voice their opinions. She’s also spent the bulk of her days and nights trying to read a mountain of committee reports and council motions she requested from the mayor’s office and clerk of council. Within her first 60 days, she will be asked to consider many major actions—pass a budget, vote on the future of city manager John Shirey, deal with the development and financing of the riverfront, try to find a way to afford a convention center expansion in addition to dealing with the day-to-day affairs of the city.

“Most first-timers will be quite frank in admitting that the first six months are very stressful,” says Qualls. “There are so many issues—the budget, the riverfront, the convention center, the city manager, the needs of individual constituents, the list goes on—that she not only has to get up to speed on but deal with immediately.”

And like most new politicians, Reece will champion those issues she’s identified as her own, most notably small business development and health care, while adjusting to the highly structured and highly political way business is done on council. Voters have screamed for years that they want to see the end of the back-stabbing, bickering and grandstanding that once earned council the nickname “nine potted plants.” Even if that changes, the way council operates—even in its most effective times—is still different from the ways of a small business or a political campaign.

“I hope she comes with an open mind and understands that she’s not going to jump to the front of the line,”

says James Clingman, president of the African-American Chamber of Commerce. “She needs to learn how things work and build a coalition. Nothing is done in a vacuum on city council, and it can be frustrating. She may already know this because she’s been around politics a long time. But it’s one thing to be on the outside looking in and another to be inside and have someone say, ‘Nope, you can’t do that because you don’t have the votes.’ ”

Luken assigned her to chair a new hybrid committee, the Health, Social and Children’s Services and Small Business Development, Employment and Training Committee, which should help ease her transition as she already is familiar with many of the issues. The committee will also give her a forum. And she’ll use it. Within her first month she says she’ll recommend that the city spend an additional $2.2 million to fund health clinics and tie Shirey’s job status to health, police/community relations and small business issues.

But for now, as her first full day as a council member draws to an end, Reece seems less concerned with how she’ll break through the political roadblocks as with how she’ll get something to eat. Somehow her lunchtime got scheduled over, and she’s just now getting a chance to eat. As she sits in T.G.I. Friday’s on the riverfront, looking across at the Cincinnati skyline, a man approaches.

“Excuse me,” he says. “Aren’t you that new Congresswoman?”

The question catches her off guard. She’s stunned as much by being recognized as by the inaccuracy of the question.

“Um,” she says, “that’s councilwoman.”

HOURS 49 to 72:
THE LIFE OF THE PARTY

Dressed in a long, black formal gown, her hair pulled back in braids, Reece makes her way out of her one bedroom apartment, down a flight of stairs, across the parking lot and through the front door of Integrity Hall. Twelve years ago her parents bought an old photo-processing warehouse in Bond Hill and converted it into the reception hall, along with business offices and three apartments. The hall is one of the neighborhood’s most popular places, with about 100 functions, conferences or parties filling it annually. Alicia rents one of the apartments above the hall—convenient to her job as vice president of marketing and promotions for the family business, Communiplex Services Inc., which runs the hall and organizes community events.

The 200 people filling the elegantly decorated hall hear Reece sworn in for the third time in as many days. Luken is there. Burke is there. Marian Spencer, the first African-American woman on council, is there. Reece slowly mingles with the crowd of family friends, political friends and roller-skating friends. (Twice a week Reece unwinds by wheeling around Golden Skates roller rink in Sharonville.)

Standing out in a black tuxedo with a bright red vest is Lincoln Ware, the no-holds-barred talk show host on WCIN-AM. Reece also works as Ware’s producer, an interesting combination since their political viewpoints are often at opposite ends of the spectrum. Ware’s politics leans so far to the right he received a letter from Republican Party officials suggesting he was mentioning Reece’s name too often on the air. But their relationship works. Alicia books the guests and supplies him with endless questions. Lincoln then fires away at will.

“She’s very levelheaded,” says Ware. “Unless you rub her the wrong way.” Do that, he says, and she does battle. Last year, when two Cincinnati police officers shot to death Michael Carpenter, Reece was so upset by the way the city handled the investigation she wrote attorney general Janet Reno and requested a federal probe of the incident. The FBI got involved.

Or the time when Reece was attending Grambling State in Louisiana and Ku Klux Klan director David Duke ran for governor. She immediately began a voter registration campaign, signing up 7,500 people by the time she was done, including the entire football team—no small task.

Wanting to register the team all at one time, Reece approached the school’s famed football coach, Eddie Robinson. Robinson, the winningest college coach of all time, can be quite intimidating. Reece, who played basketball at Grambling her first two years and casually knew Robinson, didn’t flinch. She walked into the athletic department and refused to leave until she spoke to him.

“You’re a very persistent young lady,” he said when he finally let her in his office. “You’ve also got a lot of guts. Now what do you want?”

“I want you to call practice one hour early so we can register your players to vote,” she said.

He looked at her as if she were crazy.

She made her argument, though, and by the time she was finished he agreed. ‘‘I’m going to allow this,” he finally said. “But I’m holding you personally responsible if they’re one minute late.”

Reece’s willingness to do battle isn’t anything new. When she heard people in high school complaining about violence, she created a program called Youth 2000, which evolved into the Stop the Violence Day that still takes place every January. After graduating from Grambling, Reece returned to Cincinnati and created health fairs, entrepreneur conferences and other programs for the city’s poor, including an annual Loan-athon Day in which $10 million in home loans have been awarded to minorities.

Her previous political activities aside, the work she did with these programs and conferences was as much of a stimulus to run city council as anything. If she was able to help people on a small scale, she thought, imagine what she could do with the backing and the resources of the city behind her. It was a great incentive.

“Everything I’ve been involved in,” she says, “is because that’s what the people wanted.”

HOURS 73 to 100:
THE SERENADE IN THE CHURCH

It’s a little after noon on Sunday and the church service at New Friendship Baptist Church in Avondale is on hold for the moment. Barbara Reece is singing, pouring out her heart about how blessed she’s been. The emotion and the rhythm have the church moving. The choir is singing backup. The congregation is dancing. There’s a groove for God going on. To interrupt a moment like this would be a disservice, so the church just goes with it. The rest of the service can wait.

Then, with great effort, Barbara Reece stands up.

‘Tm going to walk down here,” she says rhythmically, right ‘on beat. “Because I know I can.”

A couple of choir members grab her arms, and some in the congregation stand to see. It’s a stirring sight. For 20 years, Barbara Reece was a professional singer, performing locally under the name Barbara Howard. Four years ago, though, her career came to a sudden stop. Her voice was still strong but her legs weren’t. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she now must use a wheelchair. She strains down three steps and onto the pulpit. Alicia Reece rises from her front row seat and walks to meet her mother.

Reece almost didn’t run for council because of her mother’s health. She told her family she was thinking about running in December 1998, and for three months she and her father researched the possibility. But during that period Barbara’s health problems grew worse, requiring time in the hospital. The last place Alicia Reece wanted to be was out campaigning. It was Barbara who insisted she keep going.

So she did. But Reece wouldn’t have made that decision without the full support of her parents. That’s just the way things work in the Reece household. Alicia, along with brother, Steve Jr., 21, who attends Kentucky State, and sister Tiffany, 19, who attends Southern Ohio College, are a tight-knit bunch.

That helps when things go wrong. The family comforted each other when Barbara was in the hospital. They held each other up when Steve Jr. was found guilty of raping a girl at Colerain High School in 1995 and spent a year with the Department of Youth Services. And the family came on board when Alicia said she wanted to run.

“Whatever she wanted to do was up to her,” says Steve Reece. “We never forced her back into the family business or into politics, but our philosophy with our children is they make their own decisions and as long as they are positive then we as a family will give them 1000 percent support.”

“My parents were always the most popular parents in the neighborhood,” says Reece. “Kids would come and knock on our door and ask if my mom and dad could come out and play. I’d say, ‘They’re not home, but I can.’ They’d say, ‘That’s OK. But send your parents out when they get home.’ “

Alicia’s closeness to her father, though, has some people concerned. Twice he’s had his efforts to hold public office frustrated, which has prompted some people to wonder exactly how much influence Steve is going to try to have over Alicia’s decisions—if he’s not going to try to live vicariously through her, try to become an unofficial 10th council member. Those same people don’t appear to have asked that same question about Luken or Pat DeWine.

“She has access to people with a lot of political experience and governing experience,” Steve Reece says, brushing off suggestions of his influence, “and she can tap into it or draw upon it at any time. She consults me on matters all the time, and I consult her on matters all the time, too.”

Yes, her father continually gives her political advice, Alicia Reece says. But if you take away the “father” title, she adds, he’s more than qualified to give it.

Steve Reece ran for council in 1975 and lost by 6,000 votes, then ran in a special run-off election among Democratic candidates for Charlie Luken’s Congressional seat when he stepped down in 1993. He lost the Congressional run-off to David Mann—a move that angered some in the Democratic party and African-American community. By running, they felt, Reece took votes away from another African-American state Sen. Bill Bowen, who was also in the race and ended up losing to Mann by just 417 votes. Reece responded by trying to form an independent voting group outside of the Democratic Party. He now serves as co-chairman of the county’s Democratic Party Policy Committee.

“[Alicia’sl got her dad’s attitude—if you stir me up, I’ll rock the boat,” Barbara Reece admits. “He used to get her up at 5 [a.m.] and take her out and have her play basketball with the boys. She would get beat up and pushed around, but that’s what he said he wanted because that’s the way life is. But 1 always made sure as soon as she got home that she put on a dress, because I didn’t want anyone to confuse her with not being a lady.”

The church service starts winding down three hours after the opening hymn. It’s been almost exactly 100 hours since she was sworn into office and Rev. H.L. Harvey Jr. mentions how proud the church is of Alicia Reece. Proud not only that she won, but that she did so well, finishing fifth in the 20-member race. Nine months earlier Alicia stood in front of the congregation and announced she was running for office, choosing to announce her candidacy in church instead of some hotel ballroom, she says, simply because she felt it was the right place to do it. She was still a stranger to the rest of the city, but those in the church knew she could win, and win big, no matter what kind of weather came on election day.

“I didn’t run to finish ninth,” she says. “It’s like my principal at Withrow High School used to tell us, ‘Shoot for the stars and land on a cloud.’ That’s what 1 did.”

Originally published in the February 2000 issue.
Photograph by Kevin J. Miyazaki

I, Ghosthunter

Aiesha D. Little — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:00:00 GMT

If you’re here, please give us a sign. We aren’t here to hurt you. We only want to help you...if you want help.”

The room is silent. Light from the street lamp throws eerie shadows across the walls as we sit in the dark, waiting for an answer. Michele Hale and Noah Carlisle, members of Cincinnati Area Paranormal Existence Research (CAPER), are sitting on the floor directly across from one another. Hale sighs. Carlisle crosses his legs at the ankles, his fingers locked behind his head, and leans against a couch cushion. There is a tiny infrared camera on top of the television in the corner of the room. This would be a casual setting, this child’s bedroom, if the express purpose for being here wasn’t to commune with the dead.

“If you’d like to communicate with us, feel free to tap us on the shoulder or arm,” Hale says to the air around her. “Or if you get close to the little gray box in the middle of the floor, we’ll know you’re here.”

The green light on the little gray box—an EMF meter, which detects changes in the electromagnetic field—doesn’t change colors. If it had, it would be a sign that a spirit is trying to “manifest,” that is, gather enough energy from the room to visibly appear. At least that’s the theory. In talking to CAPER members about what they do, I quickly come to understand that just about everything is only a theory.

My mind races. What if something does respond? What will that “something” be? What if it attacks us? What am I doing here!? It seems like an eternity before my inner monologue comes to an abrupt halt. I feel something touching my back. Poking, really. Fingers. Fingers? I sit up straight and suck in my breath. I don’t turn around because I know there’s no one there.

I have a love/hate relationship with all TV shows and movies that are meant to unnerve or flat-out frighten. I have a healthy dose of misplaced paranoia, but I find films like The Shining, The Orphanage, Dark Water, and The Devil’s Backbone—more psychological horror than actual gore—irresistible. As a child, I remember being mildly creeped out by the music from Unsolved Mysteries. In my teens, it was The X Files that scared the bejeesus out of me. These days, I can’t stop watching shows like Ghosthunters International, Supernatural, and Paranormal State. Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments? Love it. But no matter how enthralled I am with what’s happening on screen, my finger always hovers over the “off” button on my remote, ready to teleport me back to reality if things get too intense.

For people like CAPER cofounders Joy Naylor and Michele Hale, there is no such button. They’ve been into the paranormal for years, fueled by their own experiences with the supernatural. After meeting through another ghost hunting group in 2004, the two middle-aged women decided to start their own nonprofit organization with the goal of investigating haunted houses. They created a Web site and set up a phone line so home and business owners could reach them, and set about trying to determine whether those properties are really frequented by spirits. Four years later, they run 12 to 15 investigations a year, each one consisting of multiple visits to the site in question. Once Naylor and Hale determine that the person in need of help isn’t a) experiencing things that can be explained away (for instance, a light that flickers on and off could be an electrical problem) or b) mentally unhinged, they agree to help. Depending on what happens while the team is on site—more unexplained activity means a longer investigation—each visit could run from three to six hours. That’s a lot of work for a hobby.

“Most people are like, ‘Oh, that’s creepy.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s creepy—and I want to know exactly why it happened,’” Matt Hoskins, the group’s tech specialist, says of ghostly encounters. “The hope is that one day we’ll be able to scientifically explain why these things happen.”

I contacted the group in mid-July, hoping to tag along on an investigation or two. I don’t know if too much TV has made me susceptible to believing in ghosts, but participating in a real, live ghost hunt would put my curiosity about the paranormal to the ultimate test. Honestly, despite my paranoia, I like to be scared sometimes. Just a little bit.

