Although it rained for nearly the entire month and gas prices soured up to $4.00, April ended up being pretty good to me – and it was mostly because of that beautiful and delightful gal named Jamie whom I had been dating for  a month and a half as we entered April. After the horrendous experience of trying to get home from California the day before, there was one good thing that came out of it. Since I didn’t get home until late on Sunday, April 3, 2011, I decided to take Monday off. Naturally, I wanted to utilize this day and drive up to Findlay and see Jamie almost two weeks of being apart.

Although I was going on exactly four hours of sleep, I hopped out of bed at 6am on that Monday and headed upward into the guts of Ohio. There waiting to greet me on the other side of her apartment door was this lovely, smiling girl. We did a couple hours of catching up and then it was time for her to go to work – even if I was being the work slacker. She had hoped to let me observe her class, but hadn’t gotten the necessary permission – until she arrived at school. So she called me as I was tuning into Family Fued, ready for that nap, and I high-tailed it down to the university.

It was quite a treat to watch her teach her two Listening classes (Level 3 at 1pm and Level 5 at 2pm). Particularly fun was when she had each of the lower level student greet me, nearly all of them used the standard English phrase “Nice to meet you!” So I used it as well – once for each student.

We had lunch at the Cracker Barrel where we picked up a book of Mad Libs and played with each other (and the waitress) over my reuben and her apple pancakes. This amusing distraction has become a pastime for us ever since – and sometimes we even make our own. Back at her house we watched another Laurel and Hardy silent Wrong Again. With such a strong desire to hang out, I didn’t leave until the wee hours of the morning, garnering only four hours of sleep again for the third night in a row. It was difficult to stay awake at work when I returned on Tuesday.

On Sunday, April 10, I went back up to Findlay again. This time Jamie had been spending the weekend with her Mom, so I met up with them that morning so that we could all go to church together. We attended the Pentecostal church, the New Life Assembly of God, where we heard a great sermon on the book of Joshua. Jamie had been here before, but wasn’t a regular member there.

After the service her Mom treated us to a great brunch at Cafe Marie in downtown Findlay. We also stopped by The George House and Jamie bought me a vanilla milkshake. I picked up some amazing wasabi peanut crunchies that made her Mom’s sinuses rebel against here. That evening we met up with Jamie’s friend Philip at Jack and Jin’s for some thai food. Since there air conditioning was on the fritz and it was roughly 800 degrees in there, we opted to take the food back to Jamie’s apartment. I stayed late again of course, but it wasn’t quite as unreasonably late as the prior weekend.

The weekdays were mostly business as usual – watching Becker, catching up on cleaning and laundry, trying desperately to get caught up on the website. Heidi did come over to go on a walk with me on Wednesday the 13th. She and her boyfriend had just broken up, and she was looking for my incredibly wise counsel. On Thursday, I hacked through my front yard grass that had grown to wild proportions. On Friday, I met Mom for lunch at Chik-fil-A, which is rapidly becoming my favorite fast food joint. We did this again on Thursday the 21st.

That Friday, April 15, Jamie came down to my neck of the woods for the weekend. We had a nice dinner at Red Robin and watched Office Space that night.

Saturday the 16th was the big day and centerpiece for Jamie’s visit. Yes we actually did something besides go out to eat. We kicked off the day by heading to Cincinnati where we picked up some Starbucks (and naturally ended up playing Mad Libs with the barista) and took it over to her Mom’s office to surprise her. The we headed to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

I had long wanted to visit this museum and since Jamie and I were in the midst of reading Genesis (nearing the end by this point), I thought this would be a great time to do it. It was a fascinating place, although a little bit different than I expected. Instead of trying to reconcile scientific evidence with the Bible, it maintained that the Bible alone is the ultimate authority on the history of the earth. Thus they claimed that our planet is only 6000 years old, that dinosaurs walked the earth alongside man, and that the flood during Noah’s age formed all of the geologic structures that scientists have pegged to be billions of years old.

We spent over three hours here, exploring and carefully reading almost all of the indoor exhibits. No matter which side of the great creation debate you come down on, it’s quite worth checking this out – even if only to see the dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden!

Jamie is thrilled to be at the Creation Museum

With some fossilized dinosaur eggs

Quite a juxtaposition of one of nature’s ugliest creatures and one its most beautiful

Three heavy hitters of the Old Testament: Isaiah, Moses, and King David

Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden

A dinosaur in the Garden of Eden

Jamie is so frightened by this dinosaur that she nearly swallows her gum

The oldest man in recorded history meets Methuselah

That evening we went from the Creation Museum to Jamie’s parents house, picking up some La Rosa’s pizza on the way. Her Mom had made nice warm brownies as well and sent them with us. We took them to my Mom’s house where we combined them with ice cream and played – you guessed it – Mad Libs. Mom doesn’t find these funny.

