The Way We Were

Pete Rose: Playing Baseball Like Dad Did

William Powell — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

When we went to games at Crosley Field, we would always get dropped off down underneath the viaduct by Frisch’s, and my mom would pick us up there after the game to save all the traffic. It used to be a big deal for us to go see the Reds and Dodgers because Don Zimmer grew up in our neighborhood, and he backed up [Dodgers Hall of Famer] Pee Wee Reese.

Playing sports was all we had to do back in the ’40s and ’50s. All I did was just follow my dad around [“Big Pete” was a boxer and semipro football player]. He was always participating in sports. I was the waterboy on the football team, ballboy on the basketball team, and batboy on the baseball team. I don’t think I was anything more than the next generation of Pete Rose with bigger and better opportunity. I played the same way my dad did.

I played for Mr. Paul Nohr at Western Hills. He sent 12 guys to the Big Leagues. I was ineligible my senior year, so I played in the Dayton AA amateur league at the same time. I played my last game on Wednesday; I graduated on Friday; and I signed with the Reds on Saturday.

Any player would remember his first game. It was just a little bit more magnified for me because I was from Cincinnati. I wasn’t nervous until right about game time when the guy from the Enquirer came down and wanted to get a picture with me and my mom and dad. That kind of woke me up: Where am I? I’m at Crosley Field ready to take the field for the Reds. —Pete Rose, The Hit King; lynchpin of the Big Red Machine

Illustration by Kathryn Rathke.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Jerry Springer: The Cincinnati-ization of Jerry Springer

Kathy Y. Wilson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

I came to Cincinnati in 1969. I’d just passed the bar in Ohio and the firm was Frost & Jacobs. When Bobby died [he’d been working on Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign] they said, “Whenever you’re ready to practice law we’d like to have you.”

I immediately got involved in a campaign to lower the voting age to 19. I showed up for a meeting and I was the oldest person there at 25, and so they made me the chairman. That was my first campaign, and that’s how I became known in Cincinnati. In 1970 I decided to run for Senate since I was still ticked off about the war. [The primary took place the day after the Kent State tragedy.] I believe to this day I got the votes I did because of this horror right up the road.

Cincinnati was very conservative; I clearly was an aberration. But the people of Cincinnati have always been incredibly kind and voted for me—not always agreeing with me.

Best job I ever had was mayor. Back in the years when I was on city council, the other people were giants: Charlie Taft. Ted Berry. Bobbie Sterne. Bill Gradison. You had people whose names were synonymous with Cincinnati. I was clearly way too liberal for everyone. Tom Luken basically took me under his wing. He Cincinnati-ized me. The very first resolution I introduced was to ban Cincinnati residents from serving in the Vietnam War because it wasn’t Constitutional. I knew it wouldn’t pass but I was hoping for a lawsuit. —Jerry Springer, Former Mayor and Current Host of The Jerry Springer Show

Illustration by Kathryn Rathke.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Chef John Kinsella: The Last Days of Haute Cuisine

Donna Covrett — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

In the 1970s, Cincinnati was second only to New York in its concentration of fine dining restaurants. There were three five-star restaurants, nine four-star, and 11 three-star restaurants. There was a couple that lived in Boston that used to fly into Cincinnati regularly, stay for seven days and nights and dine out every night. Imagine that! They came here just to dine!

The five-star restaurants were all French. Maisonette was the haute cuisine, Pigall’s was more provincial, and our Gourmet Room was Parisian style. We supported each other. [Maisonette chef] Georges Haidon would come over to my restaurant and have dinner, I would go over to his and have dinner.

Of the 110 chefs in the city, at least 50 were European: German, Hungarian, Austrian, French, Italian, Irish, and English...different ethnic groups that took pride in their cuisine and wanted to show it off. Grammer’s brought in Janos Kiss. He used to make spaetzle by hand for Schnitzel Holstein. God, his chicken stock was so rich! I had better wiener schnitzel at Grammer’s than I did in Austria.

After 1979, things began to fall apart. Societal changes destroyed fine dining. We started to teach our families to eat with their hands instead of a knife and fork. The conservative moral majority turned people off. The hotels were not attracting conventions. The racial divisiveness . . . those sort of things hurt a city. Chicago, Louisville, Kansas City, and Indianapolis began to grow, recognizing that to be a great city you need great restaurants. We just became another city.

