Beechmont Avenue, then and now

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Recently, shortly before my father's death, I came across a very old photograph of a hotel in Cherry Grove, the tiny northern suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he had grown up. Since I remember the same suburb as it appeared, first, in its post-World War II simplicity, and, later, in its Vietnam era-growth spurt, this photograph must have been taken by my father himself (he was an early amateur photographer) in the late 1920's or early 1930's.

One summer morning, back in the 1970's, having driven by myself from Missouri to Cincinnati, I sat down with my Aunt Vera, my last remaining Cincinnati relative, and, together, we identified and marked a box-load of ancient photographs of Nash and Maddux and Wainwright relatives and photographs of her relatives and the places where she had grown up.

Even with glasses, her vision was weak, and I felt her grief that some of these ancestors were thus slipping into eternal obscurity. She was the last of the Maddux line. The unspoken reason for vistiing Vera, at her house at 8310 Beechmont Avenue, the house which Madduxes had built late in the 19th century, Cherry Grove, Cincinnati, had been for me to identify and mark old photographs that she alone could identify. She was passing them along from her generation of Madduxes and Nashes.

One of the most intriguing of her lode of black-and-white photographs depicts a two-story building (Vera would identify it only as the "old hotel across the street on Beechmont") facing a hard-packed dirt road. In the front, it has four windows on the second floor that suggest only as many rooms upstairs There is a window on what would be a third storey, but the steep slope of the shingled roof seems to preclude that. There are two chimneys, one on either end of the building, and five brick posts spaced evenly down the front of the building that might just as well have been well-wrought hitching-posts.

Along one side of the building, toward the back, is an ancient (1910?) small , open-ended truck, and in the back is what appears to be a livery stable (for the horses of overnight guests?).

There is one long gutter running alongside the front of the building, directing water to the gutter running down the side, and onto the ground in the back All in all, it's a very tidy place, no pealing paint or shingles, no clutter. It appears you could lie down in the middle of the dirt road and not be disturbed for hours on end.

I was born in February of 1940, my sister Beverly in January of 1946. I think gas rationing during the war must have prevented our family from taking any unnecessary trips from New York, where my father and his family lived, to Ohio, where Nashes, Crawfords, and Wainwrights lived.. But some ancient black-and-white photographs of Bev and me indicate that my father started taking pictures soon after the War. (I find myself using the term "the War" to distinguish World War II, the necessary war, from the host of other wars and "police- actions" which the U.S. stumbled into or began for its own self-interest, in the last decades of the 20th century)

The "old hotel" across from the hard-packed dirt of Beechmont Avenue, which by 1945 had become a paved two-lane road, had been torn down and carted away. At 5:30 every afternoon, a bus arrived from downtown Cincinnati and stopped in front of 8310 Beechmont, delivering my Aunt Elda-and Elda alone, since I was always there to greet her, from her work at Almes and Doepke department store in downtown Cincinnati. She was very friendly, and had a kind of rooting section among the riders of her bus, who always wished her farewell. She then started to prepare dinner for herself and my aunt Vera, who had arrived home somewhat earlier from her job as a teacher of English and Latin at Anderson High School, just down the road from their house.

There was not yet any television, or at least my aunts didn't own one, so, in spring and summer, the two of them sat outside on their three-sided porch after dinner, until it got dark. In winter, the two would sit in the front room and listen to the news of the War on radio, while Vera knitted sweaters and Elda combed the cat Archie.

The earliest trip we as a family (my father, mother, sister, and I) took to Cherry Grove that I can remember, must have been in the early 1950's. My mother had been reminding me that, six years older than my little sister Bevie, I had a responsibility for her. I had to look after her. I took that to heart. In fact, I took it so much to heart that I think I dreamed one night that I let down my vigil long enough for Bevie to run into the street and get run over by a speeding school bus. In truth, in those days it was virtually impossible to get run over on Beechmont.

