Massillon, Ohio
(The city was named for an official of a long ago royal French court.)
The heart of the
city lies in a deep (by
stores may be
boarded up and empty the way they were on our last visit in 2001.
Everybody
migrates to the mall nowadays to buy what they want. There used to be
two movie houses
in the city, one at the beginning of the town coming from the
direction of
side of the
valley; they’re both gone now, of course.
They were genuine movie
theaters, not the
cheaply constructed mall type of modern times.
My Dad and I and
my stepsister Linda and my stepmother Mildred used to go to a
place called
“Smitty’s Diner” on
diner’s exterior
walls were made of silver colored shiny
metal; the inside was filled
with leather backed
booths and a counter with round leather stool seats that you could
twirl. You could order a wonderful roast beef
sandwich with mashed potatoes smoth-
ered in delicious brown gravy. Smitty was a large bald headed man in a dirty
apron
who never spoke
much.
My Dad traded
Swiss cheese (he sold it to bars and grocery stores from a black Chev-
rolet panel
truck) for neckties from Jewish haberdashers.
“This is my boy,” he would
tell them
proudly. I was a teenager then. “Nice looking boy, Walter,” one of the hab-
erdashers would
say. “He takes after his mother,” my Dad
would say. “Do you have
a nice tie for
him?” “Sure, Walter. Do you like this
one sonny?”
I went to a Greek
restaurant a few times and the men behind the counter would yell
at each other in
loud hard voices so that you might think that they actually hated one
another. That was just the way they were.
Steel, glass,
bricks, hard concrete sidewalks, restaurants, banks, bars, barber shops,
churches, bowling
alleys, clothing stores, convenience stores, the five and dime,
beauty parlors,
office supply stores, groceries, furniture emporiums, Germans, Jews,
Greeks, Blacks,
Italians, Slavs, Irish.
Have they opened
the steel mills again? They were what
used to give the city its life.
Is the city still
struggling, working hard to stay alive, shouldering its way through an
uncaring world?
Joseph Buehler
Joseph Buehler has
published over a hundred poems in the UK in Sentinel Literary Quarterly,
in Australia in Otoliths, in Dublin in H.C.E. Review, in Canada in Ottawa Arts
Review and widely in the US in ArLiJo, Nine Mile Magazine, The Opiate, Futures
Trading, Indiana Voice Journal, The Tower Journal , North Dakota Quarterly and
elsewhere. He and his wife Trish moved to Georgia over fifteen years ago.
nice stroll down memory lane. writing is a perfect vehicle for these trips.
ReplyDeleteWonderfully detailed memories. That last paragraph is a stunner.
ReplyDelete