My home town

I was looking for something else on my computer and found these reflections on my home town, a slice of life of small town America at the Labor Day Festival, 2006. It captures a little bit of what makes me who I am today. A year later I captured some the annual festival on film, hence the photographs. This is a little bit longer than I'd usually do for a blog entry but editing out anything would detract from the whole.

Labor Day, 2006
Sitting on the enclosed back porch of the house where I spent all my growing up years, and have come "home" to in the many years since, we watched the annual parade of John Deere and International Harvester farm tractors pass by, hauled on trailers and flat beds pulled by an assortment of pick up and semi trucks. Dollar signs rolled in my head thinking about the many thousands of dollars wrapped in those rigs.

"Do ya want to go down?"

"Nah..."

We tossed that back and forth a few times, then finally I said I would go if they wanted to go. So we did. We drove down, even though it’s only a few blocks, cause by the time we walked around there, it would be too much to walk back. Roeder greeted us at the gate and made sure we had a close-up parking space. Without blinking an eye, they gave us all three, Mom, Dad and I the senior citizen admission rate. I may be eligible for AARP, but I sure don’t look like a senior citizen. Doesn’t bother me, though.

We walked across the drive and through the remnants of the old playground I used to play on as a kid. All that remains is the metal framework for the kiddie swings and horse gliders, and the concrete base where the tall metal sliding board used to be anchored. The base for the teeter totter and merry-go-round is probably there somewhere too. On the other end of the space kids played on a colorful climbing apparatus with all the modern day safety features built in. We might have fallen off a few things, skinned our knees or pinched a finger, or got sick to our stomach or dizzy on the merry-go-round, but somehow we survived all those many wonderful hours of playing there.

Across the other drive and past the shelter where the African-American 2nd United Methodist Church used to cook up barbecued chicken dinners every year, sits a huge barrel-type barbecue device, run by a couple black guys, and on their pick up it says, "Ribs by the Bay, Sandusky, Ohio." Dad had them open up the pit, filled with split chickens and racks of ribs. He approved of the looks of them and said maybe we’d be back.

Pick-em-up trucks had backed into the fence all along the track and folks put their lawn chairs up in there for a good view of the tractor pulling. In between, guys that even Dad calls geezers were lined up in their lawn chairs, along with an assortment of younger folks too. We remembered how our cousins, the Schneiters used to go down early every Labor Day to get a prime parking spot for their pick up. Dad struck up a conversation with someone and Mom and I walked around to the opening in the track where people cross over to sit on the bleachers. After a while Dad joins us too, having come around the track from the other side. Enroute in got sucked into buying a $5 raffle ticket from Graph, for a picnic table to benefit the renovation of the clock tower on the Methodist Church. He’s in the process of painting the picnic table we already have, so I’m not sure what we’d do with another, probably let someone else have it.

On the end of the track sat the long trailer-like device with the weight on it and a cab attached high up on the back, where one or two guys sit, getting pulled down the track one way, then, putting the wheels down on the front of the trailer, they reverse it back to the starting point. The front end of this thing gets attached to the tractors and as it gets pulled, the weight slides along a metal track that runs down the middle of the trailer.

One guy on a John Deere pulling a scraping device was preparing the surface of the dirt track, and another guy on (I think) an International Harvester, pulled another device with a row of several smooth tires all in a row, then the New London Fire Dept. yellow pick up driven by my fellow class mate, Dick Rowland, with another guy perched on the tailgate, came along with a water sprayer. That must be partly to keep the dust from blowing around and partly to make the surface of the track just so.

The tractors pull by categories of weight that they’re pulling and whether or not their tractor is "modified." Some guys had bar cages around the sides and back of where they sit on the tractor, presumably because the thing could tip backward and somehow that would protect them. A couple guys even wore a helmet.

A skinny guy with long beard getting dustier by the minute, was in charge of the stop and go flags on the front end of the track. He pulls back the red flag and holds out the green one, and the tractor driver starts revving his engine. It gets louder, the rear wheels dig in and the front wheels lift up off the ground. Some guys have weights attached to various places to keep it from rearing back too far. White smoke belches out of the smoke stack on the front end of the tractor. Then gray smoke, and depending how how modified a tractor is, black smoke. If you’re interested in preserving your hearing, you might consider covering your ears against the screaming of the engine as it passes by.

There appears to be a little bit of technique to shifting just in the right way and the right time to get the maximum power going for the pull. Above all the noise, you might be able to hear the announcer as he gives a running account of the distance traversed and how many more feet the guy has to go to claim first place in the competition for his particular class. You can hope that the wind blows just right so the smoke blows up and over the bleachers, but a good part of it settles down on the crowd. Dad makes a comment something about black lung. The tractor driver keeps pulling until the wheels start to spin, and sometimes at that point the front end of the tractor rears up. If the driver isn’t happy with his distance and thinks he can do better, he has the option of going around and giving it another try.

