Happy New Year! - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

Fish Report readers, let’s go back one year and forget 2020 for a minute with this blog from the past. Look for some fresh material next week - in 2021. Good riddance 2020! Happy New Year.

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Happy New Year! - 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

Happy New Year!

With a new decade arriving soon, it’s a good time to look back and reflect on the past before we jump into 2020! Or maybe you choose to simply stay focused on the present. Whatever your perspective, time moves on for sure, it seems the faster the older you get. The years truly have just flown by.

Over the last decade, the sports scene in Midwestern Ohio has really seemed to blossom. Thanks to being retired and the internet (especially Fish Report), I can stay attuned from afar to all the local high school sports events. Between the SCAL and MAC, it just doesn’t get any better. Looking back over the last decade, there are so many successful high school programs, teams, coaches and players, that it’s arguably impossible to pick the best of the decade. But I’m going to do so anyway. My pick is Ft. Loramie’s girls basketball coach Carla Siegel.

Why Carla? Well, she’s a very talented educator as well as coach, who seems to bring out the best in her student-athletes. No doubt she can look over her 5th grade class at Loramie Elementary and visualize the girls with the demeanor, intelligence and early athletic skills who will be playing for her a few years later. Having won two state championships and six SCAL championships over this past decade, and arguably on the verge of adding to the list this season, Carla really stands out.

It’s no surprise how successful Carla is, given her parents are Vernon and Mary Jo Siegel, with whom I grew up in Ft. Loramie. The school bus's first stop was at our place, followed next by picking up Mary Jo and her 7 siblings including brother Joe whom I had written about in this previous blogpost. If I recall, Mary Jo was a cute cheerleader and Vernon an excellent basketball player for the Redskins. And they were high school sweethearts, and still are, as pictured below.

Good luck, Carla, with the rest of your season and the best to your parents.

There’s another area coach whose parents I knew well, Fairlawn’s Brad Francis, upper right in this photo. His parents, Tom and Corrine, were exceptional people, as is Brad!

Tom & Corrine were responsible for establishing the Francis Women’s Center at Wilson Health in Sidney. Here’s hoping for Brad’s success in his new coaching position. May he be my best of the decade in 2030!

Back to 2020, here are some New Years quotes and jokes from the past:

"I wish for everyone this New Year an opportunity to earn sufficient, to have that which they need for their own and to give that which they desire to others, to bring in to the lives of those about them some measure of joy, to know the satisfaction of work well done, of recreation earned and therefore savored, to end the year a little wiser, a little kinder and therefore a little happier.” Eleanor Roosevelt

 

If your born on October 1st, its pretty safe to assume your parents started out the New Year with a Bang!

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year resolutions.

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Aunt Mary RIP ✞ - 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

Aunt Mary RIP ✞

This past week, my 94 year old aunt Mary, former Russia First Lady, passed away from natural causes. She also was the great aunt of my wife, so we both have very special memories of aunt Mary, her deceased husband, long-time Russia Mayor Leo (aka Legs) Francis and their five children who were all about the same ages as our family. Click here for her obituary. For a live stream link to her funeral on Tuesday (today) at 10:30am, click this link. In aunt Mary’s memory, the excerpts from several previous blogposts that mentioned aunt Mary are replicated below:

Nov, 2019

On Veteran’s Day, my 93 year-old aunt Mary gave an organ recital at the Landings, a senior living facility in Sidney. Watch her play this famous Marine hymn, From the Halls of Montezuma, in honor of her late husband, Leo, aka Legs Francis, who served in the Marine Corps during WWII. Impressive how she can still play the organ so well and also remember the significance of the song at the end when asked by her daughter, Glo.

Vintage photos of Aunt Mary:

Aunt Mary in 1928

Here's aunt Mary on the left with her sister Ruth and their musical instruments in 1946

Mary & Legs 1947 wedding photo

Aunt Mary in 1963

Christmas 1988 photo with three of their grandkids. Legs unfortunately passed away 7 years later at age 75.

