Rumley - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

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

Rumley

The Martin Luther King holiday brought to mind some memories about African-Americans during my youth. Pro athletes like Frank Robinson, Bill Russell, Jimmy Brown primarily come to mind. However, one athletic endeavor during my youth was unfortunately not in the spirit of Martin Luther King. During one summer, I played softball for a team out of McCartyville that was named the Rumley Raiders. Little did I know at the time that the team’s name was derived from the nearby town of Rumley, where African-America’s had settled during the early 1800’s but was abandoned after the Civil War and turned into a ghost town of sorts. Many of my teammates as kids had ridden their bikes to Rumley pretending to raid the places, thus our nickname. Over the course of the softball season, I came to learn about these pretend “raids”, but unfortunately didn’t understand the racial significance until years later. Click on this link for a fellow blogger’s research after visiting Rumley in 2011.

My insensitivity to racial matters growing up is inexcusable, however, our contacts with African-Americans were minimal at best, primarily only when visiting Sidney. I recall my mother taking us kids to bowl at the single alley in the Wagner Hotel where if I memory serves, she had worked for a while before getting married. Mom knew and introduced us to several African-American hotel employees. Also, there were African-American waitresses at the SPOT restaurant who my mother knew from her days working in Sidney. We would occasionally eat there during our many family jaunts.

It was during college at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) when I had the opportunity to build friendships with African-American students, both in class and through athletics. Of course, later during my 27 year business career at Ford Motor Company, I worked with many African-American employees, including a couple who were my boss during my career. Ford had a long history of hiring African-Americans going back to the $5 a day wage era in the 1920’s that attracted many southerners of color to Dearborn for work in Ford’s huge Rouge plant that turned raw iron ore into running vehicles at the rate of 4000 per day while employing 100,000 people, many of whom were African-American.

My relationships with African-Americans have been and continue to be gratifying, in spite of the limited opportunities during my youth.

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