OHIO'S HOTTEST ATTRACTION

Every kid is enamored by firefighters. They are strong, brave and helpful. Many are regarded as heroes.

The Cincinnati fire department led the nation in firefighting with many firsts, most notably, the payment of full-time employees in early 1853. This was a huge deal because previously, private volunteer groups were paid for their service by property owners or insurance companies. This posed a serious problem because a rule of first come gets paid led to strong-arm competition for the mere right to fight the fire. There were times when multiple groups of men would duke it out in the streets for this right while the fire raged.  

The invention of the steam-pumper eliminated the bucket line. Bucket lines were men gathered to create a human chain from a water source to the fire passing buckets of water by hand. Once dumped, women and children would return the buckets to the water supply for refill. Horse-drawn steam-pumpers allowed several men to do the job of more than 100 people.

These stories and inventions, memorabilia, interactive educational aids and more are showcased at the Cincinnati Fire Museum, housed in a two story brick firehouse built more than 100 years ago in 1907. Its three bay double wood doors with glass windows open to a fascinating adventure of visual delights and hands-on learning and fun.

The museum has a very well-thought-out floor plan that is very spacious and flows through the history of firefighting. One of the museum's many gems is the city’s oldest surviving fire engine, an 1836 Hunneman hand-pumper! Other relics include an enormous 1808 fire drum, leather fire buckets and a variety of helmets that have obviously seen serious action. But the kids will fight for two things for sure; the repeated trips down the fire pole and a modern Emergency-One fire engine cab complete with siren. The kids can ring the bell, steer the wheel and flash the lights to their hearts’ content.

The experiential offerings of the museum coupled with authentic displays and thoughtful scenes depict the history of Cincinnati firefighting from frontier days to modern times. It features interactive computers teaching about topics including chemical spills, bomb squads and the jaws of life. Larger groups and school tours get a whole different level of simulation that requires forming a bucket line and being rescued from a bedroom window by a firefighter.

A Taste of Our Favorite Ohio
HOLY TOLEDO THAT’S GOOD

Having explored Ohio for years covering the roads less traveled, I get hungry. Any road warrior knows that discovering something mm-mmm good is a big part of the traveling experience.

When I lived in Toledo for several years, I had many opportunities to eat Hungarian food but never did …until a recent swing through town. While living there, I had a friend who had a friend on the Hungarian side of town. My friend would rave about the out-of-this-world food they’d serve and invited me to come more than once. For whatever reason, I always seemed to decline the invitations.

When my sister lived there for brief time, she and my future wife frequented a well-known Hungarian eatery. Oh how they’d rave about what they ordered EVERY TIME!

Finally, on a whim, while traveling through Toledo, I needed a bite to eat. The thought came to mind so I punched into the GPS – Tony Packo’s.

Guess what? Tony Packo’s has the best darn Hungarian food in Ohio!

Now, I’m no expert on Hungarian food and couldn’t tell you the last time I had it. But let me say this. I had the famous Tony Packo’s hot dog. Best ever! I had stuffed cabbage. Best ever! I had cucumber – no make that CREAMY cucumber salad. Delicious! I also smelled someone’s slow cooked roast beef. Best smelling roast beef ever.

Apparently their secret is not in the sauce. IT’S EVERYWHERE. What I mean is Barack Obama knew to eat there. So did Bill and Hillary Clinton, President Bush, and a number of actors and other well-known people. How do I know this? I saw their buns there!

That’s right. Their buns. I guess the story goes that Burt Reynolds (actor) was in town back in the 70’s and needed a bite to eat and ended up there. Tony Packo’s daughter Nancy asked for his autograph so Burt put pen to bun starting a tradition that continues today. Now hundreds of autographed buns (I don’t think they are real buns but look like it) are showcased.

One bun was even signed in outer space! Astronaut Donald Thomas did the honor on a space shuttle mission.

To enjoy the worldly experience of this charming eatery that's been serving up the best darn Hungarian food in Ohio and beyond since 1932, visit the original location at 1902 Front Street in downtown Toledo, Ohio. They are open Monday – Thursday from 11am to 10pm, Friday and Saturday from 11am to 11pm and Sunday from 12pm to 9pm. The restaurant phone number is 419-691-6054. To learn more, see www.tonypackos.com.