On a humid August evening a couple of weeks later, Naylor, Hale, and I are bringing up the rear in a caravan on its way to a house in Hamilton. This is CAPER’s third trip to the home, where the owner has been experiencing strange activity since he started major renovations back in March. He and his wife swear they’ve heard children’s laughter coming from the northern edge of their property. They also claim to have seen shadowy figures lurking in the corners of their bedroom, one dressed inexplicably like a farmer in a plaid shirt, overalls, and a straw hat. They’ve heard a tapping sound on their walls and on occasion have gotten the distinct feeling of someone climbing into bed with them. Deeply creepy, right? I thought so, too, but for CAPER, investigating is about applying logic at every turn.

“We work on debunking,” Naylor says behind the wheel of her blue pick-up. The truck is packed with the gear the group will use for the night: infrared cameras, a monitor, electromagnetic field (EMF) meters. “It’s usually something that can be explained,” she adds. “We want to help people.”

Sarah McEvoy, an investigator-in-training, and Hale are in the back seat nodding in agreement. They’re both wearing gray T-shirts that say “Cincinnati Area Paranormal Existence Research” across the back. The words curve upward and then down, outlining the shape of a cartoon ghost. It’s Boo, the group’s “mascot.”

A little later, Naylor discloses how all of the CAPER members feel. “Ninety-eight percent of the time, it’s pretty boring,” she says with a shrug. “It’s that two percent that gets us going. Sometimes it’s hard to stay calm when something happens. You don’t want to scare the client, but it’s exciting. This particular house has got me questioning things.”

“Questioning things” is Naylor’s way of saying there are things happening that she can’t readily explain. The group tells its clients to think about what they’re experiencing as logically as possible. They encourage clients to keep a journal of their experiences, noting each one in precise detail. “Do your best to find a rational explanation for what is happening,” says the CAPER pamphlet. “Many events, originally thought to be the creations of ghosts, end up with perfectly reasonable explanations.”

When we pull into the long driveway of the house we’re investigating, it doesn’t look out of the ordinary. It’s a plain two-story frame house sitting on nearly eight acres of land. There’s one house with a large pond to the left of it that sits even farther back from the street; another large house occupies the lot directly across the street. The rest appears to be woods. A U.S. land sale document on file with the county auditor’s office tells the investigators that the property dates back to the early 1800s, when the area was nothing more than farmland. In fact, it’s believed that the original owner, possibly one of the county’s largest landowners, used it to graze cattle. I’m not scared yet, but in the movies, isn’t the quiet country home on acres of land always haunted?

The owners (who wish to remain anonymous) greet the CAPER members, show them around again, then leave. Noah Carlisle, another investigator-in-training, tapes down the infrared cameras throughout the house; Naylor and Hale help Hoskins set up the equipment outside while McEvoy and Marie Peterson, the case manager, head inside. They’re establishing room temperatures and getting EMF readings so that the base team—the two investigators charged with monitoring activity inside the house from the backyard—will know if anything changes while the rest of the group is indoors.

The investigators then break into teams of two. When the first team is ready to go inside, the last bit of sunlight is fading fast. It’s going to be a long night.

The air is stiflingly hot, but a trickle of cold sweat runs down the center of my back. I want to walk out. Stand up, say good-bye to the ghost hunters—and anything else in the room—and leave. I close my eyes, holding my breath.

I’mnotbeingpokedI’mnotbeingpokedI’mnotbeingpokedI’mnotbeingpokedI’mnotbeingpoked.

I open my eyes and breathe again. The rush of oxygen to my brain makes me dizzy. The sensation on my back stops as quickly as it started and I immediately begin trying to rationalize away what just happened. Maybe it was my muscles relaxing? I had been moving furniture earlier in the day and now, after hours of rest, my muscles were expanding again. Right? It’s hard to be irrational when you’re hanging out with a group of individuals who are doing everything in their power to debunk the strange phenomena they’re encountering. Especially with EMF meters and infrared cameras.

Yeah, that’s it. It was my muscles.

We leave the room and I don’t speak again until I’m outside. The cool night air is soothing and eases my mind a bit. The monitor glows in the darkness as Hale serves up chocolate chip and raspberry crunch bars, a homemade treat for her fellow investigators. It’s a welcomed break. I convince myself that nothing touched me, and don’t mention the incident for now. After a short bathroom break another team—McEvoy and Laura Carney, another trainee—moseys inside with no effect. After I alert them that the basement door, which was not open on my first trip inside the house, is now slightly ajar, we spend 15 minutes in complete darkness down there. McEvoy wonders aloud if there are any mice in the basement.

“I’m a bit of a chicken,” she says, laughing. The irony of a paranormal investigator being afraid of rodents isn’t lost on any of us.

In the living room, McEvoy tries to entice the would-be entities by letting her hair down because the owner told CAPER that something purportedly pulled his cousin’s hair while she slept. No response. After 45 minutes she and Carney give up.

It’s closing in on midnight and nearly three hours of hanging out in dark rooms, talking to thin air, has made me sleepy. Peterson and Naylor are the last team up tonight, and I tag along. Everything is nice and uneventful until we reach the master bedroom on the first floor. Sitting on the bed with a headlamp strapped to her head, Peterson, who claims to be extremely sensitive to EMF waves, starts asking questions.

“What’s your name?”

Nothing.

“What year is it?”

Nothing.

“Do you have any children? What are their—”

That’s when it happens. In a flash, the EMF meter jumps from green to yellow to orange!

“Did that just…?” I can’t finish my sentence. To finish my sentence would be to verbally admit to what I’d just seen. There’s a lump in my throat.

Peterson continues asking questions. When she mentions the current owner’s name, the EMF meter spikes again. Naylor, who’s standing at the foot of the bed, perks up. “I just saw a shadow go in front of the window.”

With great difficulty, I manage to suppress the urge to run. Naylor radios to base and asks Carlisle and Hoskins to come around to the front of the house to “look for deer.” Maybe one walked past the window, she says. At the exact time that the EMF meter went off? Sure.

A few moments later, Carlisle radios back. No deer. Naylor crosses her arms and then puts her hands on her hips. Peterson is smiling, her eyes the size of quarters.

In a small windowless room at the Sharonville branch of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, CAPER members set up their equipment and prepare to go over their EVP (electronic voice phenomena) readings from the Hamilton investigation. EVPs are recordings of static noise that some investigators believe can capture the voices of the dead. Founded by EVP pioneer Sarah Estep in 1982, the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena breaks such recordings into three classes: a Class A recording can be heard clearly without headphones; a Class B can be heard with headphones, though listeners might disagree about what’s being said; and Class C, the least conclusive, requires headphones and amplification. It’s a few days after the hunt and everyone has had time to examine their own individual recordings, which requires hours of listening to static or, worse, chatty investigators. Everyone naturally has their fingers crossed for a Class A.

Hoskins has isolated three recorded incidents that could possibly indicate paranormal activity. Incident No. 1 happens in the kitchen while everyone except Carlisle is outside. Through the buzz of dead air, a creaking sound comes from the tiny speakers plugged into Hale’s laptop computer. Everyone gives quizzical looks and she plays the sound again.

“Did someone move a chair?” Naylor asks.

“It sounds like a zipper,” McEvoy says.

We all turn to Carlisle. “No, I wasn’t playing with my zipper!” he says, exasperated. Everyone laughs.

They agree that the sound is Carlisle taping down the camera in the family room during set-up and we move on to Incident No. 2, which takes place in the kitchen while no one is in the house. It sounds like the water is running. Peterson says she came in to get water but it was 20 minutes before the recorded incident. Everyone gets closer as Hale plays the recording again.

“Could it be the refrigerator running ice?” Peterson asks.

Hoskins is skeptical of the ice theory. “When you listen to it with headphones, you can very clearly hear water running,” he says. “I won’t argue it any further, but I just thought it sounded kind of cool.”

“I’m gonna have to say no,” Naylor pipes up. “I’m gonna have to say it was the refrigerator.”

Again, everyone agrees and it’s on to Incident No. 3, a series of weird noises picked up on the recorder in the living room, which are quickly dismissed as Michele Hale entering the house to use the bathroom shortly before the first group of investigators set up inside.

“Anyone else have anything?” Naylor asks.

When McEvoy plays what she picked up, I get goose bumps. It’s from the master bedroom, where Naylor, Peterson, and I were sitting when the EMF meter spiked into the orange. On the tape, Naylor is talking to Peterson. Suddenly a male voice bursts from the speakers.

It’s my house....

The lump in my throat is back. Once again, everyone leans in as close as possible, straining to hear the recording as Hale plays it over and over again. One by one, they each listen to it with headphones.

“You can definitely tell it’s male,” McEvoy says, her hands clamped over her ears. “It sounds like, ‘It’s my house.’”

“It isn’t a Class A, but it’s definitely a Class B,” Hoskins says.

Everyone remains calm except Peterson, who’s beside herself with giddiness. She slaps her hands together, congratulating herself for asking the questions about the kids. “I’m excited!” she whispers to me, bursting into giggles. “Aren’t you excited?”

I’m not sure “excited” is the right word. “Freaked out” is more like it. The EVP coincides with the shadow Naylor saw in front of the window, which coincides with the EMF spike. It’s all a little too much coincidence for me to not mention being poked in the back earlier that same evening.

I sigh heavily. “OK, I wasn’t sure if I should say anything about this, but, well, it sounds silly—”

“You’re hanging out with people who believe in ghosts,” Hoskins says. “How silly can it be?”

“Well, I think some...thing touched me when Michele, Noah, and I were in the upstairs bedroom. It felt like two fingers. Touching my back.”

Everyone looks at me inquisitively. Peterson grins. She wants me to be excited, but I just feel uncomfortable.

“Well, that’s what we call a ‘personal experience,’” Hale says in a very soothing tone. She’s good at validating the concerns of others. “We can’t prove it.”

“It’s much more impressive when you can say, ‘Listen to this EVP, watch this video, and look at this picture.’” Hoskins says. “We can’t say, ‘This place is haunted because I feel like I got touched.’”

Which means all I’m left with is my paranoia about what may or may not have happened to me in that upstairs bedroom. I came into this wanting to test my fear of the unknown, and yes, to get a thrill. Now? Not so much. I didn’t think that a ghost would reach out and literally touch me, but I find myself reevaluating my attraction to the creepy. In a couple of days, Naylor will tell the homeowner about our findings; I get the impression he doesn’t really care. The point of investigating isn’t necessarily to “get rid” of whatever’s there. (How would you do that, anyway? I mean, unless you think Ghostbusters is real.) For CAPER, it’s about helping clients “obtain peace of mind.” “Politely ask any ghost to leave you, your family, and your home in peace,” is another gem from the CAPER pamphlet. “Sometimes that is all that is necessary to bring the undesired paranormal activity to a halt.”

Peace of mind is putting this experience behind me post-haste, but I have a feeling it won’t be that easy. Scary movies somehow seem just a bit scarier. Any unexplained noise has me thinking the ghostly farmer from the house in Hamilton is lurking just over my shoulder. Why did I think this was going to be interesting? Clearly, I’m not cut out for paranormal investigations. But I hope that the group from CAPER eventually finds what they’re searching for. As long as it doesn’t come looking for me, I’ll be just fine.

Originally published in the October 2008 issue.
Photograph by Jonathan Willis

Last Chance Saloon

Chris Varias — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:00:00 GMT

I have cracked open numerous cans of beer inside the most rare and precious piece of real estate in Newport’s leafy East Row Historic District. The property I refer to is not an Italianate house with stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and a Lexus in the driveway. Those are a dime a dozen in the East Row. Jerry’s Jug House has no comps.

A postage stamp of a saloon and carry-out store, the Jug House is, inside and out, frozen in a time before the rehab boom hit the East Row. It’s just about always open, seven days a week, from early in the morning to late at night. Even so, there’s a good chance that the people living around the corner have never set foot in the place—which is one reason its days may be numbered. Another might be that it’s difficult to find. The Jug House isn’t a corner bar; it sits along narrow Seventh Street, amid the East Row’s maze of one-way roads. It’s as close to a secret society as a business open to the public can be. There’s little chance of a first-time visitor serendipitously stumbling upon it.

The two-story building has housed a drinking establishment on its ground floor since the 1940s. At first it was essentially a stag joint, according to its current owner, Dave Wentworth. Years later a women’s bathroom was installed. Today it’s the easternmost tavern in the East Row, completely out of place, a lone Wiedemann sign aglow in the middle of a residential block. While the East Row gentrifiers might favor the newer sports bars on Monmouth Street or the chain establishments of Newport on the Levee, Jug House customers are typically folks who have lived in the area their whole lives. On a Thursday night, a man can hunker down with his buddies and a bucket of Miller
Lites for $9 and settle into a session—lobbing complaints about a Campbell County judge, say, or gossiping about a Cincinnati sports broadcaster. On a Saturday, he can return to throw a college graduation party for his grandson.

I moved to Newport in 1999 and wondered about the Jug House every time I drove past. At the time, my wife was the bar manager at the Southgate House, where she worked with Ben Saunders. A bartender by day and artist at night, Saunders grew up in Bellevue and became an expert on local bar culture, familiarizing himself with every Campbell County dive along the Route 8 corridor from Newport to Melbourne. His favorite was the Jug House, and he suggested we go, as he knew I also liked my taverns down-home and lightly populated.

When he took me there, I couldn’t believe it. It was like the old-man bars I used to visit as a young man on the Northwest side of Chicago in the early ’90s, before Mayor Daley and gentrification swept them away. I couldn’t believe how tiny it was: five stools and a few tables and chairs squeezed into a 300 square-foot barroom. I couldn’t believe the prices: a can of
Wiedemann for a buck-and-a-quarter. To this day I still can’t believe that I never run into anyone I know on the occasions
I pop in, other than the regulars whose faces I recognize. It’s a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood that drinks elsewhere. Not a business model for survival, let alone success.