2016 photo of Aunt Mary and with all her descendants

July, 2016 Blogpost:

There’s a story about the two youngest brothers, Tom and my uncle Leo, who married my dad’s sister Mary. My favorite part of the story is where the brothers flipped a coin during tough times to determine who kept Francis Mfg. the joint family business they had started. My uncle Leo lost so he was left to start up another, Francis Products, making garage doors, a very successful enterprise pictured below before being sold to Clopay Corporation in 1969.

Sept. 2016

My uncle's company not only made garage doors, but also sold automatic garage door openers, a device that was new to me since our garage on the farm didn’t even have a door! Uncle Leo and aunt Mary had one installed on their garage attached to the house, so I’d play with the remote and watch the door go up and down with just the press of a button. I would test the range of the remote, moving farther and farther way from the door and at different angles until it wouldn’t activate. Then I would open and shut the door from inside to observe the mechanism lift then close the door. And of course, I’d open up the remote to check out its inner workings. Amazing stuff for a budding engineer.

Not a block away from their house was the railroad tracks, and at the sound of a train approaching, I’d run down to the tracks arriving just as the beast sped past shaking the ground and causing a wind rush that almost knocked me over. What a thrill!

Aunt Mary lived a long and fulfilling life, bringing joy to so many friends and family. Even at an advanced age, believe it or not, she was known around Rooshee and their cottage at Indian Lake for her ability to do cartwheels and water ski!

Also aunt Mary had a unique and infectious laugh, that she obviously picked up from her 5 sisters, as I can vividly recall at family gatherings how much laughter emanated from all my aunts during those frequent get-togethers.

  

Anybody surviving the Great Depression, World War II and the premature death of her husband who can laugh the way she did has my everlasting admiration and appreciation. Aunt Mary was indeed one of a kind, and so was her husband Mayor Legs, both now together again for eternity..

Rest in peace, aunt Mary.

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Monoliths Gone - 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

Monoliths Gone

The saga, or should I say odyssey continues! The Utah monolith referenced in last week’s blog post has disappeared a day or so after the news about the monolith went viral. Here’s all that remains, the baseplate and how it was imbedded into the stone.

Meanwhile, other monoliths were found in Romania and California, but both also disappeared after a few days. Or how about the monolith in the sky photographed in Utah that disappeared after a few seconds. Photoshop anyone? Then the latest version of an on-line video game Arcana included a monolith located in the fictional region of Vesuvia. And it gets crazier! Here’s a photo shot from a video showing Sasquatch planting the monolith!

Southwest Airlines also got in spoof with this ad.

Here’s the kind of natural monolith that I like. Maybe the monoliths represent some far out (alien) marketing campaign, but for what? We’ll have to wait and see.

The original monolith in the movie 2001 Space Odyssey had only one true replica in my view; the one that was found on New Years Day, 2001 on a Seattle hill overlooking the ocean as pictured here. It was very apropos that the monolith showed up on the first day of 2001 in honor of the movie’s title. It too disappeared a few days later.

The famous theme song from the movie was actually composed in 1896 by Richard Strauss and entitled "Also sprach Zarathustra”! Who knew? My friend Ray sure did, as he is a percussionist with the Michigan Philharmonic orchestra that literally plays the movie's theme song during most performances. As a percussionist, Ray's contribution is the meticulously timed drum rolls so prevalent in the song. He’s a perfectionist and practices the precise timing before every performance.

Ray is also an avid photographer and a life-long Detroit Tigers fan with season tickets. We met through his work as Fire Chief for our area when I was Mayor in Orchard Lake, Mi. in 2006. This previous blogpost covers some of those memories.

His garage serves as his photo studio, Tigers baseball memorabilia exhibition and percussion practice space. The cars stay outside. He’s invited me to many Tiger games, shows me any new items in his baseball collection, shares photos he’s most proud of and asks me to listen to his various drum rolls, all under the guise of talking shop about the fire and EMS service he so effectively led until he retired a few years back.

Last of the monolith stuff, promise!

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