But what she did find funny was that as she shared the details with Jamie of how she and Bob had met, Bob chimed in with a comment alluding to the fact that he was of Hawaiian origin – which of course, he is not. As Mom explained it, he is actually Native Indian. The brownies were delicious.

I roused Jamie to action on Sunday morning the 17th and drug her off the 9am service at Patterson Park church. I had been here once before for their evening Christmas service. Missy Fodor and her husband Paul had introduced me the church and we sat with them for the service. Afterward, we stopped by Heidi’s so that she and Jamie could meet one another. We stayed for a bit to chat and I ate all of Heidi’s smoked gouda cheese. That afternoon we watched Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and while Jamie napped, I checked out my new Car 54, Where Are You? DVDs.

I finished out the pre-Easter work by hacking through the front yard on Monday, where the rains had caused the grass to grow uncontrollably and offered me precious few opportunities to get it cut. On Thursday, Ashleigh left the garage door open all night and when I went to leave for work I found a stray dog had camped out in the garage. It took a while to get him out and when I got home that afternoon he was still there. He was a really nice dog, so I was very glad when Christi decided to pick him up and give him to a friend.

Easter would be coming up and I had a lot to look forward to after that: times with Jamie, a couple of trips, and the arrival of a certain baby.

Ashleigh on April 23, by now pretty much set on the name Silas McGee

Silas’ room that Ashleigh and Christi diligently prepared for him

Crib and toybox

Changing table and swing

2011 will continue…

Discovery House was always fun, although for some reason I dreaded going. We would go swimming, on field trips, fishing, or other things to keep us occupied during the Summer. I’ll do more on this memorable location from my life in a future posting.

Mom spent a lot of her time playing softball – usually practicing or playing games two or three evenings during the week. Denise and I would often tag along to the various ball diamonds in the area – Ernst, Kennedy, and Delco.

We made only one home improvement around this Summer that I know of: we had the painted cement patio scraped and applied a brown outdoor carpet to it.

As for me, it is hard to say precisely what I was doing these days. Probably watching Laurel and Hardy movies, reading MAD Magazines, exploring the woods with my chums Lee, Chris, and Kenny, riding bikes around our neighborhood, and generally just being pleased with a childhood summer existence. These were good days.

My first vacation of the year came in the form of a week at Woodland Altars summer camp. I was a bit timid, so opted to stay in the Junior Lodge group. This was for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Regrettably, I have no photos of the experience but plenty of great memories. Oddly, the major thing that I cannot recall are any of the kids that were at the camp. Except for one: a little girl named Dolly, who cried at breakfast every morning because she was homesick.

I do remember that we had six co-ed groups of kids staying in the Heritage Lodge, in separate dorm quarters of course. The male counselors were Chris Bohlander, Dean Wenger, Dean Garrett, Harold Wenger, a tall guy named Jim, and my counselor, a Japanese import who spoke fragmented English named Joe Sakaguchi. Chris was apparently the most imposing as I remember one of the kids saying on the first day that he wouldn’t dare shortsheet his bed.

Shirley Yaussy from our local Beavercreek Church of the Brethren was the dean of the camp. I rode down to Woodland Altars with her and her husband Chuck on Saturday, July 11 – one day before camp actually began. They towed their camper and we stayed in it the first night there.

In short, I had a fabulous time amongst all of the activities, Bible study, hiking, vespers, swimming, campfires, games, endless four square, and our one night (typically Thursday) where we stayed in the tents. I’ll never forget hearing the scariest ghost story ever from Joe, which was capped by the old ‘flashlight under the chin’ finale.

On Saturday, July 18, camp ended for most of the kids, but I stayed on an extra day with them. Several of the counselors stayed as well – both of the Deans, and one of the female counselors Barbie Winterbotham and her husband Jim (both of whom attended our church). We spent a glorious day playing four square without the long lines of the kids, visiting Serpent’s Mound, and going to the local outdoor ice cream eatery – probably the Locust Grove Dairy Bar. By the end of the week, if I hadn’t learned a lot of scripture, I surely learned how to be a killer four square player.

List of the camp groups for that week – provided by former counselor Dean Garrett

The next vacations of the summer were two back-to-back trips, the first being our first excursion into the world of the Classic Chevy conventions. This took place the week of August 2 – August 8. Dad had gotten his 1957 Chevy in May of this year, but we had joined the Gem City Classics near the end of 1980, attending their Christmas banquet as the first club outing.

