POP CULTURE CHRONICLES
History in Pictures
At Home Down South
By Mike Olszewski
Fear not, Northeast Ohio. The cold weather doesn’t last forever. It just seems that way, and the annual battle with precipitation will soon come to an end. Like so many, I was traumatized, thanks in part to a house on a corner lot in the secondary snow belt. That meant four times the area that had to be cleared when compared to my neighbors.
Fortunately, the snow on my roof (my premature gray hair) gave me an advantage. The guy down the street would yell out, “Go inside. I’ve got a snow blower.” After a while, I developed a system where he would see me holding a shovel and grabbing my chest, and he would point me back inside.
I think that once I waved a cane as a prop and he called back, “No, no! I’ve got it.” When spring arrived, I’d give him a gift card for gas. Don’t think I wasn’t grateful. It got to the point where it was like that scene from “The Exorcist,” where Father Karras sees the statue of the devil appear before him, and he thinks to himself, “Oh, it’s you again.” That was me with the first flake of snow every year.
Warm Up
It got to the point where my blushing bride, Janice, and I said “Enough,” though in her case, it was enough of me taking advantage of the neighbors. As the thermometer heads south, we do as well, to the land of boiled peanuts and old timers who floss with rope. See you in May.
In all seriousness, it’s an annual event in May that’s always a bookmark of sorts: the commemoration of the May 4th tragedy at Kent State University.
Years ago, I taught a course at Kent titled “Making Sense of the Sixties.” Most historians really can’t determine when the “era of the 1960s” began, but many agree that it ended at the KSU campus in May 1970. What was disturbing to me was that so few in the class knew about that moment in history, though foreign exchange students seemed far more aware.
I have a teaching gig at Florida State College at Jacksonville, and as I was walking through the library, I stopped dead in my tracks. Prominently displayed was a well-worn copy of John Backderf’s “Kent State!” It made me recall something Sean Durns said in the “Washington Examiner” about making history available in a format that’s “both popular and accessible.”
Derf has a track record doing just that, as do a couple of other graphic historians. Aaron Lange’s Church Ghost (formerly Stone Church Press) has done a thorough job of documenting local pop culture history, most notably in “Ain’t It Fun.”
Those of us of a certain age are swept back to the days when Peter Laughner and “lower case poet” d.a. levy were forging new ground. His former partner, Jake Kelly, also continues exceptional work with his “Death, Destruction, Vice & Sleaze” true crime series through his Pave the Ocean Press.
A favorite volume is Kelly’s “Blowing Minds,” which includes Carl Monday in comic strip form. I had a conversation some time back with Kelly discussing why his, Lange’s and Derf’s work has proven so popular, and we agreed that young people often look at traditional books like black and white movies. They’ll read them if they have to, but Durns’ theory seems to hold. Pictures are worth millions of words.
THRIVE TRIVIA: Last issue, I asked which country superstar said the happiest time of her life was when she was just starting on Cleveland TV. It was Dottie West who appeared on WEWS-TV’s “Landmark Jamboree” show. For next time, this former Holy Name High School teacher, a faithful parishioner at Our Lady of Czestochowa church, drew the wrath of Clevelanders for more than 20 years.