People like Saunders, who hails from a multigenerational Campbell County family, make up the customer base. His dad would take him along for the ride to the Jug House when he was a teenager. When he became of age, they started to drink there together. Saunders’s late maternal grandfather, a lieutenant colonel with the Newport Police Department, was a Jug House regular. Saunders lives in the neighborhood and says he’s probably the only Jug House drinker on his block. “It’s not the bar where a guy goes to get away from his wife,” he explains. “She figures it out and goes there too.

“Everybody I’ve taken loves that place, even the people who are too cool. It’s cheap and it’s cozy. Bars like that don’t exist anymore.”

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in June, and sunlight filters through glass-block windows. Like most other weekdays at the Jug House, business is slow. The barstools are empty, and the TV is tuned to the Golf Channel. Mike Griffith—Griff, to the regulars—is behind the bar, and he does not know, or care, which tournament is on. A couple of customers stand near the door at one end of the bar; I’m planted at the other with a can of Hudy.

I look up at the most random piece of decor ever to grace a Newport bar: a six-inch disco ball hanging above my head. Where’d it come from? I let the mystery be and sip my beer. Another customer enters. That makes four of us. A cigarette dangles from his mouth, and he mumbles unintelligibly. Griff nods and hands him a bottle of Bud Light. The door cracks open again. Five people before suppertime? This is now a party. “Rock’s in the house!” someone declares.

The arrival of “Rock” Rauckhurst, whose workshirt bears his name, brings an uptick in energy. “One of these?” asks Griff, presenting Rock with a High Life. Names are named; rounds are purchased; lungs are coughed up in lieu of laughter and Rock and his friends catch up on current events.

“Did you see Sawyer today?”

“Yeah, he was here.”

“What’d he say about his kidneys? He was hurting yesterday.”

Rock tells me he lives in Southgate and is from Bellevue but drinks in neither, making a second home out of the Jug House for the last 16 or 17 years. “I’ve always hung around—what do you call them?—hole in the walls,” he says. “It’s my type of place. It’s low key, everybody knows everybody. Seems like there’s too much activity and riff raff in larger bars.”

Rock introduces Beans—Tom Kinman—a 62-year-old UPS retiree who works a Jug House bartending shift one Sunday a month, which leaves him plenty of off days to come in for a beer. Beans lives in Highland Heights and grew up in the East Row on Monroe Street. Rock assures me that Beans has Jug House stories, and he does, like the one about the dentist who would drink at the bar in the morning, and who once took a fellow drunk back to his office and pulled out all of his teeth just for laughs.

Beans has worked in bars most of his life, first at the long-shuttered Burkhart’s a couple blocks away at the corner of Ninth Street and Park Avenue. He was a stock boy at age 7 before his promotion to bartender at 14. Although he says that nearly nothing about the Jug House has changed since he first starting hanging out here in the ’60s, he mentions a couple of exceptions. “We never had stools here until the 2000s,” he says. “Dave said there would never be stools and never be a woman bartender.” There’s a school of thought in the bar business that patrons drink less if they’re sitting down. And as for female bartenders, Beans proudly notes that his daughter-in-law is a member of the Jug House staff.

Even so, Beans admits that the bar is not made for these times, or vice versa. “There are no local bars anymore,” he says. “Because of the big places, the little places are going out of business. We’re charging $1.25 here. My buddy used to own the Beer Seller, and they get $3.75 for the same beer.” Plus, the neighbors finance their beers with plastic. “They don’t know what to do when they come in here and we don’t take credit cards.”

A true working man’s establishment, the Jug House opens at 7 a.m., ready to accommodate thirsty third-shifters. On a midsummer Wednesday morning, 70-year-old owner Dave Wentworth is pulling double duty, accepting beer deliveries and tending bar for a grand total of one customer.

Even with a virtually empty room, Wentworth is slow to warm to my efforts at conversation. As he begins to piece together details of his life dating back to a time long before even the blue and nicotine-yellow University of Kentucky wallpaper was hung upon the Jug House walls, his wife Carol comes down from the couple’s second floor apartment. She visits briefly, giving her husband a kiss on the top of his head of slicked-back gray hair before heading out to her job at Cappel’s, the downtown Cincinnati costume shop. Wentworth reluctantly continues the task of talking about himself.

He was born on December 6, 1941,
the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At Newport Central Catholic High School he was the baseball team’s star pitcher, and when the Philadelphia Phillies signed him to a contract he headed to the team’s instructional facility in Florida. He made $250 a month, with room and board coming out of his pocket.

Wentworth has the physical attributes of an old jock—large cranium, big frame, and hands made for gripping a baseball or balling into fists. He reminds me of Chicago sports heroes like Mike Ditka and Dick Butkus, guys who, despite the aging process, maintain an air suggesting that when they were in physical altercations as young men, they were not often on the short end.

I ask about Wentworth’s pitching career, but he fails to share much. “It must have been pretty good,” is all he says about his fastball. “But that son of a bitch went over the fence too much.” Wentworth spent about a year-and-a-half in the minors before returning to Kentucky when his dad died. He was the oldest of four kids and felt an obligation to be home. No excuses, though. “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” he says. “I wouldn’t have made it anyway. I’ve had people say, ‘How’s Philadelphia?’ I’d say, ‘How the hell would I know? I signed with the Phillies. I never made it to Philadelphia.’ ”

Next up was the army, including eight months in Vietnam. In 1968 he and Carol were married, and they settled in an apartment in Ft. Thomas. After that he started bartending at Jerry’s Jug House, named for the proprietor, Jerry Bittner. “It was a neighborhood back then,” he says. “Personally, I think it was a hell of a lot better than it is now. You could rely on the people. They’d come in and have a couple beers. They’d go home, eat dinner, then come back and have a couple more. Different generation now.

“The world’s not set up for a small businessman, I’ll tell you that. Hell, they can go buy beer from the store cheaper than I can buy it off the delivery truck.”

Wentworth says business was decent when he bought the bar from Bittner in 1986. But even then, the clientele was aging. Things began to change dramatically when rehabbing in the East Row took off in the ’90s. The new neighbors didn’t give him a hard time, but they largely didn’t patronize his bar, either. Which is too bad, because there’s never any trouble at the Jug House. Wentworth would bet that half the police force doesn’t even know his little spot is here. Why would they? Nobody ever calls the cops on him. He says that city officials leave him alone, too. “Everything is centered toward the Levee,” he says. “If you’re not on the Levee, you’re a dead duck.”

I ask Dave and Carol if they’ve ever been to Newport on the Levee.

“No,” Wentworth says. “No desire.”

“I went to the comedy club,” answers Carol.

“I have enough comedy in this place,” Wentworth says.

On Christmas Eve in 2009, Wentworth had a stroke. He worked in the bar that night and has no recollection of how he made it upstairs. Carol found him laid out on the bed and called an ambulance. The stroke has debilitated the left side of his body, including vision in his left eye. He used to work seven days a week but has cut back. Sometimes he doesn’t get the bar open at 7 o’clock on the dot.

It’s what his upwardly mobile neighbors might call a lifestyle change. He has only had about five beers since that day. Gone too are the filterless Pall Malls. Instead, he takes about 20 pills each day, which Carol sets out for him. “I feel like shit,” he says, breaking off eye contact and glancing in the direction of the jukebox. “I miss my routine.”

I had a journalism teacher in college who told the class how she’d filed a story about Cuba for The New York Times Magazine. She was unhappy with her editors, who decided to title the piece “The Last Days of Castro’s Cuba.” She wasn’t in the business of making prognostications, she told them. That was in 1993. As I type, Fidel is celebrating his 86th birthday.

Are these the last days of Wentworth’s miniature empire? He says he’s ready to get out, but who wants in? He has no children to whom he can bequeath the Jug House keys. All of his siblings are dead. And a potential buyer might take note of the square footage, which doesn’t lend itself to high-volume sales.

This is a clubhouse in need of a leader with an appreciation for Old Newport, someone who enjoys drinking and smoking and laughing in small groups, and who embraces certain facets of the bar business, such as the part where you don’t make any money.

“How much would you sell it for?” I ask.

He doesn’t name a price. This feels like less of a negotiation tactic than a sign that he’s not fully committed to walking away. But, like The New York Times Magazine, I could be wrong. So I follow up.

“If you sell it, do you want it to remain a bar?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He takes out a handkerchief to blow his nose. “History. Memories.”

Would the neighborhood miss it? Maybe. Newport sometimes doesn’t know what it has until it’s gone. Consider the Wiedemann Brewery. Wiedemann was once the largest beer maker in Kentucky and was headquartered a few blocks west of the Jug House at Sixth and Columbia. The massive office-and-bottle house, designed by Samuel Hannaford and built in 1893, was demolished 19 years ago. In August, this magazine named it one of five important buildings we wish we could have back. The grocery store built where Wiedemann once stood closed up and is now occupied by Builders Surplus. From a turn-of-the-century Romanesque marvel of form and function to a rotating big box: American progress in action.

The Jug House obviously doesn’t rank with the Wiedemann building in terms of architectural significance, but it’s part of the fabric that once made Newport a workingman’s beer-drinking paradise. There’s no wishing back the Wiedemann building, but the brand has recently returned under new ownership, brewed with a different recipe, in a different location. So it goes to show that there are entrepreneurs who see value in an old brand known for good, cheap beer.

Maybe someday soon, someone will wake up to the value in this good, cheap bar with the Wiedemann sign hanging above its front door.

Editor’s Note: We were saddened to learn of the death of Carol Wentworth, who passed away in September after work on this story was completed.

Originally published in the November 2012 issue.
Illustration by Patrick George.

Purple Hearts

Jack Heffron — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:00:00 GMT

It’s not quite 11 o’clock on the first Sunday morning in September, a time when the spidery streets around Elder High School are usually quiet. The only sound you should hear at this hour are the bells at St. William on West Eighth Street and St. Lawrence on Warsaw Avenue calling Price Hill’s faithful to mass. But today is not at all usual, and the streets are not remotely quiet, because this Sunday the mighty Elder Panthers will clash with their all-city rivals, the Colerain Cardinals, at noon. That makes this a high holy day of sorts for the disciples of the purple and white, who have already squeezed into the parking lots and are spilling across the sidewalks around the school’s legendary stadium, known with equal measures of reverence and scornful pride as The Pit.

The rest of America is here to watch, too. ESPN is set to carry the game live from coast to coast—a fact that bumps the normal pregame frenzy a few notches higher. The sports network’s interest validates what Cincinnatians have known for quite a while: Around these parts, high school football is a very big deal. It is covered obsessively, from The Cincinnati Enquirer on down to overwrought team blogs and fan forums. Ken Broo and Denny Janson and Lance McAlister devote precious airtime to it. You and everybody you know talks about it at the office. And anyone new to the Queen City can be excused for that incredulous “Whaaa?” look when they find out how many full-grown adults spend their Friday evenings in fall at the local high school game. It’s a Cincinnati thing; one day, if you stay long enough, you’ll understand.

In a city where the NFL team has been a farce for 20 years and the only Division I college program was, until the past couple of auspicious years, nearly as bad, high school football provides the main source of pigskin pride—and bragging rights—to local fans. Elder fans have been maniacally proud of their team for as long as most of them can remember—longer, in fact, than most of them have been alive. A considerable majority of the kids currently enrolled at the all-boys school had some connection to it before their first day of freshman year. Their fathers, brothers, uncles, even grandfathers went to Elder. They’ve huddled under The Pit’s Friday night lights since they were children. If they have a dozen T-shirts in their drawers at home, at least three are purple.

The first Catholic Archdiocesan high school in Cincinnati, Elder graduated its initial class in 1923. In the intervening years, the school put down deep roots.Just as there is a cliché about west-siders never leaving the west side, Elder alums never really leave the school behind. They continue to support it and identify with it. The crowd at the Colerain game—a solid sea of fans in purple shirts, purple shorts, and purple-slathered torsos, spanning generations—is a raucous testament to that. Head coach Doug Ramsey, now in his 13th season, says that Elder football is as much about the community as it is about the kids on the field. “Our kids know they’re playing for more than just themselves,” he says. “Here you see 70-year-old guys in the stands with Elder stuff on. You don’t see that at a lot of other places.”

As kickoff approaches, the Colerain fans filing in look somewhat bewildered. Though they take their team just as seriously, their tradition as a city power doesn’t extend as far back as Elder’s. And today they are deep in enemy territory. Swaddled in red—some of them painted head-to-toe—they head to the visitor’s side of The Pit, gazing around as if they’ve just entered the Roman Colosseum.
In an era when high school football facilities stretch like palaces across wide suburban acreage, The Pit squats in the backyards of its urban neighbors. A brutal concrete horseshoe designed in 1937 by two seniors at the school, it sits in a narrow valley bound tightly on three sides by working-class homes, their steeply pitched roofs jutting through thick trees, as if guarding the sacred battlefield from intruders. Fans cascading through the Vincent Avenue gate trundle down a blacktop driveway in front of the school, which looms above the open end of the horseshoe, its high Norman tower casting a shadow across the steps leading to the field. On the front of the purple press box perched atop the home stands hangs a sign that reads: “Welcome to The Pit: Elder’s 12th Man.”

