My family moved around a great deal when I was young. My dad worked as an industrial engineering consultant for a firm based in my native Chicago and we would frequently travel with him to locations where he might be working for an extended period of time. One of these places was Toledo, Ohio, where we lived for a time in 1958-1959 when dad was working on a project for the Otis Elevator Company. We rented a modest two story house in the 4400 block of Garrison Road, in the DeVeaux neighborhood on the northwest side of Toledo, which dead ended at the end of our block and the North Branch of Shantee Creek. It was wonderful. There were other kids around my age on our block and we had a nice big backyard to play in and a room I did not have to share with my little sister. I could walk to Elmhurst Elementary School just a couple blocks away.
Our time is Toledo was relatively brief; just over a year, but it is memorable for a series of “firsts” for me. I was quite the baseball fan when I was a kid. In the mid 1950s I was living with my grandparents on their farm in southwestern Michigan when Dad was on a couple brief assignments and I was starting school. I became a Detroit Tigers fan almost by osmosis; just about everyone in Michigan supported the Tigers back in those days. Add to this the fact that my folks and I lived briefly off Six Mile Road, in Detroit, when I was a wee tyke. The Tigers are a venerable charter American League franchise, one of eight major league teams. Tiger Stadium, its home turf, was opened in 1912 and would host the team until its final season there, in 1999 (at that time tied with Fenway Park, which opened the same day, as the oldest major league ballpark). I saw my only Tigers home game in the summer of 1958, when Dad and I drove the roughly 50 miles from Toledo to Tiger Stadium to watch the hometown Big Cats play the hated pin-striped New York Yankees (I still can’t abide them). I can’t remember who won that game, but I do remember Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra each hitting homers, and Al Kaline putting one out of the park over the distant left field fence for the Tigers. Dad was happy to see my mom’s hometown hero Charley “Smokey” Maxwell play for the Tigers. [http://lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com/2010/08/when-baseball-was-fun-remembering.html] Regardless of the intervening years and occasional shifting alliances as I moved around the country, the Tigers have always had a soft spot in my heart.
I recall another day that summer when the mother of my best friend on our block took the training wheels off his bike to teach him how to ride. Not to be outdone I asked her to remove mine, too, and a few hours later we were both riding up and down Garrison Road and around the immediate neighborhood like we had been doing it all our lives. What a sense of freedom. We would frequently ride down to a drugstore at the corner of Garrison and West Sylvania Avenue to buy penny candy and baseball cards.
That same summer the Hula Hoop craze infected America. Similar types of hoops made from natural materials had been used in various cultures for centuries, but it was the Wham-O company (it later gave us the Frisbee, Hackey Sack and Silly String which was big during my freshman year in college) that manufactured and distributed brightly colored hoops made of sturdy Marlex plastic tubing that mesmerized children throughout the late 1950s. Everyone had to have one and the kids in my neighborhood would meet in one yard or another (when we were not riding our bikes) for Hula Hoop contests. I got so I was pretty good at it. Christmas 1958 was marked by the release of Alvin and the Chipmunks singing “Christmas Don’t be Late.” They all wanted something special and Alvin chimes in “I still want a hula hoop.”
That same Christmas I received my first pair of hockey skates and a hockey stick and my dad fashioned a small rink in our back yard by packing down the snow and spraying it with water. I practiced skating and slapping a puck into a make-shift net after school and soon joined my friends to skate on Shantee Creek at the end of our street.
Another memorable event occurred in November 1958 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to town. It was his second visit to Toledo as president, each time joining friends and local politicos to hunt ducks at the very private Cedar Point Club situated in the Little Cedar Wildlife Area along the Lake Erie shore(now Maumee Bay State Park). My father had served under Eisenhower in the European Theater of World War II and so we went out to the Toledo airport west of town to watch the president arrive on board Columbine III, a Lockheed Constellation and the first presidential aircraft to used the designation Air Force One. His limousine drove so close I could have reached out and touched him and my dad managed to snap a photo of me as Ike slowly passed by. It was my very first presidential encounter (I have met three others).
When Dad’s contract was up in Toledo we moved downstate to Cincinnati. I have already written about my adventures there [http://lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com/search?q=Cincinnati]. Although I have passed through Toledo on occasion on my way to someplace else, I have never been back to the old neighborhood. I have studied it on Google Maps and Google Earth and it does not appear to have changed noticeably in the intervening 62 years. Our block of Garrison Road is still a quiet, tree-lined residential Street. The creek at the end of the street has been routed underground and the original Elmhurst Elementary has been replaced by a newer and larger building at the same location. The backyard of our old house now has an in-ground swimming pool where I used to practice skating.
Perhaps it is time to make the effort to drive down along Garrison Road and revisit the scene of so many vivid memories of my childhood.
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