The device being pulled automatically tracks the exact distance pulled in feet and inches. It used to be that guys with posts and measuring tapes would run back and forth to measure the pulled distance, then another tractor would have to come and pull the weights back to the other end. Now the whole process goes a lot faster, theoretically, but they never have started on time and somehow the event consumes most of the day and promises to give many hours of entertainment.

In the middle of it all, Mom remembers the advertising byline of John Deere. "Nothing runs like a Deere," she says.

Besides the excitement of watching tractors go up and down the track, you can eavesdrop on all the nearby chatter about crops and farm animals. Then there’s always the interesting parade of people passing by and a few here and there that we know and talk with or at least wave to. Some are wearing heavy work boots, blue jeans and John Deere tee shirts, which would seem to give away that they are probably farmers. Many look like they could use a good hair cut, tufts of hair poking out of their sweat stained caps.


A small group of folks that look like they’re related to one another stand off to the side of the bleachers. One tall skinny guy holds a trophy with a chrome plated tractor on the top. A while later I look over and see a toddler in a stroller holding on to the trophy and everyone’s staring down the track, straining to see through the dust and smoke, listening to the announcer on how the next competitor fared in his bid for first place.

There’s a ball game going on directly behind the bleachers and a few homers sailed over the fence, and one even came over the bleachers and on the track. Dad instructs someone at the end of the bleachers to keep watch for the balls so we don’t get konked in the head.

Kelly comes by with his second wife. He ran the greenhouse that used to sit behind our house, across the drainage ditch, where my brother Bob used to work. So Kelly sits with us a while and with him, his second wife. He talks about the summer being too short, and now he’s back to driving school bus again. He hired two Amish boys to help him put new windows in his house. He thinks he’s going to try to make hay this week, depending on the rain situation. We get an update on all 5 of his kids, spread far and wide, and none of them came back home for the holiday weekend.

After about an hour and a half, Mom and I get tired of the noise and the hard bleachers and took off walking. The junior prom committee is running the lemonade stand so we get some of that, even though I know it’s going to be too sweet for me. Right next to it is Dor-Lo’s pizza a mainstay at all the local festivals for as long as I can remember. We look over the raffle drawing prizes and sit on the bench outside the re-located train depot, drink our lemonade and watch the goings-on. After a while we decide to check out the Hileman building where an assortment of flowers and produce are lined up with blue and red ribbons attached. The Garden Club had crafted a pretty nice looking quilt for a raffle drawing, constructed of squares made by the members.

That’s where Dad finds us. He gives us the car keys and announces he’s going back to the barbecue pit to get us some chicken to take home. We drive out the back way, and seeing all the cars parked in the outlots, we’re doubly grateful that Roeder showed us special favor in getting a close-up space. We turn up White Ave, driving past where Grandma used to live. They’ve enclosed the front, have put on nice yellow siding and put up a nice big garage.

Throughout the afternoon and especially driving back to Cleveland, I think that this agreeable little slice of time in a small rural community, my home town seems a half a world away from the central Cleveland neighborhood where I work. My home town is quiet for the most part, except for the trucks that rumble down highway 60 past the front of our house, and the distant train whistles that sometimes sound so close when the wind is blowing just right. There are lots of big houses and big yards and big trees, some of which I remember being planted when I was a kid. There are folks who know each other and take the time to help their neighbors out. If we hear a siren, we look out the window when it passes by and wonder if its someone we know.

Being surrounded by farmland, and largely populated with people who were or are farmers, there’s a deep sense of connection with the land. We know first hand what "home-grown" means, having picked tomatoes and green beans in our own back yards. We grew up going to the county fair every year and participating in 4-H. We went to school with kids who belonged to the Future Farmers of America, and had already done morning chores on the farm before coming to school.

Continuing the drive back to Cleveland, right about where Rte 20 becomes a divided highway I see that the tops of the trees are golden, the last rays of the day’s sun give them a warm cast. As the four lane divided highway turns into Interstate 480 and 8 lanes, I can see a beautiful golden glow in the western sky in my rearview mirrors. Labor Day is ending for another year. Up ahead I see intercontinental airliners flying over I-480, coming in for a landing at Hopkins.

I think about the work week ahead. My office is surrounded by blacktop and concrete and structures. Many of the people who come to The City Mission have led lives in such stark contrast to my own. A fairly significant percentage have never seen the outside of a city. They wouldn’t be able to discern a green bean plant from a pepper plant unless.... " [That's where my thoughts ended back when I wrote this in Sept. 06 so I'll leave it at that.]

"Back when I was a kid..." we watched horse pulls on Labor Day. Draft horses that are bred for strength and agility pull loads down the track. Dad has a story about the superior strength of the horses his family used on the farm. Maybe I can get him to tell it again.