For most of the last two decades, Elder and Colerain have been two of the top-ranked teams in Ohio. This year, Elder started the season ranked third in the entire country on USA Today’s “Super 25” list. The week before meeting Colerain, the Panthers convincingly whipped East St. Louis Senior High School, another nationally ranked team, in the Skyline Chili Crosstown Showdown at Nippert Stadium, a multi-game event that has done much to bolster the reputation of Cincinnati’s high school teams. Colerain went into the Showdown ranked 13th in the country and first in the city but was upset by St. Xavier 16–0. So they come to The Pit seeking to erase the memory of last week’s surprising loss, and to deliver some long overdue payback: Last year, Colerain lost a bruising regional playoff game to Elder in double overtime 27–20, which launched the Panthers into the state semifinals. If Elder comes into the game without a chip on its shoulder, it still has a lot to protect. A ranking of third in the country is a dizzying height to reach, even for such a perennial powerhouse.

As ESPN’s cameras comb the scene, smoke from grills wafts in the air, the marching bands beat their drums, and the student sections volley cheers back and forth across the field. It’s an electrifying tribal rite that many love to the point of fanaticism. But few of those fanatics know what it is to actually walk out into the middle of that fray, strap on a helmet, and go at it full-bore for 60 exhausting minutes. Which is to say, few have had the privilege and known the anxiety that comes with being a player.

Earlier that morning, at his home in Delhi, Elder quarterback Mark Miller was eating doughnuts—a pregame routine started by his father, George, who played on state champion basketball and baseball teams for Elder in the early 1970s. Mr. Miller picks up a dozen doughnuts at the Bizy Bee Bakery in Sayler Park before every game. His son isn’t picky about what kind his dad brings home. He likes the routine as much as the doughnuts.

Last year was a pretty good year for Mark Miller. He led Elder to the state championship as a junior, was named Co-Offensive Player of the Year in Ohio, and was first-team quarterback on the Associated Press Division I All-State team. He threw for 3,331 yards and 31 touchdowns. Yet despite these achievements, no big-time college programs have come calling with a scholarship. They’ve shown, in fact, no interest at all. At this point, the two schools he’s talking with are Ohio Dominican University, in Columbus, and Eastern Illinois University, both Division II schools.

As out-of-whack as that may seem, by Division I standards, it’s all too common. Truth is, Miller doesn’t look like the quarterback on the third-ranked team in the nation. In the game program he’s listed as six-foot-one and 180 pounds, but those numbers seem a little hopeful; he doesn’t swagger like a six-foot-tall QB and lacks the big frame that top colleges covet. Still, he tries not to let the proclivities of recruiting get him down.

“I am one of the most optimistic people I know,” he says, “and I’m hopeful that there may be a Division I offer out there for me. But if not, then it’s not the end of the world. I don’t have the prototypical size or speed for a major Division I program, but I believe that heart, passion, and knowledge of the game are much more important, which is something I hold very strongly in my deck of attributes as a football player.”

Miller’s optimism has taken him a long way in a short time. Before last year’s amazing success, he was not even a starter. He didn’t see a lot of playing time on either the freshman or junior varsity teams, but he kept working and practicing, lifting weights and running, and in the summer before his junior year things fell into place. Throughout the hot afternoon practices at The Pit, he competed for time with senior Joe Hetzer, who had already been voted a co-captain. Miller, many thought, would ride the bench. Then Hetzer suffered a concussion in a scrimmage and Miller was thrust into the job.

It took a little time for the team, especially the seniors, to believe that Miller could lead the Panthers to the kind of success expected of them. “I definitely felt that I had to earn the seniors’ trust, but they made it easy on me,” he recalls. “They were always encouraging. Joey [Hetzer] definitely helped me through the first couple of weeks. He told me just to relax and have fun, try not to think too much, and let the game come to you.”

If he doesn’t look like a big-time quarterback, Miller also doesn’t act like one. He is neither brash nor cocky. He evinces supreme confidence in a modest way—as if he knows what he can do on a football field but he’d rather just do it than make a big fuss about it. His dark brown hair hangs messily across his forehead, and his aw-shucks smile suggests he’s taken all the praise he’s received since last year in stride. An A student and current student council president, Miller succeeds with brains more than brawn. His favorite subject is math and he plans to get some type of business degree, hoping someday to run his own company. Which, even though he’s just 18, makes a certain kind of sense. His charisma derives more from a quiet sense of certainty he conveys than in charm or bravado. He just seems to understand the situation better than anyone else.

“Mark is just one of those guys who does everything well,” Ramsey says. “He’s a winner. And he’s a leader. He has the ability to get people to follow him.”

As an Elder player, Miller follows not only his father and uncle (who also played quarterback) but his older brothers Stephen, Matt, and Dan. He’s known since the third grade that he wanted to play football for the Panthers. If he feels at all nervous about today’s game, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he thinks about the game plan and what he is supposed to do. School and classes and student council are far away. College is far, far away. Right now, all he needs to concentrate on is putting points on the board.

He finishes his doughnut and heads for The Pit, as if to say, Let’s get this started.

A few miles north of the Miller home, in Western Hills, star wide receiver Tim O’Conner takes part in his own pregame family tradition: Before every game, his mom or dad rubs his forehead and his palms with holy water. As a receiver, O’Conner depends on his hands, so a bit of ecclesiastical Stickum can’t hurt. Anointing his head with water is designed to keep him safe from injury.

Unlike his friend Mark, O’Conner was pegged as a future star before he took his first class at Elder. A grade-school legend on the west side, “that O’Conner kid from Our Lady of Lourdes” had wowed opponents and their parents in every sport he played. At six-foot-three and 190 pounds, he’s bigger than Miller. A strong and rangy 17-year-old, he moves with the grace of an athlete on and off the field. While Miller didn’t see much playing time on the junior varsity team as a sophomore, O’Conner was already playing for the varsity, getting into 15 to 20 plays per game.

Another difference between him and Miller: Every Big Ten school has talked to him about a scholarship, and right before the season started he committed to play at Indiana University, the first one to make him a formal offer. While other schools wanted to wait and see him play a couple of games as a senior, he was impressed by Indiana’s certainty about his ability. “Seems like a good fit,” he says.

Where Miller, the less gifted athlete, exudes confidence, O’Conner seems almost diffident. He doesn’t talk a lot, and when he does, he speaks in a soft voice. Says Ramsey with a chuckle, “He only wants the person he’s talking to to hear what he has to say.” Before he speaks, O’Conner often knits his brow, considering what is being said before responding. Then he’ll offer a few words. Slowly.

But like Miller, he comes from an Elder football family. His father and older brother, Bill, are both alums, and Bill played on Elder’s state football championship team in 2003. His dad, a dentist, is an active booster at the school. “Elder has always been important,” O’Conner says. “There’s always been that sense around my house.” His favorite subject is history, but he plans to get a business degree. After that, he’s not sure. “Maybe I’ll be a dentist, like my dad,” he says. “I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”

Though shy off the field, O’Conner is extremely sure on it, and he relishes competition. When he leaves home for The Pit, he feels the normal anticipation. How could he not? But at no time before or during the game does it enter his mind that Colerain has a chance to win.

Ramsey and Elder athletic director Dave Dabbelt had talked for some time with other school administrators, faculty, and coaches before accepting ESPN’s offer. Though the national attention provides great exposure for the school—and for Cincinnati prep football in general—they wanted to be sure it was a good situation for their athletes. The big business of sports in America can be tough on professionals, much less 16- and 17-year-old high school students.

Dabbelt, who has taught at Elder for 40 years and served as its AD for the past 20, is keenly aware of the pressures that student athletes endure, especially the kids who play football. That hallowed tradition has been a good one overall for the school, but an inordinate amount of expectation is psychically projected onto the kids who take the field each autumn. And that can be taxing.

A graduate in the class of 1966, Dabbelt came back to the school immediately after college and has never left. At 61, he’s as thin now as his first day on the job and just as passionate about the place. Though his hair is nearly white, he has a tanned, youthful face and bearing. He speaks quickly and with enthusiasm. In his cramped office, packed with trophies, he guides what is perhaps the city’s most storied sports program.

“Twenty years ago I’d never have guessed what I’m doing right now,” he says. “It’s changed dramatically. It’s become much more of a business. A big-money business, to some extent. We’re still trying to be a high school that doesn’t have ‘pay to play,’”—meaning that the kids don’t have to pay a fee to be on the team—“but we’re getting closer to where we may have to. We’re one of the few around that don’t.”

When sports teams do well, boosters and alumni tend to take an interest and offer more financial support. That’s important at a private school like Elder, where tuition (currently $7,900) cannot cover all the costs of keeping the doors open. When Mark Miller’s father, George, was playing for the purple and white in the 1970s, the school’s enrollment hovered around 2,000. Now it’s less than 900. Tuition is considerably higher, making it more difficult for families, particularly big Catholic families, to afford Elder and the other Catholic high schools. Oak Hills High School, just a few miles up the road, has the largest public enrollment in the state and annually receives top ratings for education. Which means that, in order to survive, Elder has to market itself wisely and get its message out.

That message, in a word, is family. “The community is what makes us work,” Dabbelt says. “We talk about ‘family’ all the time. I think the west side culture lends itself to that.” He credits the Dads Club and the Elder Boosters with pitching in to keep the school viable, and sports programs are a big part of the success.

Aside from keeping the program competitive and profitable, Dabbelt’s toughest challenge is finding schools to play. As part of the Greater Catholic League’s South Division—Elder, Moeller, LaSalle, and St. Xavier—the Panthers have only three league games on their schedule any given year. The annual game with Western Hills High School, a rivalry that dates back to the 1930s, ends the season, but Dabbelt struggles to find other teams to fill the remaining dates during the regular season. The GCL schools in the Central and North divisions lack the enrollment to compete with the powerhouses in the South, and the big public schools fill their schedules with league games, leaving only a few openings. Dabbelt therefore has to range widely to fill his 10-week schedule; this year that includes teams from as far away as East St. Louis, Louisville, Columbus, and Cleveland. He couldn’t find a team to play in week nine. St. X and Moeller face the same challenge.

The crowd in The Pit is practically throwing off sparks when Elder’s kicker Tony Miliano boots the ball into the air. Colerain’s first drive stalls, and once Elder has possession, the offense moves down the field like a machine until Colerain’s defense forces them to settle for a field goal. Then the Cardinal offense takes over, employing a lightning-quick triple-option attack that Elder appears unable to stop. The fans dressed in red cheer wildly as Cardinal fullback Trayion Durham rambles for a touchdown.

The Panther players seem to view this as a minor setback. Exhibiting their usual sangfroid, Elder’s offense takes the field and begins methodically moving the ball toward the goal line. The game seesaws back and forth for the rest of the first half until 20 seconds before the gun is fired, when Miller finally finds receiver Selby Chidemo in the corner of the end zone. With that, Elder goes into the locker room leading 10–7.

Days after the game, while munching a pizza at LaRosa’s on Boudinot Avenue in Price Hill, O’Conner recalls what being in the middle of all that felt like. “We knew we would win,” he says, matter-of-factly. “That’s the way it always is. We’re not cocky about it, just confident. Even in that state championship game last year. We fell behind early but we all felt that ‘We’re going to come back and win this game.’ We knew we were good enough to do it.”

But belief was not enough on that cold night in Canton last November when Elder met St. Ignatius High School from Cleveland in the state championship game. St. Ignatius had hit its stride in the playoffs and bulled through every team in its path. The Panthers knew they had to stop the Wildcats’ high-powered offense early in the game to stay close, but they simply couldn’t do it. By the end of the first half, they’d fallen behind 21–0.

In the locker room at halftime, they regrouped. Coach Ramsey told his players, “Regardless of what happens, for you seniors it’s once in a lifetime. Don’t have a regret about it. Five years from now don’t look back and say, ‘I gave up in the second half of the game.’ Give it everything you’ve got.”

And they did. In the second half Elder mounted a comeback, mostly on the arm of Mark Miller and the hands of Tim O’Conner. Miller set state playoff records with 50 pass attempts for 27 completions and 399 yards. O’Conner set the state playoff record with 15 catches, including two touchdowns, which tied the record, and gained 184 yards, which came close to the yardage record. “We’re down one score,” Ramsey remembers. “Ignatius thought they had us. They thought the game was over and then we came battling back. We scared them to death. I’m sure they thought at halftime, ‘It’s going to be an easy second half.’”

Elder did not make it easy. With under two minutes to play, they lined up for an onside kick in hopes of tying the score. But Ignatius recovered the kick and held on to win. For Ramsey, who had led Elder to state championships in 2002 and 2003, the loss was disappointing. For the players, it was devastating. When the game ended, Miller slouched toward the sidelines where his mom and brothers were waiting, waving off a reporter who hustled up to him for a quote. He wasn’t ready to talk.

In some ways, he’s still not ready. “I don’t think there’s been a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it,” he admits. “It’s not so much specifics, it’s just you think, ‘What if I had done something different here or there? What if I’d made a different play than I did?’ It sticks in your mind. That’s my motivation for this year.”

All O’Conner really remembers of the aftermath were the fans cheering the team, their frothy breath pouring into the night air. “We felt like we should have won the game,” he says. “We were coming back, and the defense was stopping them. We just ran out of time.” As for how he felt, he recalls, “It hit me pretty hard. I was down for a couple of weeks probably. But then you have to start rebuilding for the next year.”

Which is what they began to do.

Throughout the winter and on into the spring and summer, if you happened to pass through the Donohoe Center, Elder’s training facility, you would have heard the ring and clank of weights being lifted, the grunts of players, and the vehement exhortations of coaches and trainers. The center was built more than 80 years ago as the school’s original gymnasium; in 2002, it was remodeled to house up-to-date training equipment—row upon row of Icarian weight machines, all with purple seat pads and benches. The walls, too, are coated in purple and white, and across one, in large type, are the words: “What I had I gave, what I saved I lost forever.”

