Until last Friday, I don’t believe I had attended a single football game played by my high school alma mater since I graduated. Furthermore, it seems quite likely that I had not attended a game as a spectator ever. I had attended every game in the four years prior to graduation but it was always as a member of the marching band. Friday night was a new experience for me in several ways not the least of which was the favorable final score.
Of course, I’d thought about attending a game on several occasions but never followed through. I probably would not have made it to Friday’s game if my friend Terry had not been paying more attention to things than I was. Although our friendship goes back even further than high school, we did not attend the same school. Terry’s son did attend Ansonia High School and played on successful teams there in the 1980s.
As the regular season ended, it was Terry who made me aware of Ansonia’s 10-0 record and their entry into the 2023 playoffs. As the #2 seed for Division VII, their first two playoff games were on their home field but I was, unfortunately, out of town for both. Fortunately, they won them both (52-7, 34-8) to set up Friday’s match with St Henry at a neutral site. Also on the fortunate side of things, I was home for this one.
The game was a good one. Ansonia never trailed but our victory was not assured until the closing moments. With no kicking and little passing, the Tigers repeatedly moved the chains on third and fourth down with what often seemed like just inches to spare. The officials thought only one of their two-point conversion attempts was successful although there was serious disagreement from AHS fans on one of the others. Ansonia will play #1 seed Marion Local next Friday but where has not been determined. Whether or not Terry and I are there will depend a lot on the location.
ADDENDUM 19-Nov-2023: The Marion Local game was also at the Piqua stadium, and we did attend. Read about it here.
As implied by this headline from my days as a student, rooting for a winning team was once an impossible dream. The thirty-eight-game streak it refers to came to an end just a little over sixty years ago on September 13, 1963.
Both of these images are from the 1964 Ansonia High School yearbook. The first contains photos of the seniors on the team that ended the streak along with a local newspaper report of the event which attracted some national attention as well. The second image shows the entire team. In those days, yearbooks, at least those for small Ohio schools, were entirely black and white with the exception of the endpapers. There could be no better use of the book’s only splash of color than recognizing the group that ended what I believe was the longest losing streak in the nation at the time.
I mentioned that my previous AHS football game attendance involved the school band. The band’s fortunes over the last six decades do not appear to match those of the team. The picture at right shows the band during halftime of Friday’s game. I counted about twenty members, and Terry said that was noticeably more than what he remembered from the last game he attended.
There were 54 in the band that would have marched at that big 1963 win.
Cyndie’s done it again. As I began to write this review of Cyndie L. Gerken’s fourth book on the National Road in Ohio, I revisited my reviews of the previous three thinking I might come up with a better opening line but everything I saw just reinforced my initial thought. Cyndie has indeed done it again.
Although I certainly know better, I tend to instinctively think of big stone arches when I hear the phrase “National Road bridges”. One reason is that many of those stone bridges, some of them S-shaped, are still in existence. There were also many wooden bridges along the road but all were much shorter-lived. Building the Bridges… includes both. It identifies twenty-one covered wooden bridges built for the National Road in Ohio in addition to probably forty-some stone bridges. There were also well over a thousand stone culverts and one reason an accurate count of stone bridges is difficult to produce is that not everyone followed the same rules when distinguishing culverts and bridges. Span length was and is the distinguishing characteristic. Twelve feet, twenty feet, and no doubt some other numbers of feet were used to make the distinction and some reports did not distinguish the two at all.
After telling us about as many of the bridge builders as she could identify, Gerken touches on some of the iconic National Road bridges east of Ohio, including the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, before beginning a county-by-county trek across the state. Each county chapter begins with a thumbnail of the county and the National Road through it. A map locating the National Road bridges in the county appears very early in each chapter. Sections on each of the bridges and some of the culverts in the county appear also in east-to-west sequence. Just as some bridges east of Ohio were touched upon preceding the border-to-border coverage, a few in Indiana follow it. 
At a minimum, the location of each structure and what it crossed is given. The builder or builders are identified if known and, thanks to some pretty good sleuthing, many of them are. Beyond that, the information given for each bridge or culvert varies widely but it is a natural variation. For unnamed culverts over unnamed intermittent streams, location might be just about the only thing known. For major structures, lots of additional information might be included and usually supported by various graphics. Topographic maps are fairly common and there are lots of historic photographs and drawings. Plenty of modern photos also appear and if a structure is still standing there’s a good chance that the book contains a very modern picture of it taken by the author herself. Stories about events associated with happenings at or near a particular bridge can pop up anytime and are often fleshed out by reproducing contemporary reports.
History does repeat itself. In the early 1970s, I lived with my wife and two sons in a house with a driveway that sloped to a paved area in the back. That driveway was an ideal spot for the four-year-old to give his Big Wheel a workout. While I worked on something on a car behind the house, he repeatedly pushed the three-wheeler to the top of the hill so he could come rocketing down the hill, brace his feet on the pedals to stop the big front wheel, and throw the rear wheels into a perfect 180-degree slide. This was exactly what Big Wheels were designed for. After one of his countless slides, he looked up at me and made an incredibly insightful observation. “Dad”, he said, “I bet you wish you could do this.”
The stories are divided into six sections: “Ghostly Legends”, “Legendary Characters”, “Legendary Villians”, “Legendary Places”, “The Unexplained”, and “Legendary Events”. Having lived my entire life in southern Ohio, I was already at least somewhat familiar with most of them. There are exceptions including all four “Ghostly Legends”. It is the only section where every story is new to me and it is the only section dealing more or less directly with possibly supernatural phenomena. I’m thinking those two facts might very well be related. I’m also thinking that this is the right place to mention that Willis is the founder and director of the paranormal research group The Ghosts of Ohio. I find it somehow reassuring that this is also the only section where that comes into play and even here there is no straying from the “verifiable facts” approach.
I don’t believe I learned anything new about any of the “Legendary Characters” but I appreciate the concise and complete descriptions. Willis’ reporting on John Symmes and his hollow earth theory is among the most even-handed and comprehensive I’ve read. Likewise, his tale of “Legendary Villian” George Remus where I did learn a few details for the first time.
“Legendary Places” combines a place I had never heard of (Athens Pentagram) with three that I am quite familiar with. That somehow makes it my favorite section. One of the three familiar places, the Loveland Castle, was the subject of a blog post here 