The ironic and purely coincidental thing about this trip was that this, our first Chevy convention, took place in the exact same city and hotel as our last Hudson convention had in 1979: the Hyatt Regencey in Dearborn, Michigan. This was very cool for me because I absolutely adored this high rise hotel with the lighted glass elevators. I wouldn’t see this hotel again until 2004, when I had my friend Bob swing by here during one of our road trips.

In its day, it had a monorail system that would transfer hotel guests to the mall across the street. I spent hours riding that thing back and forth from the hotel to the mall. I recall picking up one of the volumes of The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics by Alan Aldridge, as well as a special edition of National Lampoon’s True Facts at the mall.

Oddly, I remember our earlier Dearborn trip a little better than this one, but I’m sure that I hung around the older kids Dennis Matherne, Mark Wilson, and Missy Karver. I seem to recall running into a lady in the hotel and getting burned with her cigarette. The memory only remembers what it wants apparently.

 And I remember going all out in a t-shirt, rolled-up jeans, and with a simulated pack of cigarettes rolled up in my sleeve for the 50′s dance. Yes, I went crazy on the dance floor, attempting my version of the Twist and other ridiculous dances of the era. Obviously the photo at the top of the posting was taken during this event, as were the two below.

Mom, Denise, and I get wild on the dance floor

Denise, little girl on a big floor

Unfortunately, there weren’t many photos from this trip – or any other part of the summer for that matter, with the exception of the next and final Summer trip of 1981, which immediately followed this one.

The next trip of the Summer of 1981 up next…

Our Pastor in Beavercreek was Byron Flory, who was the twin brother of our former Bear Creek Pastor Dan Flory. Byron (who I can recognize because he is with his wife Betty Lou) was here on the retreat. But then again so were Bill and Dottie and their kids, who attended Bear Creek.  So the jury is out.

Either way, the pictures are most fascinating to me because it shows the campgrounds many years before I first ever attended camp in 1981 and really got to know these surroundings. I have visited the camp as recently as 2007 and the bulk of the locations seen in the pictures are still virtually unchanged.

Paparazzi shot of the arriving Florys

The road, the woods, and the cars

Mom and me, hand in hand on the prairie

Vespers on the prairie

The log cabin…still there. See a photo of Christi and me inside of it in 2007 here.

Robby and Lora and an unidentified kid

The shelter area where we often hung out at camp. We performed our talent show here in 1989.

Mom and I break bread with the other retreaters

The small diving board is still there. The big one remained through my camp years but has been removed.

Dottie (in pink), Mom, and I cool off in the Woodland Altars pool.

Strolling poolside

I’m sure I had fun on this trip, but it wasn’t until our 1977 visit that any specific memories would stick with me.

1974 will continue…

This week of Eco Adventures (my first of two) certainly ranked at the top of my Woodland Altars experiences and Scott certainly contributed to the great memories. Keeping us in check from getting too insanely wild, he certainly understood the rambunctious nature of thirteen year old boys - and my new friend Darin Anderson and I certainly must have pushed him to his limits. He played along with us in ‘sneaking out’ and spending the wee hours down by the lake or up on the roof of our Sugar Grove lodge, where we laid out under the stars, cracked jokes, discussed life, and made obnoxious noises simulating various bodily functions. What fun!

I tracked Scott down earlier this Summer only to find that he had pursued his calling to become a pastor – and a pretty good one at that. In fact the phrase ‘pretty good’ carries a lot of meaning at The Vineyard Church in Beavercreek that he helped form some ten years ago, its sign in front of the building designating it as ‘a pretty good church.’ Incidentally the church is located exactly 2.09 miles from my house on Winterset, where I lived at the time that I went to Eco Adventures camp.

Just one day after reuniting with fellow camper Wendy Johnston who had attended that very week of Eco Adventures in 1985, I attended a service of the Vineyard on Sunday, June 29, 2008, with Scott providing the message for the week (as seen at left). First of all, let me say how much I enjoyed the service and Scott’s sermon, which looked to address the problem of worry – and what’s around the next corner of life. Just as I remembered him, he was entertaining, charismatic, and still had his fabulous sense of humor. The entire congregation sat in either in rapt attention or laughing at the jokes that Scott had sprinkled throughout.

And secondly, let me say how much I enjoyed having lunch with Scott afterward. He treated me to a meal at Mimi’s Cafe in the Greene. He hasn’t lost his ability to mesmerize and amuse – not just me but the dozens of folks waiting to talk to him after the service, our waitress, and anyone else crossing our paths. He can still do the impressions - even the one of Naturalist Dave – but now he carries with him the responsibility of married life and four children, the oldest being 21, and seems to be succeeding admirably. He’s still a cool guy – even if he no longer resembles Rick Springfield.