Playing at a high-powered program where expectations are high requires a good deal of sacrifice and a strong commitment from young men barely old enough to drive. State regulations require a 30-day no-contact policy after a season ends, meaning that coaches and players cannot participate in any organized workout or practice. After the 30 days, the boys begin formalized training four days a week. A workout usually lasts about two hours. One group will lift weights while another group runs—sprints or agility drills or whatever is on the schedule that day. The pace is relentless.

The head coach’s office is located in the Donohoe Center, right next to the weight room. It’s spare, containing a desk, several computers, and a television. At 43, Ramsey is tall and fit, a commanding presence easily the size of his biggest players. Wearing an Elder T-shirt, he sits in a chair and looks intensely at whomever he’s addressing. His blue-eyed gaze could shrivel the resolve of the cockiest kid.

When asked about the level of expectations he places on his players, he barks “a lot” with such certainty it’s clear that anything less is unacceptable. “To be a part of our program you’d better be committed,” he says. “We have high expectations. We expect you to stay out of trouble and we expect you to do well in school. We expect that if you’re not playing another sport we expect you in the weight room. We expect you to work hard in practice. We expect you to accept your role, whether you’re a starter or you’re a scout-team guy. We talk about passion a lot. You’d better be passionate about it. Football’s not for everybody. If you’re going to do this, you’ve got to love doing it.”

O’Conner and Miller got that message long ago. “It gets pretty intense,” O’Conner says. Miller agrees. “Sure, everybody gets tired,” he says. “Four days a week is kind of tough on us, but it’s something you have to do.”

Beyond developing strength and stamina, the workouts and the long summer practice sessions (two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, starting in July) are designed to build camaraderie. The players are all together, suffering the same fatigue, facing the same challenges. But building camaraderie among Elder players seems almost redundant. Most of the players have known each other since well before their freshman year. Miller and O’Conner met when they were in the fifth grade playing baseball with the Weststars, a west side organization of select players, ages 10 to 18, that competes in the Southwest Ohio League, the largest amateur competitive league in the country. That kind of unity helps the school field strong teams despite dipping enrollment.

That closeness pays off during the third quarter of the Colerain game, when Miller is chased from the pocket. He eludes a couple of linemen and rolls to the right side of the field, then whips a pass all the way across the field—a dangerous move even for a pro quarterback. Elder fans collectively stop breathing for a second until O’Conner steps into the open, plucks the ball out of the air, and heads up field.

“Mark just threw it up because he knew that I would be there,” O’Conner says, as if any other outcome was even possible.

Trust is a key theme that Ramsey repeats over and over. This year he even gave the players “Trust” T-shirts to remind them. But he also pushes another theme, one every player hears frequently beginning in his freshman year. It’s a simple and yet complicated question, a kind of Catholic high school version of a Zen koan: Are you Elder football?

At the start of every year, all the players—even those on the freshmen and junior-varsity teams—gather, along with their parents, for a mass. Afterward, Ramsey distributes more T-shirts emblazoned with “Are you Elder football?” Though it has become the mantra of the program, articulating what it means isn’t easy. Miller and O’Conner say it’s more a matter of internalizing the philosophy—which is another way of saying, if you have to ask what it means then you’re not going to get it.

“It’s like it means—is that what you want to strive to be?” Miller says, struggling to put into words a feeling he’s had in his heart since the third grade. “Is that the kind of person you want to epitomize?”

“I think it means you’ve got to have heart and get through the tough times,” O’Conner says. “You’ve got to be dedicated to the team always. Team first. Well, family and God first, but then the team. Put team before yourself.”

Seated in his office, athletic director Dave Dabbelt tries to explain the mantra. “Part of it is about setting priorities, but part of it is the competitiveness,” he says. “To compete you have to work hard, and I think [the students] understand that message. Those kids are working out in the off-season. It’s not something that’s just going to be handed to them. It’s that toughness, that inner drive, that competitiveness, which is really a big factor as far as what Elder is all about.”

Ramsey, who cooked up the mantra with his coaching staff, answers the question with another question: “What it comes down to is—are you a quality person? Are you what Elder High School wants you to be? That’s what we’re looking for. It’s a lot about football but it’s not just about football.”

OK, so that’s probably what you expected them to say. But ultimately that’s what makes high school football so popular: it’s about the game and—cue the NFL highlight reel soundtrack—much more. In a word, life. Strip away the hype and the media attention and the money, and the sport retains a level of innocence fans can’t find elsewhere. In pro ball, we hear about an endless parade of players in trouble, of unchecked egos running wild on and off the field and unchecked greed in the owner’s box. We watch players thump their chests for doing what is simply their job. At the college level, scandals in recruiting are so commonplace we accept corruption and hypocrisy as simply part of the game.

If high school football has become more about the money and the hype than ever before, it’s also still about kids trying hard to play a game they love. And we bring to that game memories of our own youth, our uncomplicated fondness for the old alma mater, and a ragged innocence within ourselves that, under the glare of those mythic Friday night lights, gets one more chance to strut its stuff.

By the second half of the game against Colerain, Elder has used its disciplined approach to neutralize the Cardinals’ superior speed. Early in the fourth quarter, following another Miller-O’Conner connection on a 29-yard touchdown and a 37-yard field goal by kicker Tony Miliano, Elder holds a 13-point lead. Colerain is forced to pass, which is not their strength, and Elder begins grinding out the clock.

Even before the game is over, many Colerain fans are heading for the exits—a comment not on their loyalty to the team as much as on the parking situation around The Pit. The cramped, narrow streets fill up fast when 10,000 people leave a game at the same time. Elder fans, savoring the big victory, stay to watch the final seconds tick down and let out a roar when the gun signals the end of play. Final score: Elder 20, Colerain 7. Miller and O’Conner are lost amid the swarm of players from both teams on the field shaking hands.
When asked about the secret to the Panthers success, Miller gets almost wistful. “Elder is just west side kids who have always dreamed of playing for Elder,” he says. “They’re all giving a hundred percent, putting their heart into it.”

As hyperbolic as that sounds, for some of those kids it is the truth. Unfortunately, for Tim O’Conner, reality intruded on that dream four weeks later, on Elder’s first offensive play against their perennial GCL rival, St. Xavier. O’Conner ran a long route and grabbed a pass, leaping high above the defender and landing hard on the turf—so hard that he snapped two bones in his right wrist. With that injury, his football career at Elder may be over. According to Dabbelt, he might return later in the season if the team goes far in the playoffs and his break heals well. But as of early October, that was unknowable. How—or if—the injury would affect O’Conner’s future in the Big Ten was unclear as well. Reached at home a few days after the game, O’Conner texted back a response that was, under the circumstances, understandable—and completely in-character: “Not up for an interview right now. Sorry.”

“That’s part of the game,” Dabbelt notes ruefully the following week. Yes it is. Just not the part coaches, fans, or players like to think about too much.

Originally published in the November 2009 issue.
Photographs by Ryan Kurtz

The Accident

Linda Vaccariello — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:00:00 GMT

When you're a police officer with three decades on the job there are things you know from experience.

On a beautiful afternoon last summer, Joseph Peptis, an investigator with the New York State Police, was driving back to the station when he heard the dispatcher call for an ambulance at the New York State Thruway's 200-mile marker.

"They said a car had rolled," Peptis recalled. "And when they said 'Multiple persons ejected,' I knew it was going to be bad."

Peptis arrived at the scene in minutes. An eastbound quad-cab pickup truck had rolled across the median and into the westbound lanes. One teenager was on his feet, with barely a scratch on him. The rest of it was as bad as Peptis had feared. But something about the chaos wasn't what the veteran crash investigator expected.

"We knew at the scene," he says. "There were no drugs, no alcohol smell. And the things from the car—camping equipment, a guitar. You see things and you know. You could tell these kids were great. They just made the one enormous mistake."

On Wednesday, June 23, 2004, Mark Fischer, Ryan Robinson, Craig Newton Starkey and Tyler Linne—four friends from Milford High School—set off on a trip to Maine with the blessings of their parents. Halfway there, they had a terrible wreck. One of them walked away, two of them died, and one of the young men was horribly injured. All four families have had to put their lives back together, piece by piece, rebuilding themselves in the face of death and the pain of survival. In the process, they've learned how many people can be touched by one enormous mistake.

"I was the kind of parent who would practically research your family lineage before I'd let my child go over to your house after school," says Sherry Fischer, 51, from the comfortable family room of her home in Miami Township. "Out of context, I can't believe I would allow it."

The "it" in this case was the trip that her son, Mark, started talking about in the winter of 2004. The idea was to take a two-week vacation with three friends—Ryan Robinson, Craig Starkey, and Tyler Linne. Mark was 17 and a junior, but Tyler, Craig, and Ryan were seniors. The trip would be a graduation celebration of sorts, the last chance to really hang out together before college claimed them. Sherry had met Craig's mother, but not the other parents, even though all their kids attended Milford High School and lived not so very far apart in Clermont County subdivisions.

But it didn't matter that Sherry and her husband, Ron, 52, didn't know the parents. "I knew these boys," says Sherry. "I had absolute trust and faith in them. I never thought of saying no because of who they were."

They were an interesting mix. Mark, Ron and Sherry's middle child, was a little guy—short, thin, and teetering on insecurity. But when he met Craig Starkey in a newspaper class his sophomore year, things began to change. Craig's maturity and self-confidence buoyed Mark's self-esteem. "The friendship made Mark believe in himself," Sherry says.

Craig was confident and thoughtful, a cheerful nonconformist whose interests spanned everything from Boy Scouts to writing poetry. With his goatee, flannel shirts, and beat-up jeans, Craig moved through the world with ease. He was comfortable in his own skin, which is not a small accomplishment for a teenager, though apparently he'd been that way from childhood. "On the first day of school, he hopped on the bus and said 'See ya!' " says Craig's father, Gerry "Butch" Starkey, 44. "He had everything under control."

Craig was the glue that bound together a group of seniors that included Ryan and Tyler, and eventually Mark found himself spending time with them, too. Tyler, quick and funny, was an artist who had been drawing constantly since kindergarten. He also had an uncanny musical ability, a fact that his friends were only vaguely aware of. One day Craig went to a music store where Tyler was buying a new amp for his guitar. He came home amazed. "Dad," he said to Butch, "he could pick up anything and play it!"

Ryan was more reserved—a big guy who played right guard on the Milford football team and the only jock in the group. Because Mark was such a small fry, the boys joked that Ryan was his bodyguard. Whenever Sherry fretted about her son's safety, Mark would say, "Mom, nobody's going to mess with Ryan."

Hanging out tends to cultivate the rip-and-run tendencies of some teenagers, but these four liked to keep things mellow. When the seniors weren't tied up with their part-time jobs (Ryan worked at Blockbuster; Tyler at LaRosa's; and Craig, the outdoorsman, at Nature Outfitters in Milford), they'd show up at the Fischers' and crowd into Mark's bedroom with videogames, or hang out in the family room, playing poker and endless rounds of Risk. Or they'd go the Starkeys' and watch cartoons, visit with the family's younger children, or talk. If the seniors felt indolent, Mark would goad them into activity like a pup yapping at their heels, and they'd be off to play Frisbee golf or catch a movie. And when Mark hung back and felt uncertain about some fresh challenge at school or on the social scene, Craig was there to talk it through. You can do it, he'd say to Mark. You're The Man.

Parents spend a lot of time fretting about their children's friends. When they realize that they're spending time with good kids, it's a huge relief. And when they see their children showing every sign of becoming responsible adults, parents become a little more willing to give them the opportunity to be adults.

It was Beth and Pete Robinson who first suggested that the boys take a trip after graduation. "It would be a way of marking their friendship before they went their separate ways to college," Pete says. No surprise, the boys took to the idea; they had big notions about where they might go and what they might do.

"But budgets being what they are when you're 17," Pete recalls,"they decided maybe it would be fun to go to the cottage."

The cottage has been in the Robinson family for years. It sits on Pemaquid Harbor, midway up the coast of Maine, a 20-hour drive from Cincinnati. Pete, 46, who was joining the humanities department at the College of Mount St. Joseph in the fall, was going to spend most of the summer there with the Robinsons' daughter, Sarah, working on his dissertation. The boys could drive to Maine and use the cottage for a few days, then set off for camping, hiking, canoeing, sightseeing—whatever they wanted. Craig had canoed the state's Allagash River wilderness once and was eager to go back. Tyler had always wanted to go to Maine, and Mark was just excited to be going along on this adventure with his friends. In a couple months, Ryan would be enrolled in engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Tyler would be studying industrial design at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Craig would be writing up a storm at Ohio University, and Mark would be knee-deep in Advanced Placement courses at Milford High. But first there would be two weeks in Maine.

The Starkeys offered the use of their Nissan Frontier pickup truck, and all the boys practiced driving it. They agreed in advance that they'd take the wheel in two-hour shifts, with the person in the passenger's seat responsible for keeping an eye on the driver. They even decided to rotate seats each time they changed drivers, to keep everyone alert.

"Good foresight," says Pete Robinson. "A good plan."

On Tuesday before the trip, they packed the truck up to the gunwales. There was camping gear, fishing tackle, clothing, and cases of root beer. Tyler brought a camera and the guitar that he was building with his father, figuring he'd find time to work on it. Craig tucked in his journal so that he could write on quiet evenings. And each of the boys brought a passport; in addition to the canoeing and hiking and hanging out, they were counting on spending a couple of days in Quebec.

The plan was to sleep at Craig's house and leave early in the morning. Pete and 14-year-old Sarah Robinson had already headed for Maine, splitting the trip into two days, so only Beth, 45, was home when Ryan left for the Starkeys' that evening. She reminded her son to be careful, stay alert, and wear his seat belt. He teased her about her anxiety. "Well, I don't want to get a call from Albany saying there's been an accident," she responded. Ryan went to the Fischers' to pick up Mark, where Sherry issued her own maternal advisory.