By the taste buds of Frank R. Satullo, the OhioTraveler

Return to Top

THE STORY BOX PROJECT

The Ohio State University’s Multicultural Center, in partnership with Academic-Storyteller in Residence, Kevin Cordi, has launched an international effort to celebrate the stories of our communities, nation, and world called The Story Box Project.    

The Story Box Project currently consists of more than 35 organizations and centers in and around Columbus, Ohio along with other locations including Singapore and Nicaragua.  Many organizations are still finalizing their commitments as well. Stories will be collected at these locations from January through June 2009. This effort will culminate with a two-day Storytelling Festival on June 3^rd and 4^th 2009.   In June, each location’s Storybox is shipped around the world returning one year later to Columbus. 

The project was born in 1995 when Cordi, a nationally known Professional Storyteller, met a friend in Brazil who said, “I wish we could share our stories in some way but there are too many miles between us.”  Cordi took the idea to his high school storytelling troupe where he served for 11 years as, according to the National Storytelling Network, “the first full time high school teacher in the country.”   He and his students created the Story Box.   

MCC Director and Assistant Vice President for Student Life Rebecca Nelson states, “When I first heard about the Story Box project, I knew that this could be a powerful leadership and community development tool for our students at OSU.  Individual and community-wide narratives are a vital part of framing what is important to us, and to helping students develop into leaders who can share and motivate others around their visions for the future. The Multicultural Center is fortunate to have this unique year-long partnership with Kevin Cordi as we engage the campus in our programming theme: Transformation – What’s Your Story.  

“At this time of giving, we need to remember the value of our stories, both our own and in our community,” said Cordi.   “We hope people will both contribute a story and decide that their organization or place of business will serve as a Story Box location.” 

Christa Porter, who serves as an Intercultural Specialist adds, “The StoryBox is a great addition to our lineup of intercultural programming this year.  At the MCC, we strive to build community, promote social justice, contribute to the academic experience as well as facilitate individual transformation in students we serve and the greater OSU community.  Telling stories and hearing one another’s experience allows us to break the barriers that all too often distance us from each other.”  

The Story Box defines story as any means to share narrative.  Past contributions have included:  DVDs, photographic images, small paintings, posters, MP3s, fiction and non-fiction. “I consider this global publishing.  Not only will hundreds and thousands of others read, listen, or view their work, but the Story Ambassadors will encourage others to share this work in an organized way,”   Cordi stated. 

People can find out more about The Story Box Project at http://kevincordi.com/storybox.htm.  A digital story detailing the Storybox can also be found on Kevin’s website http://kevincordi.com/storybox-av.html  where educators, community members, librarians, and school personnel have shared their own stories.  Individuals can host a Story Box by sending an email to Kevin at kcteller@sbcglobal.net  or calling 614-272-6153.  

Story Ambassadors will collect stories and serve as hosts for the“Drop Off” location for The Story Box Project.  In the month of May each Story Box location will swap with another location to celebrate the new stories.  Throughout the year, The Multicultural Center will present internationally known storytellers in free public performances and workshops designed for community participation.   Details are on their site at http://mcc.osu.edu/programs-and-initiatives/storybox-project.  

People can send a physical copy of the stor(ies) or e-mail a copy to kcteller@sbcglobal.net to be placed in one of the boxes. People may photocopy stories, but the originals must remain in the box.  Imagine such a treasure from all over the country arriving in your city or country to share.

After The Storytelling Festival in June, the Story Boxes will travel around the world, including Northern Ireland, Singapore, Nicaragua, and Japan. The Story Boxes will return one year later and the celebration will begin again.

“Since 1995, people have created their own Story Box.   Once people have the Story Box, they continue to have one.  Each place ignites a new idea that is passed onward.  Three storytellers have adapted The Story Box to their work; I can hardly wait how this project will grow after this concerted work.   We hope that it becomes a model for the nation and the world to share their stories,” the flame has already started, stated Cordi.    

A full list with contacts will be available on The Multicultural Center’s website by January 15, 2009.

Return to Top

FREE FOR ALL!

Understanding many people don't have the discretionary income they may have had as little as a year ago, OhioTraveler.com's focus is on admission-FREE tourism. Most sections of OhioTraveler.com feature places with FREE ADMISSION at the very top of menu options. Find your free fun now:

Videos

Festivals & Events

QUANTRILL'S RAIDERS

Eastern Ohio has produced an inordinate number of famous people making exceptional contributions to every facet of society—probably more than any like-sized geographical area in the country.  