Three five-star restaurants! Nine four-star restaurants! My God, can you imagine if we had that now? —John Kinsella, Senior Chef Instructor, Midwest Culinary Institute, and former executive chef, The Gourmet Room

Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Chow Fun

Curtis Sittenfeld — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Before I ever ate masaman curry at Bangkok Bistro, or chicken tikka masala at Baba, or dolsot bibimbap at Riverside Korean Restaurant, there was the Szechwan Wok—my introduction not just to Chinese food, or even to Asian food, but to pretty much all non-American food. For years and years, through the ’80s and ’90s, my parents and siblings and I piled into our minivan and drove to Silverton to feast on the Szechwan Wok’s sesame noodles and potstickers, their egg foo young, shrimp in black bean sauce, moo shu pork, and spicy eggplant. We’d pass the tropical fish tank on the left as we entered the red-accented dining room and sat at a booth, or, as our family expanded, at round tables with lazy Susans, the better to lunge toward the food. My father would order for all of us. He and my mother started with the hot and sour soup—which I still think of as the soup for adults—and my sister Tiernan and I would have the egg drop. Just as at Skyline you must sometimes restrain yourself from wolfing down all the oyster crackers before the arrival of your chili, at the Szechwan Wok it was necessary to exercise willpower with those delicious fried twigs—Crackers? Chips? I’m still not sure—meant to be sprinkled in the soup. If my beloved paternal grandmother was in town visiting us, she’d order a scotch, and the waiter would bring it to her with a brightly-colored paper umbrella.

I’ve often heard the national decline in in-home cooking blamed for the breakdown of the modern family, or perhaps for the breakdown of society itself, but to me these meals out were always a big treat—a time when (no offense to my mother) we ate food a little more delicious than usual and behaved ourselves a little better than usual and experienced the recurring delight of reading on the paper placemats which animals we were according to the Chinese zodiac. (Born in 1975, I was a rabbit. “Luckiest of all signs, you are also talented and articulate,” the placemat told me, which brought me almost as much pleasure as knowing my younger brother P.G. was a rat.)

Our meals ended, of course, with fortune cookies, and sometimes when I got a really good fortune, I’d save it and tack it to my bulletin board at home, though I’m not sure that any came true. The Szechwan Wok closed in 2007, when the lovely people who ran the restaurant retired, and by then I was long gone from Cincinnati myself. So in a way, I feel like I never got to say goodbye. But here’s a fortune that would have been exactly right if I’d ever pulled it from one of those sweet, broken cookies: You will remember these meals very fondly.

Fueled by potstickers and egg foo yung, Curtis Sittenfeld grew up in Walnut Hills. She’s the author of Prep, The Man of My Dreams, and American Wife (one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2008).

Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Dharma & Me

Donna Covrett — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

To look at it now, moving into a yoga commune in 1974 was the act of an 18-year-old girl seeking a whole family. My own had splintered dramatically; both my parents had left the city, and I was on my own. My objective was similar: to leave Cincinnati and its stodgy, soporific temperament for art school and adventure and the bright lights of a big city. Anything to get away from my buttoned-down hometown.

But first, I needed money. Sharing an apartment near Mariemont with a girlfriend, I baked bread to sell from our tiny kitchen. No one talked about artisan bread back then, so at $3 a loaf (the grocery store variety cost less than a dollar) my target customer was a financially comfortable one—primarily the parents of my Indian Hill high school friends, who took pity on me when I showed up on their doorstep hawking misshapen bagels.

Marijuana was still affordable then, and much of my income went towards keeping myself and friends immobile on the couch listening to Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead. My roommate Paula had a more structured job, working for a group of people from Bloomington, Indiana, who’d moved to Cincinnati to reopen a historic restaurant called Mecklenburg Gardens. The Indiana crowd lived together, all 18 of them, in a big house in Clifton. They practiced yoga—something I was marginally familiar with thanks to WCET’s Lilias! Yoga and You—and they worked together at “Mecks.” I was fascinated by the stories Paula brought home about these enigmatic yogis. One day I was invited to a class, and my life changed forever.

The class was not yoga, as Americans know it today. To my novice eyes, the teacher merely sat cross-legged on a raised platform, the students seated randomly on the floor in front of him. In his late 20s, handsome, ripped beneath his snug orange T-shirt, he would silently scan the room, lock eyes with a student, they’d stare at each other for a few minutes, and then his gaze would move to another. Nothing else seemed to be happening. Or so I thought until one of the students started convulsively shaking, then somersaulted backwards. Backwards. What the hell? I had never seen the yoga lady on Channel 48 move like this. Whatever was going on, I knew it was a different sort of high. In a matter of months, I’d moved into the Sri Rudrananda Ashram.