It’s amazing that we hadn’t crossed paths before seeing that we have been in the same area for years - or perhaps we had and didn’t know it. In fact I learned during our lunch that we were both at the Gene Hackman book signing at the Greene earlier in the week. That’s not the only thing we had in common either. Both of us spend hours spinning Steve Martin records and honing our ‘humor’ craft in our younger days. (Actually I just listened to Steve a few weeks ago).

I have every intention of returning to the Vineyard sometime and meeting up with Scott again. And by the way, wouldn’t you agree that life gets a little surreal when you meet up with two different people within two days, both of whom you hadn’t seen in twenty years or more, and both from the same week of camp 23 years ago?

2008 will continue…

Continue to the next reunion…

The Sugar Grove Lodge

The lake and Heritage Lodge

The lake from atop Heritage Ridge

The ol’ swimmin’ hole

Mom and me exploring the woods

Serious as hell at the bell

I had made fast friends with Darin Anderson the year before and this year he was bringing along a friend named Eric Hubble, with whom it turned out I got along equally as well. Again our home base for the camp was the Sugar Grove Lodge. I brought along a copy of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to appease Darin’s curiosity – but I really was no longer much into comic books. I had the infinitely more appealing hobby of girls on my mind. And this year I met a slew of them.  

In my bunk, wearing my Buckwheat shirt

Eric provided endless hours of amusement

Darin in search of one of the gals

Amy Angle, Mandy Angle, Dorinda Dohner, Wendy Johnston, and Kim Littlejohn (in alphabetical order, as to slight none of them) were all girls from the Troy Church of the Brethren and they all became the weeklong friends and companions of Darin, Eric, and me throughout the week. Darin, Mandy, Wendy, and I were in the same group with counselors Brian Bohlander and Gloria Landis. There was only one other group and the counselors were Harold Wenger and Stacy, who I think Darin had quite an affinity for. The dean of the camp was Brian’s older brother Chris Bohlander. Four years later, I would become good friends with their younger brother Matt.

Kim cracking up

Kim, Darin, Wendy, and Eric conspire against me

Dorinda on ‘hogan’ night

Dorinda and Stacy do the dishes. Kim doesn’t help. Harold appears to lick the bowl clean.

Stacy composes herself as she enters our vehicular unit

This certainly came close to being the best week of camp I ever experienced. I enjoyed every minute with our close-knit little group. I continued my tradition of doing imitation of various people at camp including our naturalist Dave Koehner. We also had a portly little fella in our group named Rob Godown (or something like that) on whom I pasted the unfortunate moniker of “Rollo.” I also did a nearly-perfect imitation of his high-pitched laugh.

One of the kids from Beavercreek named Chris Vickers (who had somehow become an arch nemesis of mine) was also at camp and had his share of issues there as well. Some of the other kids who were there were Jessi Wolf, Daniel Riggins, Megan Keller, and a dude named Ricky.

In the center is Shelli Link and then Megan Keller on the right. I think Shelli was actually attending horse camp at this time, but we later became good friends at Youth camp.

Dueling cameras with Darin. Megan idly watches the festivities.

I can’t recall many specifics, but there were all of the traditional goings-off: bible study, vespers, hiking and outdoor exploration, swimming, a hayride, homemade ice-cream perhaps, one night in the hogans and the rest in the lodge. It was bascially a typical camp-week with many ‘nature’-related activities thrown in: rock-climbing, streaming, and spelunking.

One really significant activity that I can remember pretty vividly was the spelunking. This was completely new to me. We began in a ‘starter’ cave that you could actually walk halfway through. As the cave became smaller and smaller and the passageway narrower and narrower, we were forced to crouch and then finally, had no choice but to kneel and crawl in the mud and water if we wanted to reach the other end. From then on, I explored the caves with absolutely no trepidation. Wearing flashlight helmets, we squirmed in and out of even the most narrow crevices, coming out drenched in mud.

Filthy after caving. At left is Erin Ansbaugh. Standing behind the girl in the pink is Darin, then Rollo, Brian, Chris, Megan, Ricky, Stacy, and me with my hand on Kim’s shoulder. Mandy is the cute one in blue, kneeling up front.

Kim again – with, amazingly, my hand on her shoulder again

But most of all, I remember our gang of friends: Darin, Eric, Kim, Wendy, Mandy, Dorinda, and Amy. We would all have a reunion later on in the summer, exchange letters for a while – along with the occasional phone call, and I would visit Eric and Darin the following Summer. After that, I fell out of touch with all of them and they were consigned to a special memory in the depths of my head – until I began to hook up with some of them again some twenty-odd years later.

1986 will continue as I get ready to spend most, if not all, of my Laurel and Hardy fund…