Nearly all have come from rural areas or small towns, some remote and expunged from modern maps. But the people of their home regions have never forgotten them, and their pride is preserved even though association is often little more than geography. 

However, there are exceptions. Dover, Ohio is located in the middle of this exemplar region, and they have rights to the famous, but also the infamous—perhaps notorious is a better characterization—and no one in Dover expresses an overt smugness with this particular relationship.  

It’s understandable that there is little celebration in claiming someone portrayed as the “bloodiest man in the annuls of America.” Still, there is a fascination with this man whose name is better known than the most renowned war-time commanders coexisting during the nation’s ultimate military ordeal.   

Over a period of time he was interred in two separate caskets in Dover’s Fourth Street Cemetery, but even with this bizarre arrangement, his remains are not all there. Indeed, it is said by many that William Clark Quantrill was never all there.  

History books convey an impression that Quantrill was a hardened veteran who gained followers due to his wartime experience and martial acumen, when in fact he was little more than a boy—although one endowed with extraordinary leadership ability.  

The oldest of eight children, Quantrill was only seventeen when he left his Dover home in 1854. His parents had swarmed attention on him, but apparently not the kind that cultivates ideal citizenship. His hard-drinking father beat him while his mother doted on him.  

Although psychiatric problems were not then as quickly recognized as today, it was acknowledged early on that William would never be a poster boy for mental health. Although no mention is made of bed wetting or playing with fire, the third symptom of a psychopathic killer in the making—torture and killing of animals—was William Quantrill’s boyhood pastime.  

Modern psychiatry describes psychopaths as manipulators, risk takers, and narcissists. They lack empathy, and have a total absence of conscience—but are usually quite intelligent. It’s not insanity, but rather a character flaw described in more polite terms as an antisocial personality. History implies that Quantrill’s contemporaries deemed such a depiction laughably inadequate. 

In the most paradoxical of career choices, Quantrill began as a schoolteacher in Dover and then in Indiana and Illinois as he forged his way west on his first adventure.  

Occupational satisfaction eluded him from the beginning, and he dropped teaching in favor of gambling, but sparse winnings compelled him back to Dover before his twentieth birthday. It was his indulgent mother who convinced two friends to claim a plot of land in “free soil” Kansas for William, and allow him to repay the courtesy by laboring on their farms. No one foresaw this maneuver as precipitous to the legend of “Bloody Kansas” which was almost totally composed by the treacherous hand of William Clark Quantrill.  

The territory was a perfect bailiwick for someone of Quantill’s predisposition. Kansas and Missouri were split on slavery and skirmishes between factions escalated as the War Between the States heated up. Quantrill soon disposed of his farming obligations in favor of collecting bounty on runaway slaves. His most profitable scam was helping Jayhawkers (abolitionists) free slaves then recapturing them for the reward money. By 1860 he was wanted in Kansas for horse stealing, burglary, larceny and arson. He was never tried due to his escape to Missouri where he joined the Bushwhackers (Confederate guerillas).  

With allegiance to a cause that better excused the instincts of a modern-day terrorist, his band of guerillas rapidly grew. They ambushed federal troops, robbed the Union’s mail and murdered civilians while burning and pillaging their way through every anti-slavery community in their path. Eventually he was commissioned as a Captain in an authorized Missouri detachment, but always operated outside the official chain of command.  

Quantrill was described as about 5’ 9”with a Roman nose and sandy hair. He always wore a slouch hat and high-heeled boots to enhance his stature, but it was his reputation that made him a bigger-than-life hero to many southern sympathizers. Under his lead rode Frank and Jessie James and the Younger brothers who after the war continued their Quantrill-learned hit-and-run tactics to rob banks. As well as superior leadership he was a strategist of uncommon skills. So effective were his devises that Union forces never gained the upper hand over his mercenaries.  

His finest hour (in his mind) and the most despicable as seen by ethical citizens, was the August 1863 raid on Lawrence Kansas. In retaliation for a perceived Union crime against Confederate prisoners, Quantrill led more than four hundred guerillas with the intent of destroying the town. The strangest and most repulsive action resulted from his twisted, heretofore unspoken code that forbid harm to women—but forced them to watch as their husbands and sons were murdered.  