"We were standing outside, and they were so polite," she recalls. "It was 'Don't worry, Mrs. Fischer,' and 'Mom, I've got Ryan; nobody's gonna bother us.' They were just so tolerant; they let me finish my whole neurotic speech. And then I said, 'OK, I feel so much better.'"

Meanwhile, Lisa Linne, 46, was double-checking to make sure that Tyler had emergency contact information. Lisa and Jeff, 50, Tyler's father, were leaving in a few days on a mission trip to Uganda. If anything happened, Tyler needed to be able to reach them. She tried to impress the importance of this on him. "Mom," said Tyler with a smile, "what could happen?"

The next morning Sharon Starkey got up at 4:30, crept past the boys sleeping in the family room, and drove to a bakery in Goshen for fresh doughnuts. She woke them at five o'clock, and they were soon laughing and joking over breakfast. Sharon, a mother of four, had always enjoyed having her oldest son's friends around, and sending them off on this trip was a special treat. "Around 5:30 or 6, I watched them all climb into the truck," she says. "All those happy faces."

They talked and laughed, toggling between the radio and a trove of comedy and music CDs. They drove north through Columbus and Cleveland, then followed 1-90 as it skirted Lake Erie and headed east into New York. They rotated drivers as planned: Craig first, then everyone else had a turn, then Craig again. When it got warm in the truck's cramped cab, Mark, sitting in front on the passenger's side, stripped off his T-shirt and kicked off his shoes. The Robinsons touched base with their son as the afternoon wore on. Pete called from the cabin, where he and Sarah were getting things opened up and aired out, then Beth called from her office in Cincinnati, then Pete called again from Maine. Pete alerted Ryan to road construction around Worcester, Massachusetts, and they talked about how perfect the day was—clear from Cincinnati all the way to the coast. When Pete said good-bye to his son, it was 4:20.

At this point in the trip, Tyler and Ryan, sitting in the back seat, had unzipped their seat belts. So had Craig, who as at the wheel. At about 4:55, the truck drifted onto the rumble strips on the shoulder, quickly swerved back on the highway (overcorrecting, investigators would later surmise) then flipped. It rolled hard—seven or eight times, all the way across the high weeds in the median and into the westbound lanes—and as it rolled, the impact peeled back the roof of the cab.

The truck came to stop on its side. Inside the cab, Mark Fischer, who never lost consciousness during the accident, found himself hanging from his seat, held in by his seat belt.

"I said, 'Is everybody all right?' " Mark remembers. "And there was nobody there but me."

Bad things happen and we need to know why, to learn the lessons and heed the warnings. When something so bad happens to someone else's children, we're tempted to use the "why" like a talisman to ward off evil. And so a story about a trip to Maine becomes a cautionary tale about three teenagers who weren't wearing seat belts—"the one enormous mistake," as Joe Peptis put it. Seeing it this way allows us to believe that this terrible thing would never happen to us, to our children. Why? Because we'd warn them. Why? Because they'd remember. Why? Because... because... because those boys and their families are not us.

But we've all made those singular, enormous mistakes, and so we know that the only thing that separates them from us is chance, circumstance, luck. That's what an accident is.

Pamela Esposito-Bidwell, a psychiatric nurse with the New York State Office of Mental Health, was driving from her home in Buffalo to Albany with a male colleague that afternoon. They were a few car lengths behind the truck when it happened. "It was such a beautiful day," she says. "It was surreal."

She pulled over and the two of them leapt our of the car and ran toward the wreck, arriving as Mark emerged from the truck, barefoot and shirtless. There was luggage and camping equipment and soda cans everywhere, and two bodies—Craig, laying on the median, and Ryan, in a westbound lane. Esposito-Bidwell's colleague raced to protect Ryan, waving his arms wildly to stop traffic. Esposito-Bidwell knelt next to Craig and began searching for a pulse. Mark saw Ryan, then Craig, but couldn't see Tyler. He heard people around him talking about "three boys." "I said, 'No! There are four of us,' " Mark recalls. "They hadn't cut the grass in the median and nobody could see Tyler. It was like he was completely gone. That's when I got panicked."

If you believe in miracles, you can find a couple in this: No other vehicles were involved. And here's another: The cars that squealed to a stop as the truck went hurtling through the air included, in addition to Esposito-Bidwell and her companion, two trauma nurses and several off-duty police officers. The trauma nurses took over, beginning triage on Tyler, Craig, and Ryan, while Esposito-Bidwell led Mark away from the scene. "All I could do is take care of him as if he was my own child," she says. "And I knew that if it was my kid, I wouldn't want him to see this."

Sherry Fischer, driving back from spending the day in Lexington, got a call on her cell phone a couple minutes after 5. It was Mark. There'd been an accident—that much she understood—but the rest was confusing. Suddenly she heard Pam Esposito- Bidwell's voice. "She said, 'Your son is fine, but I have to tell you that this is very serious,' " Sherry recalls. In case there was any doubt about how serious, Pam told Sherry they couldn't talk any longer; later she learned they had to get off the highway so that a helicopter could land.

Sherry reached Sharon Starkey; Sharon called Lisa Linne. They had no information about where the boys had been taken, only that there had been an accident somewhere west of Albany. Beth Robinson, arriving home from work, had no idea that anything was wrong. She ate supper, then noticed the light blinking on the answering machine in Pete's study. The first message was from an ER nurse at the Albany Medical Center. "My world stopped," Beth says.

The frantic parents began piecing together scraps of information. Mark was OK, and Ryan had been taken about 70 miles away to Albany, where he was in critical, but stable, condition.

The hospital didn't have any information about Craig or Tyler, and they didn't know what had happened to Mark after he made the first phone call. The Linnes called directory assistance, and a supervisor helped them track down scores of hospital names and telephone numbers. They called and called, but no one could tell them anything. Around 7, Ron and Sherry learned that Mark was waiting for them at a small community hospital in Little Falls, New York, close to where the crash occurred. About the same time, the Starkeys had the answer they feared. Craig, who didn't have his wallet in his pocket, was listed as a John Doe at Bassett Healthcare in Cooperstown. Despite the trauma staff's heroic attempt to save him, he had died two hours later. Not long after that, a local police cruiser pulled into the Linnes' driveway and an officer got out, carrying the final, heartbreaking piece of the puzzle that ended the Linnes' desperate search. Tyler had been declared dead at the scene two hours before, but protocol dictated that they be told in person.

Joe Peptis called both families, explaining the circumstances of the accident. "We asked, 'What do we do now?' " Jeff Linne says. "And he said 'There's really nothing you can do up here. We know everything about the accident. We know the boys.'

"He was very nice," Jeff says. "He just got a sense of them and he expressed that to me. They were good boys. He seemed to understand."

At midnight, Pete Robinson arrived at Beth's brother's home in northern Massachusetts. His plan was to leave Sarah there and continue on to Albany alone. But his sister Ellen had driven in from New Hampshire and was waiting for him. "I'm going with you," she announced. It was 3 a.m. when they arrived at Albany Medical Center. Pete's brother, Jim, was already on the scene.

When Beth arrived on the first flight into Albany the next morning, she joined her family and was updated about the horrifying damage to her son's body. Ryan had a broken clavicle and shoulder blade, four broken ribs, a lacerated spleen, and a ruptured bladder. His pelvis was broken in three places, both lungs were collapsed, he was on a ventilator, and there was a gaping wound at his knee with detached ligaments and tendons. Most critical of all, he had suffered a serious head injury. It had taken nearly nine dramatic hours in the ER and in surgery before Ryan was stable enough to be moved into the pediatric I.C.U. That's where he was when Beth arrived—alive, but in a drug-induced coma with a cranial probe monitoring the swelling in his brain.

Mid-morning, Pete was called out of the I.C.U. and into a nearby hall. There, with hugs and tears, he met Sherry and Ron Fischer for the first time. The couple had driven all night to reach Mark at Little Falls Hospital. "We arrived at five in the morning, and he was standing straight up in the emergency room with nothing on but a pair of shorts," Sherry says. "He looked at us and said 'We have to go see Ryan.' " So they found him some shoes and a jacket, and drove another hour to Albany.

"We tried to prepare Mark for the worst," Pete recalls. Ryan was alive, but he was a mass of tubes, monitors, bandages, and wounds. "When he got in there, he said, 'Ryan, man, you look great!'" Then he stood at Ryan's bedside, talking to the inert form of his high school bodyguard, urging him to fight. "We drew such strength from him," says Pete.

The Fischers stayed in upstate New York until Sunday Joe Peptis spent time with them, taking them to the Cash site and to the wreck itself to collect the boys' personal effects. Then they went back to Ohio, and to the immense sadness of a whole community.

Jeff Radloff, the physics teacher at Milford High School, remembers standing, stunned, in front of |his house as a student delivered the news. Four boys from Milford had been in a terrible accident in New York, and the four names landed like hard blows: he knew every one. "It was a shock," he says. "And it's still a shock."

Radloff and others used the school's "phone chain" and called everyone who knew the boys. People wrote cards, letters, and e-mails for Ryan, and a teacher took a detour from her vacation to drive to Albany and deliver the greetings to the hospital. Even though it was summer break, the school arranged to bring in counselors for students. Teenage traffic deaths and injuries are too common; it was only June, and the Cincinnati Enquirer was reporting that there had already been at least 21 local teenagers killed in crashes in 2004. But being a fact of life doesn't make it any easier. Teachers, struggling to help their students cope, were devastated.

"I'm not saying it's like being a parent and losing a child," says Radloff. "But the kids we have in class are our children for a year or two. We are family here." Like a father facing an empty chair at the dinner table, everyday Radloff looks across his classroom and remembers where Craig and Tyler sat. "It's still hard," he says.

The staff at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship, where Tyler, his parents, and his brother were members, set up 500 chairs for Tyler's memorial service, then 50 more, then watched the church continue to fill. There was art and music by Tyler everywhere, his mother sang and his father spoke, and the family stood in line for two and a half hours as people stopped to pay their respects. At Milford First United Methodist, the Starkeys' church, the crowd spilled out onto Main Street. The high school choir sang, and Craig's teachers and friends shared their memories of Craig.

Mark was prepared to speak, too. "Knowing that it was going to be difficult, I made myself notecards," he says. "I'm a pretty good speaker. [But] halfway through notecard number one of, like, five, I couldn't even spit out the words." After the memorial services. Mark says, "I just insulated myself from a lot of it and chilled." But he took it upon himself to mow the Robinson's lawn during their long stay in New York.

"He said it was his therapy," Pete recalls. "Doing Ryan's chores."

Ryan spent five perilous days in a coma while the swelling in his brain subsided. When the sedation pump was finally shut off, the Robinsons were told that Ryan would soon "start to emerge." But no one told them what that meant, exactly. "Piecemeal, we began to learn," Beth says.

Still basically unconscious, Ryan thrashed and struggled wildly. Grandmotherly volunteers generally monitor children under such circumstances, but that wasn't going to work with a "child" Ryan's size and strength. So his parents pulled 18-hour shifts at his bedside to keep him from yanking out his tubes and sensors. When he first attempted to talk, he could only repeat numbers over and over, like a computer trying to re-boot. At first he could only see from one eye; then his vision of everything was turned 180 degrees, like a funhouse room turned on its side.

Ryan was in the I.C.U. for two weeks, followed by two and a half weeks in the trauma ward. He was treated by an army of specialists, each leading a platoon of young doctors on rounds. When he was still in I.C.U., a nurse had told the Robinsons that with this kind of a head injury they didn't need to worry about him getting worse: he'd improve, or he'd stay the same. And so at each juncture, Beth and Pete would try to read what they could into the symptoms and into the doctors' reactions. How would his life be redefined if he was like this forever?

During their month-plus stay in Albany, Pete and Beth rarely left the hospital, sleeping in the intensive care ward for two weeks and virtually functioning as part of Ryan's nursing team. It was emotionally and physically exhausting, made bearable by the kindness of the staff and volunteers, by Ryan's constant improvement, and by cards and letters from friends. At Hixson, the de- sign and engineering firm where Beth works, colleagues sent around e-mails to keep everyone informed about Ryan's progress; staff at Playhouse in the Park, where Pete had been public relations director for 13 years, e-mailed his friends in the arts community.

"People felt so bad that we were so far from home," says Beth. "They let us know that we weren't alone. We recognized that we were part of a community. There were people praying for us all over the globe."

Ryan has no memory of his first two weeks in the Albany hospital. He says that he remembers driving through upstate New York, then waking up in a strange room with the walls covered in cards and letters. "I thought, 'I should be in the truck with Tyler and Craig and Mark,' " he recalls. "I was just in the truck." He asked his parents what happened and where his friends were. When Pete told him that Craig and Tyler were "being taken care of in a better place," he understood.

A month after the accident, Ryan, flat on his back, made the 12-hour ambulance trip from Albany to the Drake Center in Cincinnati. He spent two weeks at Drake, in physical rehab—"all upper body work," he explains. There was more surgery, then on August 6 he came home on a stretcher to a hospital bed set up in the family's dining room. He had an external stabilizing rod bolted to each side of his pelvis.

In September, when the pelvic stabilizer came off, he was able to begin more comprehensive therapy. The first time he sat at the leg press, he was only able to press 50 pounds. "Before the accident, I could do 500," he says. The physical therapy—which plenty of people find excruciating—didn't bother him at all; it reminded him of training for football. But the accident had left him with a stutter. "Sometimes at night I'd worry: What if I can't talk again?" he says. "But I'd think, well, what can I do to help myself with this?" He suggested to his parents that he'd like to try speech therapy.

