I’ve never had Legos. I’ve had Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs and even a hand-me-down Erector Set but no Legos. Both my Tinker Toys and my Lincoln Logs were made out of real wood but I had no Legos made out of anything. If having wooden Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs isn’t sufficiently impressive, consider that I also had a Mr. Potato Head that did not come with a plastic body but required a real potato and my family’s Clue Game had a real rope (string) and lead pipe. Knowing all that should make it abundantly clear why I had no Legos. My childhood occurred at a time so far removed from the present that Legos had not yet been invented.
The Lego company and something called “Automatic Binding Bricks” did exist during my childhood but it would be the late 1950s before the sort of plastic brick we now know would appear. Initially seen only in Lego’s home country of Denmark, they would not show up in the USA until 1961. That was a little too late for me but Legos were part of my sons’ toy collections. They were not a big part although they were around enough for me to experience stepping on them barefoot in the dark. The experience is certainly a memorable one but the pain level does not, in my opinion, equal that of stepping on a Barbie high heel under similar circumstances. Legos really took hold a generation later and at least one grandson dived pretty deep into the phenomenon.
Others took even deeper dives to become LEGO® Certified Professionals. One of those professionals, Ryan “The Brickman” McNaught, is responsible for “Bricktionary: The ultimate LEGO® A-Z” exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center that I visited Friday. It is based on a book of the same name. Learning that A is for alligator is a good start.
The Seattle Space Needle just beyond the alligator had me stumped until I figured out it was part of the ‘B’ section. B is for buildings like the Space Needle and the Sydney Opera House.
There are several hands-on stations in the exhibit where lots of Lego elements are available to experiment with. At the earthquake station, visitor-built structures can be tested for stability on adjustable shaking platforms.
It took me a second to realize that G is for garden but knowing that H is for Harley Davidson was immediate. I was pretty impressed with the spokes made out of bricks and I thought the giant flower so cool that I used a shot of just the bloom for an Instagram/Facebook post.
I found this hands-on station extra interesting and spent some time talking with the two people operating it. In the end, I participated myself. It has some similarities with assembling a jigsaw puzzle except all of the “puzzling” has already been done. Screens display random sections of the big image for visitors to copy onto 6×6 panels. The pattern I followed to assemble my section is here. Completed sections are placed in their proper position by one of the station workers. The image being assembled here is a frontal view of the Museum Center. There are others including an awesome view of the Grand Canyon. It takes a number of days to complete an image but several have already been assembled and disassembled since the exhibit opened in March. There is talk of the Museum Center image remaining in Cincinnati when the exhibit moves on and I briefly had visions of my little panel becoming part of a permanent museum display. I quickly realized, however, that the Museum Center, the Grand Canyon, and every other image will likely rise and fall many more times before the exhibit closes in August.
This Lego model of the Museum Center, a.k.a., Union Terminal, sits at the line separating the big exhibit from the obligatory gift shop. One of the items available in the shop is the Bricktionary book mentioned earlier. I should have checked to see if it gives instructions for building all 150+ models in the exhibit. If so, then anyone could duplicate the exhibit with a little free time and about 3,000,000 Legos. If only my condo was a skosh bigger.
Amy E. Brownlee is a lifelong Cincinnatian. She naturally learned a lot about the city growing up here then used that knowledge and added much more during her ten years at Cincinnati Magazine. An awful lot of the treasures she writes about in Lost Treasures of Cincinnati were lost before she arrived but a rather frightening number have disappeared during her lifetime. Of course, an even larger number have disappeared during mine. Neither of us is responsible for that. I swear it’s coincidence pure and simple.
The book opens with “Food and Drink” in Section 1 then covers “Entertainment” and “Retail” in the next two sections. The smallest section, “Media”, is followed by the largest, “Community”. Definitions for those section titles are not particularly rigid and the size of the “Community” section probably indicates that it is the least rigid of all. It is where things like churches and breweries, of which Cincinnati had more than a few, appear.
Most, but not quite all, of the breweries mentioned in the book were gone before I got here. Likewise with restaurants and attractions which together comprise the biggest part of things that have disappeared during my lifetime. I caught one show, Hair, at the Shubert (“Entertainment”) before it was torn down. I also saw one movie at the Albee (“Entertainment”) but I don’t remember what it was. I had one meal each at The Gourmet Room and the Maisonette (“Food and Drink”) before they closed. There are quite a few places in this book where I ate one or more meals or watched one or more movies, plays, games, or concerts. Encountering each of them on these pages prompted memories that went way beyond the single paragraph of text. Reading about places that were already gone when I came to Cincinnati didn’t prompt any memories, of course, but it did make me appreciate just how many treasures have been lost.
I really enjoyed reading Lost Treasures of Cincinnati cover-to-cover front-to-back but as I did, two other ways of reading the book came to mind. With its fairly short standalone essays, it seems like a natural fit for that popular personal reading room with the porcelain furniture. Its use as a reference book also seems rather natural. I don’t mean an every-last-detail reference book to use in conducting deep-dive research but a great place to answer questions like “What was the name of that boat-shaped restaurant?” or “What happened to our NBA team?”. The full index will help the book play that role.
Greg Hand has been a man of letters — or at least a man of words — his entire adult life. He began as a newspaper reporter, moved up to editor, left to head up a university PR department, co-authored three books about the university while he was there, then retired. I was not even slightly aware of any of this as it was happening. I only became aware of Hand’s existence when I stumbled upon the blog he started post-retirement. His knowledge of local history and ability to dig up information to augment that knowledge was immediately apparent and I’ve been an ardent reader of that blog ever since that happy discovery. The blog’s name is Cincinnati Curiosities and it can be found 
In fact, later in the book, Hand offers another very different capsulated view of the city. On December 12, 1890, he tells us, “The Palace Hotel had elephant steak on the menu because an elephant was executed by firing squad that morning at the Cincinnati Zoo. Hundreds of people watched. That pretty much summarizes Cincinnati in 1890.”
“The Sensational and the Senseless” is the fourth of ten chapters. Other chapters tell of monsters in the Ohio River (“The Old Weird Cincinnati”), Fanny Trollope’s visit during the “Porkoplis” period (“Tales From the Old City”), the possibility that striptease was invented in Cincinnati (“Freaks, Flesh, and Footlights”), and a large variety of other topics. The striptease claim is based on Millie De Leon’s orchestrated removal of several garters in 1901, and Hand cites the claim in suggesting that a Striptease Hall of Fame might be an “appropriate addition to our Over-the-Rhine neighborhood”. 
Hand’s usually light-hearted reports are often accompanied by contemporary illustrations. At left is a Pears Soap advertisement based on Lillie Langtry’s famous bath in Apollinaris water at Cincinnati’s Grand Hotel in 1883. It’s in the chapter titled “Nudity, Naughtness, and Negotiable Affection”, and if that doesn’t get you interested in the book I don’t know what will.
This was one of the most flat-out enjoyable reads I’ve had in a long time. I have seen Katie perform many times, heard her talk on the radio several times, and even chatted with her personally a few times. I knew her as a talented musician and entertaining storyteller but I did not know her as a writer. Others, it seems, have been aware of Laur’s writing skills for some time. It’s my impression that nothing other than the foreword, an introduction, and Katie’s acknowledgments was written specifically for this book. In one of the book’s essays, Katie talks of selling her writing and says she sold everything she wrote. From that, I assume that each of the essays and stories that make up Red Dirt Girl has previously appeared in print somewhere. Where I don’t know and regret that where ever it was, it was outside my field of vision. That I am only now seeing the literary side of Katie is very much my loss. This gal can write.