Ashram is a Sanskrit word referring to a spiritual community, and that’s how we lived and worked as we struggled to integrate an ancient Eastern philosophy into our Queen City lives. As our group grew, we sought out successively larger homes—most notably, two mansions in North Avondale. Understandably, a yoga commune in the midst of the neighborhood made people suspicious. From the neighbors’ perspective, yoga meant a coven of hippies practicing secretive, paganistic rituals and doing yard work half naked (OK, so that much was true). Through hate mail, neighborhood consortiums, and zoning laws we were chased out of each mansion, finally settling into a large apartment building across from Mecklenburg Gardens.

If our lifestyle was an affront to many Cincinnatians, our food was not. By 1975, Mecklenburg Gardens (with the brilliant Rob Fogel as chef, and me turning out pastries) had been named a four-star restaurant. Still, the headlines we made most often were not gastronomical. The most sensational was when family members abducted our chef de cuisine for “deprogramming.” Twice.

Four years in the Sri Rudrananda Ashram—and Mecklenburg Gardens—were some of the most colorful moments in my life. My experiences there set the professional and personal course I follow today: I teach and practice yoga and earn my living in the world of food. And I learned an Oz-like lesson: The adventure and artistic life I sought was always right here—literally right under my nose. This city harbors plenty of countercultural experiences. Artisan bread, yoga, and half-naked gardening? That’s so Cincinnati.

Donna Covrett has been Cincinnati Magazine’s dining editor since 2005.

Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Nikki Giovanni: Growing Up in Lincoln Heights

Kathy Y. Wilson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

I first lived in Wyoming; we were renting there. Then we bought a home in Lincoln Heights on Jackson Street and we moved there for a long time, and then we bought a house on Congress Street. Lincoln Heights to me was a lovely place. When I was growing up it was a working-class community. I went to St. Simon’s and I walked to school every day, which I liked. We had Neal’s Grocery Store—he was a veteran—when we lived on Jackson Street. Directly facing our home was Green’s. It was a juke joint. They actually had a jukebox. They sold Cokes. Some other things that I didn’t understand were probably going on inside.

G.E. was needing engineers and they had imported black engineers. There was still segregation. These black engineers rented rooms in Lincoln Heights. It was the ’60s, so there were rooms.

We never had a high school. We could go to Wayne High in Lockland; our kids could also go to Woodward. We would walk from Lincoln Heights to Lockland to talent shows. The Isley Brothers used to win all of the contests. Everybody sang. We were black so everybody sang. My mother was a jazz person and I was the only person singing jazz.

I was a schoolteacher’s child. My mom taught at St. Simon’s and my dad taught seventh-grade math. It’s like being a preacher’s kid. I remember feeling incredibly safe. Even the crazy people knew my dad. The term I would use and I would use with great affection is: it was Southern. —Nikki Giovanni, Poet

Illustration by Kathryn Rathke.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Suzanne Farrell: Taking the Stage at Music Hall

Amy Knueven — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

In 1955, the Ballet Russe came to town. It was the first time I’d ever seen a professional ballet company, and I saw it from the stage! They needed a young dancer to play Clara in second act of The Nutcracker at Cincinnati’s Music Hall. Marian La Cour, a local teacher, suggested me for the role. I was to sit quietly on a little red velvet bench on the side for the whole act. The curtain went up, and I was in heaven. Alicia Alonso was the Sugar Plum Fairy, and after the performance I asked her for her autograph. She was very kind. Several years later, the Royal Ballet came to the Music Hall with their production of The Sleeping Beauty. They needed four mice to pull the wagon of the wicked fairy Carabosse, and I was chosen to don a gray leotard with a long tail. In March 1958, Marian La Cour was giving a demonstration with the Cincinnati Orchestra called “Introduction to the Art of Ballet,” and we danced on the apron of the Music Hall stage. I was one of 10 corps girls, with sparkling tutus and tiaras on our heads. On that huge old stage, looking out into the theater with its chandeliers, tiers, and boxes, I decided that I wanted to dance. —Suzanne Farrell, Ballerina and founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Illustration by Kathryn Rathke.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue.

