Ohioana Library Ohio Connections Project: Ohio By Choice by Robert Fox

Ohio Connections Literary Exhibit

Ohio by Choice
By Robert Fox

Kate and I call our children who are 28, 26, and 21 “the kids.” My first wife Susan and I were “the kids” when we moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Athens, Ohio, Labor Day weekend of 1967. I was 24 and she was 20. We had been married two weeks. After spending a week in a cabin by Lake George in the Adirondacks, we loaded a Ford Econoline rented from U-Haul to spend two full days crawling on smoky, congested Route 22 through New Jersey into Pennsylvania Dutch country, and then winding along the Ohio River on Route 7, for I-70 was closed. On Route 22 east of Harrisburg, one of our tires blew out coming down a hill, and I was miraculously able to bring the van to a stop without flipping it over.

On the Tuesday after Labor Day I returned the U-Haul to John’s Marathon, the Athens franchise. John Russell’s garage occupied a substantial corner lot. After John berated the remaining bald tires as well as the man who rented the vehicle, I decided John was kooky and honest and that I would patronize his garage. He became my automotive mentor, helping me learn to care for my first car (my family never owned one), letting me use his grease rack during off-hours. I was the first of two Fritos who frequented his garage (the sobriquet attributed because of black mustachios). The cast of characters also included two Richards, the first a bright high school student who went on to college and majored in history, and the other a hapless fellow who, on a summer’s day, yanked the cap off a hot radiator and wore a cast-like bandage to his armpit until Christmas. There was an obese bulldozer operator working on the Athens bypass who came by every afternoon to hose red clay dust off his “Jimmy” pickup, then sit on a stool with a Woolworth guitar and sing “Okie from Muskogee.”

I served an automotive apprenticeship at John’s that paralleled my literary apprenticeship at Ohio University and helped prepare me for farm life a few years later. In addition to my master’s thesis at OU, I did my orals on motor oil at John’s.

My literary mentor was Daniel Keyes, best known as author of Flowers for Algernon. Dan advised the high school literary magazine in Brooklyn and drafted me to his staff. He moved on to teach at Wayne State University in Detroit, and from there to OU’s fledgling creative writing program, joining a staff that included Walter Tevis, Hollis Summers, Jack Matthews, James Norman Schmidt and Jerry David Madden. Dan had encouraged me to apply to OU to study writing rather than do scholarly work at the University of Buffalo. Though Dan wasn’t my thesis advisor, he skillfully guided its passage.

Susan and I stayed with the Keyes in April to scout apartments without success. I returned on my own at the end of the quarter, again staying with the Keyes, and snagged a real home from a departing English graduate student.

We had tentatively planned to live in married student housing in a part of the campus that flooded in spring, despite the prospect of canoeing to class. Instead, our first home in Athens became the ground floor of a well-built house pre-dating World War I. It was the first house on the west side of Athens and the landlady’s home place. She took a liking to us for Susan’s care with the oak floors, bringing them to a high gloss with Johnson’s paste wax. Elma Rardin’s brothers, who built the house and owned Rardin Brothers’ Lumber, appear in an old snapshot of the farm we bought six years later in Snowville, in Meigs County. In the snapshot, the turn-of-the-century home is new, and the Rardin brothers sit before it in a buckboard wearing dress suits. The Rardins were related to the man who built the house and farmed there.

Local histories, the strong sense of place in southeast Ohio, fascinated Susan and me; we knew little of our own ancestors except that they fled massacres in Eastern Europe. Before buying our Snowville farm, we rented on Sand Ridge north of Amesville, home of the Coonskin Library. Amesville was one of several Ohio towns once known as Mudsock because of frequent flooding.

Susan and I did not know we would settle in Ohio, especially way out in the boonies as people called our Snowville farm, nestled in the peaceful hills at a fork in the road. We had agreed before marrying that we would like to live in the country but we didn’t know that “country” would be Ohio. We expected to remain in Ohio no more than two years but my degree took three, and the English Department hired me as a part-time instructor while Susan finished her bachelor’s degree.

Then we were off to Levittown, Pennsylvania, and my teaching job at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. We chose Levittown because we didn’t have a choice. We scouted nearby Pennsylvania and New Jersey and found no rural area close by that we could afford, and none of the other rentals accepted pets or children. (We had a coonhound.)

Susan worked at Princeton University’s U-Shop and studied spinning and weaving at night at the Princeton Y. We planned to return to southeast Ohio at the end of the year and live off the land. Farms were affordable. Two friends of ours had found 30-acre farms for $5,000.

While we weren’t that lucky, the Snowville farm at 73 acres was just right for us. It had hay in the bottoms, pasturefield on the hills, apple and pear trees, a generous garden spot, flowers blooming throughout the growing season, and a creek that was never still during the summer. I was thirty years old and had never driven a tractor. I learned to farm with the help of neighbors whose children had left rather than learn the old-time ways. We butchered beef, chicken, hogs, filled a root cellar with potatoes and turnips, canned beans, corn, tomatoes, peaches. We ate food as fresh as we remembered from childhood and learned the meaning of living in a community.

Initially, I thought farming would be an exercise in individualism. To the contrary, it was an education in mutual dependence. Ernest Wood taught me how to build barbed wire fence and repair farm machinery. He helped me put up 600 bales of hay each summer and I helped him harvest 3,000 bales for his grade B dairy. When I pulled people out of ditches with my tractor, instead of taking offered money I learned to say, “You may have to do something for me some time.”

Hard as Ernest worked, he couldn’t keep up with his creditors and eventually auctioned off most of his holdings. We had moved to Columbus by then. We were not meant to be farmers. Susan abandoned her plans to raise sheep shortly after we moved to the farm and didn’t unpack her lovely New Zealand spinning wheel until she sold it. But our kids were born on that farm, where Traveler, our coonhound, guarded them on a blanket in the shade of a maple tree. Josh helped me dig potatoes when he was two, and both he and Jessica managed their own portions of our large vegetable garden. We did not want to give up the farm, but after commuting to Columbus for ten years to a job I wanted to keep, it became a necessity.

We were still kids when we bought the farm and some friends and relatives thought we were dumb or crazy for wanting to work so hard, while our neighbors tried to teach us all they knew. Back to basics made sense to us in the post-Vietnam Watergate era. Southeast Ohio had preserved much of a 19th century way of living - hard, but honest and rewarding. The local farmers had not gone without meals during the Great Depression as my parents did. To this day I am grateful for what our southeast Ohio friends and neighbors taught us about getting along in this world. And Josh and Jessica still think of the Snowville farm as their home place.