He worked hard at it, and now the stutter has faded to nothing more than a thoughtful pause in the conversation.

By late November, he was back working his part-time job at Blockbuster. In January, he started taking classes at U.C.'s Clermont campus. If you saw him working out in the gym today, you could not fathom what he's been through.

"When I see old friends, they're amazed at how well I look," he says. "At work, they didn't expect me back for a year." He says that he is astounded at what happened to him and his friends, and at what his family has done for him. "I've become closer to my parents," he says. "They were there for me and I want to pay them back. And I'm closer to Craig and Tyler and Mark's parents."

In the aftermath, the four families, who barely knew one another a year ago, have become friends. When the Fischers, the Linnes, or the Starkeys talk about Ryan's remarkable progress, they're as grateful as if he were their own child. When the Robinsons, the Starkeys, or the Linnes talk about Mark's senior year, they're as proud and protective as if he were their son, too. They seem to be ready to share in the future of the young men who lived, just as they share the memories of the ones who died.

What they don't share is the blame, because they have decided there is none. Pete Robinson describes the accident simply as "an error of judgment on the part of an inexperienced driver." He says that he is "at peace with the fact that it could have been any of the boys."

"Accidents happen," says Jeff Linne. "All four families are similar in that respect. [We] don't have anger. It's hard enough to miss Tyler. To be angry would make it unbearable."

Mark is still processing what happened, but he feels confident about the "why." "I have since taken physics class and I understand the physics of what we did. A completely packed back of the truck: it was a very top-heavy car. Craig just over-steered. "It happened," he says firmly, "because of physics."

Pamela Esposito-Bidwell, the nurse who was first on the scene, has kept in touch with the Fischers. She wants to know how Mark and Ryan are doing, and she's made a point of learning all she can about Tyler and Craig. She says that she's still struggling to get past the horror of that awful afternoon. Soon after the accident, she and her colleague got together and burned items of clothing they'd worn at the accident, hoping their ritual might put the worst of the memories to rest. Still, she says, "I think about it every day."

What she did that day on 1-90 had nothing to do with being a psychiatric nurse. "My whole role was to be a mother, nothing else," she says. "I would hope that someone would do the same for me and my kid."

The accident has stayed with Joe Peptis, too, "I was in a shoot-out one time, but this has affected me more than anything else in my career," he says. "I felt so sorry for the families. You could tell these kids were great. They were going somewhere."

After so many months, the permanence of the loss has sunk into the community. At Milford High School, students, faculty, and parents are planning an outdoor classroom as a memorial to Craig and Tyler—a place where teachers can take classes to study nature, draw, write, or just talk. For the families, it's still a day-by-day proposition. "It comes in waves," says Pete Robinson. Once, months after, simply pumping gas brought back the hellish night he drove from Maine to Albany, not knowing if Ryan would be alive when he arrived.

For the Linnes, there is the comfort of faith. "Tyler had received Christ and we know we'll see him again," says Lisa.

"Knowing that has an element of peace in it," says her husband. "But it doesn't change the grief."

Butch Starkey finds comfort and delight in reading his son's journal with its bold title—The Book of Craig. But he knows why Sharon involuntarily moans each morning before she gets out of bed. "It can be challenging to feel powerless to take away the pain," he says. "But Craig's spirit was 'Seize the Day.' So...you just move forward."

Today, if you happen to meet Mark Fischer when he's sitting down, the first thing you notice is that he doesn't so much stand up as unfurl, getting taller and taller before your eyes. Ron Fischer says that his son has grown a lot in the past year; the little guy that Ryan Robinson used to bodyguard is now 6'2". Ron says that as a father, he has protected himself from thoughts of "what if?" "For me, seeing Mark in the hospital, getting a hug... I put the rest of it behind me," he says. "What would it have been like if it had been Mark? I don't even go there."

His wife doesn't have that power of emotional self-preservation. She thinks about it all too often. "Two boys died. Ryan came close. And Mark has been changed forever," she says. "I want there to be a lesson I can understand, a reason. It just doesn't make any sense."

But most of all, she says, "I just want them all back. Laughing and driving to Maine."

Originally published in the April 2005 issue.
Illustration by Maria Rendon

A Very Cold Case

John Boertlein — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:00:00 GMT

On the wall of the main auditorium at the Cincinnati Police Academy in Lower Price Hill, a line of plaques depicts a morbid fraternity. Portraits of officers slain in the line of duty cast watchful eyes over the new recruits as they prepare to take their places in the thin blue line. In 1981, when I entered the academy, the display featured photographs. Our instructors explained the simple purpose behind the photos: Study the facts surrounding each officer’s death, we were told. Learn from these tragedies.

Back then, the first photo in the lineup was of a handsome young man with dark hair topped with a white police cap. His face bears an affable smile under kind brown eyes open wide with apparent anticipation. His name is Donald Martin. As a young recruit, I found Martin’s photograph far more disturbing than any of the others. Our instructors explained the details of each officer’s slaying and the conclusion of each case; only Martin’s murder was unsolved. It stayed that way until last year.

In February 2005, two homicide detectives pulled the Martin file from cold-case storage. There are, of course, remarkable forensic tools not available to law enforcement in 1961 that sometimes help investigators solve cold cases today. But this 44-year-old mystery did not give up its secrets that easily. So the officers took a journey into the past, recreating a murder scene that has long since disappeared, retracing the footsteps (and missteps) of a dormant investigation, and probing a family’s dark history. In the end, they solved the murder of Donald Martin—a crime committed before they were born.

On the evening of March 10, 1961, patrolman Donald Martin was excited when he reported to work. Life was changing for the 29-year-old west sider. That winter, Martin and his wife, Gail, had applied to become adoptive parents through the Protestant Orphan Home. Now the two had great news: They were getting a baby.

Adding a child to the family would require a larger car, which is why Martin asked his supervisor, Sergeant Hike Bogosian, if he could visit some of the car lots on his beat if the night proved quiet. Sergeant Bogosian gave his permission. He knew that Martin’s presence on the neighborhood’s car lots meant he’d be doing extra security checks at the same time—all the better for local businesses. Martin’s beat was the Pendleton neighborhood, which lies along Reading Road northeast of downtown. Back then, I-71 was nonexistent, railroad tracks ran where the expressway stands today, and Reading Road was a major thoroughfare into the city. It was a good place to have an upscale auto dealership, and one of the businesses located there was Downtown Lincoln-Mercury.

At around 3 a.m., Martin notified the police dispatcher from his in-car radio that he was out of the cruiser checking the southern end of Reading Road near downtown. Today there’s a Staples office supply store and the I-471 entrance ramp on the east side of the road; in 1961 the block held the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) building at 721 Reading, the Lincoln-

Mercury dealership at 715, and a parking lot in between. That’s where the mystery began.

Just minutes after Martin’s call to the dispatcher, a carload of young men, returning home from a night of gambling in Newport, witnessed an event that would haunt them for years. “We were in my friend’s car. I was on the passenger side in the back when we heard a couple of shots, two or three, I don’t remember,” says Harold Stiver, one of the witnesses. “I remember the guy standing behind the officer when I first spotted him. The officer had his hands up in the air like he was begging for his life, and the guy lowered the gun at full arm’s length, point blank range, and shot him.”

Shocked, the young men turned the car around to help the fallen patrolman. “[The suspect] fired a shot toward us that went through the back window of a car close to where we were,” Stiver remembers. “I jumped out and flagged down a police car that was coming by.”

According to one of the officers on the scene, Martin muttered a few words, but the only thing the officer could understand was “I’ve had it.” Martin was admitted to General Hospital (now University Hospital) with multiple gunshot wounds at 3:19 a.m. and rushed into surgery. At 5 a.m., almost two hours into the operation, the surgeon pronounced Donald Martin dead.

Harold Stiver, now 69, retired, and living in Florida, still pities the police officer he saw brutally murdered so long ago. “It wasn’t like it was a gunfight or anything,” he says. “It was cold-blooded.”

Donald Martin was born in Kentucky on May 4, 1931, to Claude and Allie Martin. He attended the Ohio Mechanics Institute, then enlisted in the Army in 1948. He served in the 1st Cavalry Division in Tokyo, followed by 12 months of combat duty in Korea, earning the rank of corporal, the Korean Service Medal, and three Bronze Stars. Discharge came in 1952, and four years later he became Patrolman Don Martin. According to his application to join the police department, he was a shade under six feet and a shade over 200 pounds, and he enjoyed baseball, swimming, reading, and “working around the house.” Martin found his calling with the police department. “He was just a great, clean-cut guy, a real team worker who always got the job done with no excuses,” says 86-year-old Hike Bogosian, who was Martin’s immediate supervisor. “Don ran a tough beat [and] he was a good policeman. You wished you would have had eight or ten like him.”

Don and Gail Martin married in 1954 and bought a home on Foley Road, a quiet Price Hill street. By the spring of 1961, Gail had resigned her job—she was secretary to Chief of Detectives Lieutenant Colonel Henry Sandman—in anticipation of becoming a full-time mother.

The handsome young officer had endeared himself to neighbors. “He was king of the neighborhood,” says Bob Ellerman, then the Martins’ 8-year-old neighbor. “He always had a smile on his face; he’d take the time to do things like throw a ball with us, and he was always playing pranks on us. I remember how excited he was to be adopting a baby. He’d shown us kids the nursery he and his wife had prepared.”

Martin appeared on the Ellermans’ front porch before leaving for work on March 10. “He said he had good news,” says Gene Ellerman, Bob’s father. “He said ‘We’re bringing the baby home next week.’” The elder Ellerman offered congratulations and suggested they have a drink to celebrate. “No,” Ellerman says Martin told him, “I have to work tonight, but I’ll have a Coke.” It was the last time the Ellerman family saw him alive.

By sunrise on March 11, teams of officers were combing every inch of the car dealership and surrounding area for clues. The department poured every available resource into the investigation, and scores of off-duty officers joined in. The lot where the killing occurred yielded evidence of a violent struggle between Martin and his assailant. A copper Cincinnati Police uniform button, torn from the officer’s jacket, was found where police believed the confrontation began. Near it was an ordinary white button, assumed to be the perpetrator’s. There was a red thread hanging from it—a clue that eventually pointed to the gunman’s escape route. Based on the witnesses’ account, the location of the torn-away buttons, and the spot where Martin was found, investigators surmised Martin encountered the perpetrator on the car lot. A struggle ensued and the officer was somehow disarmed and shot three times with his own revolver. Martin was trying to make it to his vehicle to call for help when he was shot again in the back, then finally in the head behind his left ear.

Northwest of the scene in Mt. Auburn, on a street made up mostly of five-story apartment buildings, the big break seemed to come. In the alley behind 542 Dandridge, a patrolman spotted the butt end of Martin’s revolver sticking out of a garbage can. Detectives converged on the alley. Going through more garbage cans, they found a gray jacket and a red and white flannel shirt wrapped in a white pillowcase. The shirt was minus one white button. “When we find the owner of the shirt and jacket,” Chief of Detectives Henry Sandman told reporters, “we’ll have the killer.”

Police followed up on scores of tips and clues. Investigators checked the tags in the shirt and pillowcase, trying to narrow the search to patrons of a specific dry cleaner or clothing store, but that proved fruitless. An FBI analysis of hairs found in the shirt pocket only confused matters. The FBI said the hairs belonged to an African-American but the car full of witnesses clearly described a white suspect. Police flooded the city with flyers containing information on the crime and photographs of the killer’s jacket and shirt in hopes a citizen could match the clothing to an individual. Nothing significant came to light.

Martin’s funeral was held at Concordia Lutheran Church at 1524 Race St. in Over-the-Rhine on March 14, 1961. The Times Star quoted the eulogy offered by the Reverend Arthur Scheidt. “This was no monster who committed this crime,” he said. “It was a man. One of us here might be a friend or relative of the man who stooped so low as to commit this crime, which so tragically ended the life of Don Martin.” His tribute might have been interpreted as an entreaty for one of those friends or relatives to come forward with information. But no one did.

Days turned into months and, eventually, to years. Lt. Colonel Sandman even sought help from true-crime magazines—one way to reach crime-curious citizens back in the days before television shows like America’s Most Wanted. In the August 1963 issue of True Detective Magazine, Sandman is quoted as saying, “The Patrolman Donald Martin case is over two years old. Hundreds of leads have been followed without success. This case, like all other unsolved murders, will remain active and any new leads will be vigorously pursued. The best hope for the apprehension of Patrolman Martin’s killer is some information not yet revealed to our police department.” He then asked the magazine’s readers for any leads or information they could provide.

In 1965, the Martin killing officially became a cold case when records from the investigation were moved into the file catacombs locked deep in the basement of Cincinnati Police District Four in North Avondale. But even though the file was out of sight, the murder took on a life of its own, achieving folklore status within the department, with speculation and stories passed from generation to generation.

The most persistent of these was that the killer was a criminal named Frank Murph. The theory was born in April 1961, when an anonymous source mailed a newspaper article from the Cincinnati Enquirer with a note that suggested police look at Murph for the Martin murder. The article reported that Murph, 30, of Mt. Auburn, had been sentenced to nine months in the Workhouse and a $900 fine for violently resisting arrest when caught shoplifting from the Kroger store on Madison Road. One sentence near the end of the article got everyone’s attention: “Murph was arrested after a struggle in which he disarmed Patrolman Raymond Davis.”

Murph as a suspect must have seemed to make sense. He’d tried to disarm another officer and he lived in the neighborhood where Martin was shot. The story that circulated among officers was that Murph was black, but light-skinned, which could have explained the discrepancy between the hair samples in the shirt pocket and the witnesses’ description.

