Tuesday, January 12, 2016

From This to That! - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

From This to That!



Recently this article about Canadian beach towns on the eastern shore of Lake Huron appeared in our local paper, and the article reminded me of a chain of events that impacted my life very positively. Let me connect the dots between the above photo and the one below. What got things started was a weekend trip to one of the beach towns described in the article near the end of my senior year in college with a bunch of fraternity brothers. We drove to Canada in a caravan of several cars and stayed in a cottage on the beach owned by the parents of another friend. In those days you could drive right on the beach like at Daytona. It was a fun weekend until we drove one of the cars too close to the lake's edge, causing water to be sucked into the engine. Since water does not compress like air or burn like gas, the engine locked up with a bent connecting rod. We left the car at the cottage, but went back the following weekend to tow it to the frat house. While returning with the car in tow during a rainstorm, we spun out on a curve and did a 180. What could have been a disaster resulted in the only damage (other than my underwear) being a slight dent in the tow bar. Both cars were ok. Finally making it back to the fraternity house, we proceeded to remove and tear down the engine and successfully replaced the bent connecting rod during finals week when I should have been studying.

Earlier that year, another fraternity brother was at Mardi Gras in New Orleans where he was hit by a motorcycle and broke his leg. Since he was out of commission, he lent me his motorcycle for the summer. But I had to get both my car and the motorcycle from the frat house in Michigan to Dayton where I would be working, so my buddy with the newly rebuilt engine said he would haul the cycle back in his trunk (it wouldn’t fit in mine). We disassembled the bike, squeezed it into the trunk with half of it hanging out the back and after following him all the way to Dayton, we re-assembled the motorcycle and it ran just fine. The photo above shows our group at the Port Huron cottage; note the bike, the car and the guy with the broken leg. Believe it or not, I set up blind dates with this motley crew and a bunch of my sister’s friends the year before, but I’ll leave that misadventure for a future blog!

The Friday after coming home from college, Tom, the neighborhood friend who lived on the farm next door whom I wrote about in last week’s blog, threw a party at his place in Dayton, so I decided to ride the motorcycle to the bash, where I connected up with a cute girl who, when I mentioned the bike, wanted to take a ride. So off we went after the party, riding all over the place through the night. Turns out that midnight ride started a relationship that would eventually lead to our marriage! Recall from an earlier blog that I had become aware of this young lady some 4 years earlier during a high school basketball game while on the bench with foul trouble checking out the Russia cheerleaders. In the photo above, I'm the dude in the Budweiser shirt. What she ever saw in me is anybody's guess; maybe it was the bike? But our motorcycle ventures were over at the end of that memorable summer when I returned the bike to my friend. We haven’t ridden since! And check out the photo below of my fraternity brothers with their mini-skirted girl friends (no blind dates this time) all decked out for our wedding. Incidentally, I just discovered last night from a friend who had attended our wedding that the Russia Mayor at the time had directed the town cop to not arrest anybody and to make sure everyone got out of town safely. My friend was stopped, but was told to let his girlfriend drive home. Not coincidentally, the Mayor was my wife's great uncle who was married to my aunt!


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