Frank and Robin Wood: The Birth of WEBN

Amy Knueven — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Frank Wood: In the early in the days of ’EBN we had a lot of phony commercials for a fictitious company called Brute Force Cybernetics, which invented lots of strange products: The three-dimensional television, which was a TV mounted on a rail that went back and forth really fast. Or the portable hole.

Robin Wood: If you needed to disappear quickly you could pull the hole out of your pocket, lay it on the ground, and jump into it.

Frank: We’d run frogs for council. One of the most famous things we ever did was a parade—we’d broadcast a parade on April Fools’ Day. And it was a completely fictitious thing, but we’d describe the floats as they came down the street. It started in the morning with Rob’s show and it was hilarious. It got to be such a cult thing that by the third year, people started showing up on Hyde Park Square to watch it. And they would bring chairs and stuff to drink, and they would cheer the parade, even though they were just listening to it on the radio: There was nothing there. We call it the willing suspension of disbelief. They knew better, but they wanted to believe it. It was just funny. And people were like that then.

The ratings got huge in 1975, which coincided, by the way, with Rob taking over the Morning Show. It was a strange thing because there were no women on the radio then. No female personalities. FM listening developed first at night because in the early days, the only FM in the house was a stereo in the living room. The morning was the last to develop. And part of it was because nobody was much good in the morning, and part of it was because that wasn’t the habit, but gradually the habit caught up.

Robin: And FM converters started being added to car radios. There was finally something to listen to on FM, too. FM had been sort of a big wasteland before that. It was easy listening and classical, and it was very soft.

Frank: The radio industry pretty much all had FM stations, but they all put elevator music on them. They just used them to hold the license. They thought that it was going to catch on some day, but they didn’t spend any time or energy helping it. And we thought, _We don’t need no stinkin’ AM, so we came on and foundered around and figured it out. It was good timing, well executed.

Robin: But our father [Frank Wood Sr.], I think, did have some foresight to see that happening and when he bought the frequency, it was the last vacancy on the FM dial.

Frank: He got it for a filing fee.

Robin: Music sounded so much better on FM and he knew it because he was a big music fan. He loved all kinds of music—except rock.

Frank: My father wanted to make it jazz and classical music. And that’s what it was for the first year or two. But the third week it was on the air I started a show on Saturday nights that played sort of the new music that was around in 1967—that was when Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and The Blues Project and all sorts of things were hitting, and there was a new kind of music that wasn’t heard on Top 40 radio. So we waded into that and eventually that ate up the radio station. It was more than a business for a long time. It was on one side of the continental divide in Cincinnati. There was a major change in lifestyles and consumption patterns and we sort of landed right in the front of it. It was very Us vs. Them. It was big fun.

Robin: Jerry Springer used to be a guest three times a week on the Morning Show.

Frank: That was his first broadcast job.

Robin: Jerry would write one-minute commentaries, which were very thoughtful and funny.

Frank: The Springer Memorandum.

Robin: But he never got a key, so I’d have to run down three flights of stairs and let him in every morning. He’d call from the corner.

Frank: Jerry has never forgiven us for that. But you couldn’t have too many keys out there.

Robin: The beginning of the fireworks was really wonderful. They were for the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the station in 1977. My brother the pyromaniac thought “Let’s have a fireworks show. I wonder if someone would come.”

Frank: We thought we’d throw a birthday party, really to thank the listeners. There was a fireworks company here in Cincinnati, Rozzi, and they were one of the major fireworks companies but they’d never done a big show in their own hometown. We decided to do a big show, and then to try and synchronize it with music. We told the cops we were going to do it; they didn’t do anything. That first year, there was no police protection. Nothing. They just didn’t pay any attention to it. And probably a quarter of a million people showed up the first year. It was phenomenal. We had no idea what was going to show up. We were on a boat over on the Kentucky side and this crowd kept getting bigger and bigger. And the minute we looked at the crowd we thought, “Uh oh. We’re in this business now.” And the cops hated it for the first three or four years. The second or third year, the cops got on One Lytle Place and had a photographer taking a picture of Sodom and Gomorrah down there. And of course everything bad that people could do, they would take pictures of. They took a picture of people carrying a coffin full of beer. That was the symbol of how bad things were. But it was great. It meant that we had arrived.