Across the street from Aunt and Vera's house in the 1950's was Pete's ramshackle general store. It sold everything, or purported to sell everything. That meant that, somewhere or other in the vast clutter of his jury-built store, lay exactly what you were looking for. One day, Bevie and I, together with the quarter dollar our mother gave me, crossed Beechmont

In those early post-war days, when there was a recession in the country and when my father had just taken a wonderful job as a lawyer at American Oil Company and made great money, a quarter dollar would buy nearly everything in Pete's store. I don't recall what I chose, but I wanted to steer my little sister in the right direction: Shopping 101.

"What looks good, Bev?"

She wandered around the store with a thoroughness that I found admirable. She looked as if she were looking for clues. After some 15 minutes, she chose a plastic pinwheel. (Could it have been plastic? I thought plastic, a German invention, didn't come into general usage until well after the war was over.) If memory serves me, it cost five cents. I paid Pete the quarter, pocketed the change, then gave the pinwheel to Bev. We crossed the street, and no sooner did we reach the other side and climb the wood steps to Vera's house than the plastic part came off the wood stick in Bev's hand and fell to the grass. In those days of my late childhood my cursing lacked all panache and fire. "Gosh darn it all!," I might have said, remembering my mother's prohibition of unseemly language. It had clearly been defective when I paid Pete the quarter.

"Chuckie, it's broken!" I don't remember her shedding any tears, but she was upset.

"I know, Bevm honey. You let me have it, and I'll see if I can't exchange it for a good one."

My trip back across Beechmont didn't take much time, but it was plenty enough for me to grow enraged at the troll behind the counter who had taken the opportunity to sell my innocent sister a defective product. Boy, the nerve!

Frankly, I don't remember the slightest detail of my tale of the so-called swindle, but Pete's fellow-clerks finally got around to telling Vera when she crossed Beechmont the next day to buy a quart of milk or a pack of pins, and from Vera it passed to her neighbor, the sweet old Mrs. Grole, who lived with her husband down the road a way.

From Mrs. Grole it passed to Mrs. Thelma Morgan, the school nurse at Anderson, who would be the one to go with Vera, a German minister, and me to Europe many years later (presumably to look after me if, as a recently diagnosed diabetic, I should run into any trouble) Boy, did little Buzz give the clerk a proper dressing-down.

By day's end, Bev was sporting a brand-new, bright-colored pinwheel, and I was sporting a new reputation as a razor-sharp, neighborhood labor leader. News does get around! For the rest of her days, my mother would interject the story into any conversation that might have warranted it. She was so proud of me, for qualities which I had no use for! Never again did I perform so brilliantly in labor disputes.

The next time I took real notice of Beechmont Avenue, in the early 1970's, it had been converted for business into an aesthetic nightmare, six lanes of traffic and choc-a-block business buildings -- a lot like Range Line in Joplin, Mo., but worse, messy and dangerous for drivers and walkers alike. Aunt Vera's house, a feature of the area since well before the turn of the 20th century, had been torn down and replaced by a little indented area butcher store and vacuum cleaner agency. I wanted to weep, but kept my head and tried to find a way of getting back into the flow of traffic. But it was business rush hour, and Cincinnati's commuters were returning to their homes. It occurred to me that few of the new people who lived in Cherry Grove could tell you today which of the tiny townships they lived in.

I opened the drivers'-side window and watched a steady mass of swift-moving traffic pass, moving northward from the city. Seeing a slight break in the flow of cars and panel trucks, I gave my car a little gas.

A teenage boy on a bicycle shouted at me as he pulled himself up short and dismounted his bike beside my right fender. I'd almost run over his feet, if not worse.

In fact, I wanted to step on the gas and run over his feet, but I managed to control myself.

Yeah, I'd become at least only another of the old geezers who were always complaining about the younger generation, the newest developments, and, in the process, endangering the young and middle-aged. alike. I'd become my father (who had let his Mercedes- Benz die at a corner in nearby Columbus only a month before), maybe even my grandfather.

Suddenly, I wanted to drive slowly to Vera's house and lie down on the front room divan until dinner time.

That was the last time I saw Beechmont Avenue.