With an estimated two hundred killed and most of the town burned, retribution by the Union was swift and far reaching. Quantrill, never one to stand and fight, fled to Texas. Even some of his most hard-edged followers had been sickened by the slaughter in Lawrence and the Confederate command became disgusted and embarrassed by his atrocities. Texas authorities requested he leave. In the spring of 1864 he returned to Missouri, but there the rebels suffered one of their worst defeats. With resistance stronger and Quantrill having been declared an outlaw, he slipped away to Kentucky.

Organized Union troops had never come close to capturing him so they opted for a different tact. A man named Edwin Terrell—nearly as dastardly a wretch as Quantrill, on the premise that “it takes one to know one,” was authorized to hunt him down.  On May 10, 1865 Terrell’s small band caught up with Quantrill and a few of his men in Taylorsville, Kentucky. In a shootout Quantrill was struck by a bullet that lodged in his spine, instantly paralyzing him. He was taken to Louisville where he declined in agony for nearly a month before dying at the age of twenty-seven.  Fearing vandalism, his grave was disguised and left unmarked –which should have signaled the end to America’s most monstrous myth. It’s ironic that for years Quantrill’s name was spoken like a bad omen, but it was only after his death that the “raiders” designation was added—inserting new verve into the legacy and keeping it alive.   

Twenty- two years later Quantrill’s saga was further resuscitated with the treachery and deceit befitting the subject and all the miscreants involved. Quantrill’s mother enlisted the help of William Scott, a boyhood friend of Quantrill’s, to bring his remains back home to Dover. In Kentucky the remains were exhumed and Mrs. Quantrill identified them by a chipped tooth. She was denied permission to remove the vestiges from the state—so a scheme was devised to steal them.  

For two years following, Mrs. Quantrill toured Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas attempting to learn all she could of her son’s wartime activities, and returned to Dover for the final interment. However, Scott who had interim possession of the body parts pilfered the skull, some hair and five arm and leg bones. There was a burial, but it’s unclear whether it was with deception or agreement. There is certainty of course, that the coffin lacked all the remains. Afterward Scott tried to sell the skull to the Kansas State Historical Society, and the bones and hair were in their possession for a time. It’s also acknowledged that the skull was later in the possession of Scott’s son and used in fraternity initiations. Years passed before it was donated to a Dover museum where it remained until October 1992 when a decision for closure put the skull to rest in a tiny coffin in the Dover’s Fourth Street Cemetery. A flat marker can be found in the Quantrill family plot in the right rear of the burial ground near the alley.  

In that same month the five bones and hair were finally re-interred at the Old Confederate Veterans Home and Cemetery in Higginsville, Missouri.  

William Quantrill’s story is not the most dignified of Ohio’s past, and many are more than willing to let Missouri and Kansas have an outsized share of his legacy.  To this day there are descendents who deny connection to Quantrill.  

Matt Lauezenheiser, director of the Dover Historical Society and the historical J. E. Reeves Mansion located at 325 E. Iron Avenue said, “We don’t celebrate Quantrill Day here is Dover.”  In the Carriage House Museum at the rear of the Reeves Mansion there is a life-size wax replica of William Quantrill’s head—but you’ll have to ask to see it. Lauezeheiser says they are not trying to hide it, but for preservation they keep it stored in a refrigerator.  

In all its perversity, this Dover native’s tale is still among the most memorable of Buckeye state folklore. Who can forget the narrative of Quantrill’s Raiders? It’s part of history. 

Go  to dovershistory.org or call 800-815-2794 for hours, tours, and prices.

By Robert Carpenter
Robert Carpenter was born and raised in the New Philadelphia, Ohio area.

Return to Top

RIPPLES

Sea formed me
I splashed
And became the sea

Human-kind struggles with self-absorption. We want to live forever. Then we want life after death. But no matter what awaits in afterlife, we live on.

After all, matter and energy cannot be destroyed or created, and there is no end or beginning to time and space. We are eternal.

The universe is in perfect harmony. Good cannot exist without evil. Everything connects. That is our destiny. A drop in a pool of water sends ripples to its furthest shore despite the obstacles.

We may just be drops in a sea but without drops, a sea does not exist. Subtle splashes ripple forever in calm waters. Thunderous splashes may go unnoticed in stormy waters.

We are mostly water; without it we die. After we splash, what is the ripple-effect?

By Frank R. Satullo

Have a happy new year!
And may your ripples be good.

Return to Top