In reality, Homicide Lieutenant Charles Martin (no relation to Donald) had investigated the Frank Murph lead after the tip came in, just a month after Martin’s murder. What he found was that Murph couldn’t have killed the officer because he was in jail when it happened. Lt. Martin noted his findings in the ever-growing mound of paperwork generated by the Martin case, but because he died suddenly in 1962, he wasn’t around to set people straight when Murph’s name was repeatedly added to the Martin murder legend. As a result, to most police officers, Frank Murph remained a likely suspect—especially after 1965, when he was shot and killed trying to disarm a police officer after a botched robbery in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

There were other theories and speculation about Donald Martin’s murder, but nothing was ever substantiated. The unsolved case left a frustrated hollowness in officers of every generation.

Detectives Jeff Schare and Kurt Ballman happened to be on duty in February 2005 when a small, fragile-looking woman with a disturbing story came into the homicide squad offices downtown. The woman’s health was failing and she told the detectives she needed to ease her conscience about something her former husband said four decades ago. She was a young bride back then—a newlywed who quickly discovered her husband to be a violent alcoholic. She learned to fear the man’s drunken rages, a fact that was magnified one night when, during a whiskey-induced rant, he told the tale of how he had “once shot a cop.”

Schare and Ballman listened intently as the woman related how her now-ex-husband said that he and an accomplice were breaking into a train car in a Cincinnati railroad yard when they were confronted by “a figure in the shadows.” Assuming they were caught by a police officer, both men pulled pistols and fired, shooting the victim. “If you ever tell anyone, I’ll fucking kill you!” he told the terrified woman. The threat had silenced her for years.

The woman said she’d been married in 1963, and she thought the incident had occurred a few years before that. Even though Donald Martin had died before they were born, the detectives had heard the stories about his murder and went in search of the file. “If God had a hand in it, if there was divine intervention, this was it,” says Ballman. “The first box we looked in was marked ‘miscellaneous homicides.’ The first file we pulled read ‘Patrolman Donald Martin Homicide.’”

Reviewing the details, it was quickly apparent that the aging woman’s confessional was not about the Martin case, and they could find no record of similar unsolved crimes in the area in the early 1960s. It appeared that the husband’s drunken tale was just that—a fabrication. But for detectives Schare and Ballman, it was the beginning of a new investigation—one they were going to own. “When we were going through the evidence,” recalls Ballman, “I pulled out Don’s uniform and police hat and realized it’s the same kind we wear today. I got teary-eyed. I knew we had to give it a shot.”

Schare and Ballman have a lot in common. Partners on the Homicide Squad for four years, both were born in May 1963, both graduated from the same police academy class 15 years ago, both hold advanced degrees from the University of Cincinnati, both are experts in the martial arts, and both “hate to lose,” says Schare. That’s where the similarities end. Kurt Ballman stands 6'5" with muscular girth to match. He has an easy smile and is not afraid to share his emotions. At 5'7", Jeff Schare is compact and wiry. Schare’s businesslike demeanor belies the nickname “Pee Wee” given to him by coworkers who’ve noticed a similarity in his appearance to Pee Wee Herman. For these detectives, “giving it a shot” meant starting from scratch. Simply going through the file alerted them to holes in the Martin lore. For one thing, they realized that despite the enduring stories, Frank Murph had been cleared four decades ago. “Once we destroyed the myth that it wasn’t the person everybody assumed,” says Schare, “it gave us the resolve to believe we could solve this case.”

They ignored hearsay; they also reconsidered previous leads that had been labeled dead ends. They examined every piece of evidence and every shred of documentation they could find and turned to forensic tools developed since the early 1960s. Still, a contemporary technique for recovering fingerprints on fabric failed to produce anything usable from Martin’s uniform jacket; even the “Super Glue” fingerprint process—in which vapors from the adhesive can reveal latent prints—failed to retrieve anything definitive from the murder weapon.

This was the first cold case either of them had ever worked, and it was frustrating. “One of the things about being a homicide detective [is] you always want to go to the scene,” Ballman says. “Being that the scene in this case is completely changed, we just couldn’t get a feel for it. That’s when Jeff got the idea to find retired detectives who had actually worked the case.”

Now 73 years old, Jerry Schimpf was a young detective working out of the Juvenile Bureau in 1962, almost a year after Don Martin’s murder. Schimpf had gone to a downtown diner where the mother of a rape suspect worked, hoping the suspect would show up. When a group of young men came in, Schimpf recognized the suspect among them, so he snuck out the back door, came in through the front, and sat down at the group’s table. He told the suspect he was under arrest. The suspect’s brother decided to play tough. “You think you can take all of us?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Schimpf responded, “but you better look under the table. You’re first.”

The kid glanced under the table and, noticing Schimpf’s pistol pointed in his direction, decided to change his tack. “Do you think you can help my brother out if I give you the name of a cop killer?”

Walter Baker Walls was the name Schimpf received. Walls, a 29-year-old who lived in Over-the-Rhine, had a long criminal record and a propensity for tough talk. He told one girlfriend that he was a member of Satan’s Disciples, a motorcycle gang with a bad reputation, and he bragged to friends and family that he had ties to organized crime in Newport.

Schimpf took Walls’s name to Lt. Colonel Sandman. Sandman in turn assigned Schimpf to work on the case with veteran homicide detective Will “Staggie” Stagenhorst. Stagenhorst and Schimpf traveled to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, where Walter Walls was serving time for a parole violation from a burglary conviction. Short and stocky with slicked-back black hair, Walls looked remarkably similar to the sketch that the police artist had drawn from the witnesses’ descriptions. So similar, in fact, the detective’s next move was to bring Stiver and his friends to the Ohio Penitentiary for a positive identification. “He sure looked like the guy,” Stiver remembers. “I just couldn’t be 100 percent sure.” The abandoned clothing also fit Walls, who persistently denied knowledge of the crime. Walls agreed to a lie detector test, which, according to Schimpf, he “failed miserably.” But that’s where the investigation stalled.

“Will Stagenhorst was convinced it was Walter Walls, but didn’t have enough back then to prove it,” says Schare. “They just didn’t have any solid physical evidence, the witnesses weren’t sure, and nobody in the Walls family would talk for fear of Walter.”

Time passed and no charges were brought. Jerry Schimpf left the police department in 1967 and became an attorney. Will Stagenhorst retired from police work in May 1965 and died in 1992. Ballman and Schare had the Martin case file, but the file Schimpf and Stagenhorst had kept on Walls was missing. They speculate that Stagenhorst took the Walls file with him for safekeeping when he retired. That wasn’t unusual at the time; often detectives felt protective of unsolved cases and wanted to hold onto their records so they would not be lost. Ironically, that’s exactly what Schare and Ballman think happened when Stagenhorst died—the file was probably discarded, and with it, the history of Walls as a suspect.

Today Jerry Schimpf can’t explain why Walter Walls’s name didn’t attach itself to the department’s chatter about the murder in the 1960s. “I think it kind of fell through the cracks when Staggie retired,” he says now. For years, apparently satisfied with the story of Frank Murph, no one knew to associate Walls with the case. The job for Schare and Ballman, then, was to find all the bits that “fell through the cracks” and piece together the puzzle.

Released from prison in 1963, Walter Baker Walls continued life on the fringes of the criminal justice system, including involvement in the 1969 murder of his wife, Ann Walls, at the hands of his girlfriend, Brenda Anders. He died of cancer in 2002, but not before leaving a legacy of threats and violence.

Schare and Ballman identified and tracked down anyone they could associate with the case—family members, friends, and any police officers and witnesses who might know anything. Their first interview was with Walter Walls’s daughter, Anna Dove. It was an auspicious beginning. When the detectives identified themselves and asked if they could talk with her, Dove immediately blurted out, “This isn’t about my dad killing a cop, is it?”

Dove told Schare and Ballman that she was a teenager when Brenda Anders shot her mother. Dove was there when it happened, and as a witness to the murder she became the object of her father’s wrath because he feared her testimony in court. Dove told Schare and Ballman of an encounter where Walls grabbed her, pulled her down an alley, held a handgun to her head and said, “I’ll fucking kill you just like I killed that cop!”

The two detectives worked their way through interviews with the rest of Walter Walls’s children and other family members. No longer cowed by the violent man, they recounted how, through the years, Walter often bragged that he had “killed a cop.” William Walls, Walter’s brother, told Ballman and Schare that Walter said he was trying to break into a car on a dealership lot to steal a battery when he was confronted by a police officer. According to William, Walter said that he was able to get the officer’s gun and shoot him. William also claimed that when it happened, Walter said he was with another Walls brother (Jesse, now deceased) and an associate nicknamed Cadillac Charlie. Walter later told William, “You won’t be seeing [Cadillac Charlie] anymore. He’s in a shallow grave.”

Eventually the two detectives tracked down Brenda Anders, Walter Walls’s one-time girlfriend, who had served eight years in the Ohio Women’s Reformatory in Marysville for the murder of Anna Walls. Anders recalled Walter talking about killing a cop and told them that he even pointed to a particular house on River Road, identifying it as the place where he murdered Cadillac Charlie because he was an eyewitness to the killing. Brenda and Walter parted ways when she was convicted of Anna Walls’s murder in 1969. Initially charged with complicity to murder, Walter avoided jail by agreeing to testify for the prosecution.

Schare says that in their conversation, Anders also insisted that Anna’s murder was another of Walter’s brutal acts. “This man just totally had me hypnotized or something,” she told the detective. “The psychiatrist said that he totally had me brainwashed.”

In the end, Ballman and Schare determined that Walls and two accomplices—his brother, Jesse James Walls, and Charles “Cadillac Charlie” Jillson—were responsible for the murder of Donald Martin during the early morning hours of March 11, 1961. Here’s the scenario they pieced together:

While Donald Martin worked his shift, brothers Walter and Jesse James Walls were hanging out at Ozzie’s, a bar at the corner of 13th Street and Reading Road. They were walking that night because neither had a car in running condition. To remedy the situation, Walter called his friend

Jillson, who lived in Covington, for a ride. Jillson picked up the brothers and Walter suggested driving around downtown to see if he could locate a suitable car battery to steal. The trio decided to try the Downtown Lincoln-Mercury dealership. While Walter got out of the car and headed onto the lot, Jesse stood on the sidewalk as a lookout and Cadillac Charlie waited in his car. As soon as Walter found a vehicle with a battery he wanted, he popped the hood and went to work removing it.

Around 3 a.m., Don Martin pulled his patrol car onto the Nabisco parking lot next door to Downtown Lincoln-Mercury. He walked up a ramp onto the car lot, browsing the available automobiles. When he saw Walter Walls tampering with a vehicle, he confronted him. Walls became violent and a fight ensued. Martin was wearing his uniform cross-draw holster with his issued .38 caliber revolver. In this close-quarter struggle, Martin had to reach across his abdomen to get at the firearm. But the pistol was already near Walls’s right hand, making it easy for him to seize. Martin assuredly felt the chill every cop fears—the criminal had the drop on him. Walls grabbed the gun and shot Martin in the chest. Wounded, Martin turned and ran for the police cruiser. Walls pursued, shooting him twice more in the back. The officer faltered, his knees buckled, and he began to fall to the ground. Walls caught up, shot him in the back again, and finally, execution style, delivered a fifth shot to the back of Martin’s head.

Right about then, Walls noticed a car on Reading Road slow down to get a view of the scene. Cadillac Charlie was nowhere to be found; he apparently left in a panic. Walls felt trapped and fired a shot at the witnesses’ vehicle, blowing the rear window out of a parked car. While the witnesses’ car slowly proceeded up Reading Road and turned around to go back to the fallen officer, Walter Walls ran across Reading Road and up some pedestrian steps to Dandridge Street, where he dumped his clothing and Martin’s revolver into trash cans. By now the four witnesses were at the scene, where they saw Jesse Walls, who had come over to look at the mortally wounded officer before running east through the Nabisco lot toward the railroad tracks.

In his official review of the Donald Martin homicide investigation, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters writes: “...based on the statement of the surviving eyewitness to the shooting, as well as statements made to family members of Walter Walls over the years, there is a reasonable likelihood of a conviction for aggravated murder against Walter Walls were this evidence presented to a jury.... Although we cannot bring criminal charges against Walls, I hope your investigation...brings some sense of closure to the family of Patrolman Martin.”

Gail Martin eventually remarried and left Cincinnati. Late in 2005, Police Chief Tom Streicher located her. “There’s no doubt that this helped her healing process after 40 years,” Streicher says. “It was obvious to me that this offered her some sense of comfort, that finally there was closure to a very difficult part of her life.” Schare and Ballman are still on the force and have received much-deserved recognition for closing the Martin case.

Donald Martin lies in a neatly manicured section of Arlington Memorial Gardens in Springfield Township. He is surrounded by his mother and other family in a plot beneath a mature black walnut tree, which was probably only a sapling when he was interred there. His headstone carries a brass disc bearing the seal of the Fraternal Order of Police, and upon it the motto “Justidus / Libertatum”—“Justice and Liberty.”

Were justice and liberty served too late for Don Martin? Perhaps not. Streicher says that Martin’s case suggests there can be value in examining a suspect’s family lore, even when a case has been unsolved for generations. This summer, he presented the Martin investigation to the Major City Chiefs Association as an example of a new approach to cold case investigation. “If it provides dividends somewhere around the country, then he really didn’t die in vain,” Streicher says. “Maybe it’s Don Martin’s contribution to policing and society some 40-plus years later.”

Kurt Ballman and Jeff Schare take pride in solving the 44-year-old murder of a brother officer. Their only regret is the lack of the final piece of the puzzle: a judge and jury announcing “guilty” face to face with Walter Baker Walls.

Originally published in the August 2006 issue.
Photograph courtesy of Cincinnati Police Department.