Some Reasons I Love Toledo, Ohio
We went there when the stuff we needed wasn’t available in Findlay. My first suit came from Tiedtke’s. It was wool and scratched me, but the man who measured me for it said he’d fix me up with his daughter. I thought that was incredible, even at only 11. My mom said he was just trying to sell a suit because he was Jewish. I developed a phobia about both suits and church, the only place I wore it, because my skin would itch all day afterwards.
One time we went to the Lions Store, which had library style lions outside the entrance. It was high class for a kid from the farm. We were sitting in the restaurant when a woman wearing multiple gold bracelets rattling on her arms walked by. She was wearing a dress fit for a queen and was walking with a shorter man who wore glasses. Her perfume was overwhelming. As she passed our table she spoke a sentence that began, “Are you insinuating…” and then her voice trailed off. She sounded pissed. The man shrugged. I never heard “insinuating” before but I knew it was really bad because it sounded like “incinerating.”
Dad always went to the noon show at WSPD, maybe it was outside the Rivoli theater. He won a lot of free theater tickets when John Saunders let him pick a key that might open a small locked box. I went to many matinees while my parents shopped. I saw 3-D movies like House Of Wax and It Came From Outer Space. The Star Theater in Deshler never played sci-fi movies like that – or, when they did, the prints were so scratched up that it was all you noticed. Never in 3-D, it was too expensive, no cool glasses.
WSPD-TV had a kid's show called Fun Farm. They had a contest every week and would give out prizes each Friday. One week they had a contest to draw a clown. Sister Ruth, always the better artist, dashed out a parody of a clown picture in a matter of seconds. I diligently copied it, taking many hours. the I colored it in and mailed it in. During school recess on Thursday, they came out to the playground and told me I had won second prize. "No big deal," I told me friends in my first attempt at false modesty, "I just won a contest." We went to Toledo the next day and I was on television! I got a clock radio with a complicated manual that only I could figure out. My parents kept that clock radio until it literally disintegrated and they always asked me to set the time and alarm.
One time on the way home from Toledo with my sister and my mom, I discovered that I had lost a precious comic book that would never make it to our farm town. I still have dreams about what might have been in it.
Sister Bubbles took me to a touring performance of South Pacific and I heard Juanita Hall sing Bali Hai. Once again my dreams were possessed, this time with a special island. I went to a Mud Hens game when they played in a rickety old stadium downtown - the way baseball was meant to be played. A guy named Sammy Meeks broke his bat during batting practice and gave it to me. My dad fixed it up with a couple of wood screws and we played baseball with it until it fell apart, unrepairable.
I saw Cinerama there. Lowell Thomas Jr. gave a short introduction on a normal sized screen, then the curtains parted like the Red Sea and his voice boomed out, “This Is Cinerama!” and there was movie just friggin’ everywhere. We never got that in Deshler either.
When the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed, big ships showed up in Toledo, unloading gigantic cargo containers with mysterious goods from all over the world. Some of them ended up at the store for Anderson’s. My parents bought a lot of stuff there because stuff was plentiful and comparatively cheap. One time my mother bought a combination wax paper, paper towel, and something else, I forget, dispenser there. It never worked right. It would get gummed up and the rolls of stuff never tore off cleanly. A couple of years later, after I’d left for college, I took a wax pencil and wrote “DEFECTIVE!!! – RETURN TO FACTORY!!!” inside it in big fat letters. About a year later, I came home again and it was gone. My mother had discovered the writing inside and they returned it to Anderson’s, who (probably terrified by my consumer advocate mother, who could scare Ralph Nader out of the business) refunded her the purchase price. I never told her I did it.
One day in my senior year of high school, a couple of friends and I decided we didn’t want to go to school after we were there. I had driven our family’s old blue ’52 Ford with Overdrive to school and so I said, “Let’s go to Toledo!” We went to the Gayety Burlesque and saw things that would make Janet Jackson blush. The popcorn in the automatic dispensing machines in the lobby was so stale it must have been popped a week before. I made a point of commenting that the midget comedian harkened back to the days of Vaudeville, which he probably did, but it was just beta testing for my later rationale that I bought Playboy because the articles were intellectually stimulating.
Around 1963-64, we liked to go to The Peppermint Club and The Carousel on Jackson street, I think, which may not exist anymore. A favorite band was The Fascinators. One night a friend of mine said, “Hey, they look like Johnny & The Hurricanes!” He had made the ID based on the albums covers in his large collection. Wow! Johnny Paris had just dumped the rest of the band and struck out on his own. I would watch Paul Tesluk play his cheesy Hammond B-3, wearing a cumnerbund, and wonder how anyone who looked that weird could ever hope to be a rock and roll star. He probably wondered too. He moved to Boston shortly thereafter and began a new career in carpet sales. Boy, that organ still sounded killer anyway. The unknown Beatles opened for these guys in the UK just a few months before. They were that close.
About that same time, I bought my first Fender guitar from Durdel’s Stars Of Tomorrow studios. It was a Fender Jaguar, like a Jazzmaster, but with a shorter neck. I also bought an amplifier, a Gibson Echoplex echo chamber (and was in a Corvair-totalling wreck on the way home from that), but Mr. Durdel talked me out of buying a fuzztone because he believed it was just a fad.
Those are some reasons why I love Toledo, a city for dreamers.
7:02:51 PM 
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