Bill Cunningham: Tuning into the Teenage Heartbeat

Jonah Ogles — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

My mother forced me to listen to Stan Matlock on 55 KRC against my will and wishes. My mother loved Stan. She ruled the roost and she wanted to listen to Stan Matlock so that was what I listened to. And I learned that Stan was one hell of a radio personality, but I rebelled. I wanted rebellious characters, so I began listening to Jim Scott and Dusty Rhoads on 1360 WSAI. Those were the rebellious revolutionaries. When I came home from school, 1360 had on Jim Scott, Dusty Rhoads, and a guy named Ron Britain. Teenagers in the 1960s and early 1970s considered that to be cutting edge, serious radio. 1360 was the heartbeat of the teenager at the time. When you would go to a Frisch’s restaurant and drive around on a Friday night, every car had on the same station, so you didn’t miss a beat.—Bill Cunningham, host of The Big Show on WLW

Growing Up Bilker

Deborah Paul — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:00:00 GMT

With the exception of one vacation in Miami Beach and another in New York City, my childhood travels consisted of train trips from my home in Indianapolis to Cincinnati, where my mother was raised as the youngest of the three Bilker daughters and where her family remained. We boarded the James Whitcomb Riley at Union Station and gathered around the passenger car window to watch my father wave good-bye from an abandoned train trestle a few minutes from town.

Grandma (Jennie) Bilker’s large home was situated on a wooded hillside in Amberley Village. She always greeted me as “Debbie, dahling,” in a thick, eastern-European accent left over from her growing-up years in Austria-Hungary, and offered a chilled Vernors Ginger Ale in a tall glass bottle. Grandpa passed away when I was around 5, but I knew the legacy of Bilker Foods, a fashionable market that moved to Roselawn from its original Avondale location in 1952. By the time I was old enough to visit, the business was run by my mother’s sister, Aunt Rose, and her husband, Uncle Nat.

Provisions were plentiful in the Bilker kitchen: Their multi-course meals—which always included a bibb lettuce salad dressed with oil and vinegar poured from glass decanters, a dish of fruit, and freshly baked dessert—were fancier than I was served at home. And everything in the house, from the formal furnishings to the painted concrete floor in the basement, shone.

When Grandma wasn’t setting up play dates I didn’t want with girls I didn’t know, I was allowed to tag along with Aunt Rose to Bilker’s. There, I would roam the aisles and admire the many imported and unfamiliar items on the shelves. Aunt Rose placed small notes in a flowing script beside favorite items, suggesting how shoppers might best enjoy the gourmet foodstuffs. “Try this with toast rounds and shredded egg!” she might offer alongside a jar of fine caviar, or “This tuna is packed in water! Try it on salad.” I’m only sorry she didn’t live to see the current obsession with cuisine; Aunt Rose was a foodie before foodies were all the rage.

On those visits I could select whatever caught my fancy to take home, and Aunt Rose accompanied me to the checkout lane, where the biscuits, cookies, and jams were “rung up,” free of charge. In later years, boxes would appear on my doorstep at home, filled with sweet marmalades and syrups, crisp wafers and rich dark chocolates.

The coolest place to visit was the small office, up a few steps in the northwest corner of the store. There, Aunt Rose and Uncle Nat could oversee bookwork and watch patrons on the other side of a glass partition. Being allowed in such a privileged space was magical; I wasn’t a shopper down there, but somebody “in charge.” Surely this was how royalty must have felt.

Grandma Bilker blazed the trail for working women in the early 1900s, Aunt Rose worked tirelessly her entire adult life, and my own mother met my father as she sliced salami behind the deli counter in the 1930s. These were sturdy, upright, self-sufficient women, role models for the generations beyond. The store, and every item on every shelf, was personal. This wasn’t just their livelihood; it was their life.

There were no Bilker boys to carry on the family name, so I bestowed the middle name to my older son. I always wanted to call him “Billy,” rather than his first name of Gabriel, but the moniker never stuck. All the Cincinnati Bilkers are gone—my entrepreneurial grandparents, the aunts, my beloved mother—but I remember them, each and every one, whenever I see a stack of French macarons, a display of trendy coconut water, a spicy exotic tea. Mom was right when she said Grandpa Bilker had foresight—they were all ahead of their time.

Deborah Paul still lives in Indianapolis. As executive vice president and editorial director of Emmis
Communications, she continues to visit Cincinnati to look in on the action at this magazine.

Originally published in the Octbober 2011 issue.