A Little piece of Paradise… College Hill, Ohio - SELFCRAFT

‘Doc’ Miller’s drug store, built much later on the other side of Hamilton and nearly opposite theHollywood, was much larger and more diverse in stock. He had a soda fountain...not as big or glamorousas Dow’s, which had a ‘Moon River’ machine and sold sandwiches...and had plastic phonograph recordscalled ‘Hit O’ The Week!’ for thirty-five cents. That was a dime more than my weekly allowance but Ifinally saved enough to buy one. It didn’t last very long; when I was through with it, we used it like aFrisbee.Miller’s Drugs was a major help with my biggest under-10 project: my ‘museum show’ in aid of thenew parish house at the Presbyterian Church. I have always been an avid collector of rocks, shells,playing cards, old kitchen implements...whatever. My stellar piece was a meteorite loaned me by a man inGlendale who, as a boy, had seen it fall on his family’s farm in Silverton. I couldn’t lift it, alone, but -with help - got it on my coaster wagon to take to the new building. Miller’s Drugs paid for my tickets, aquarter for children, and fifty cents for adults. He got an advertisement on the back, we made over fiftydollars for the building fund. I had to give back the meteorite; someone returned it to Glendale.My other ‘main’ trip with the coaster wagon was to the Kroger store on Hamilton Avenue. Mr.Bolam, who supplied most of our groceries from his shop at Belmont and Llanfair, didn’t carry ‘maltextract’ but I rather gathered that my older brothers didn’t want to talk about it, anyway. They’d give mea dime to bring a can or two back to the house. I didn’t know, then, why they wanted it. It clearly said, onthe front of the big can, ‘For Baking Purposes Only!’ and I knew they never baked a thing. Several times,bottles cached in back corners of our old basement exploded and I was told that it was ‘root beer.’ Didn’tsmell like it, though.My older brother went to the C. H. School for two years. I never did, but I used the public librarybranch a lot. I found my first detective story when I was 10 or 11, about a ‘dick’ named Creek. I havebeen reading mysteries ever since. While being tutored at 14 (after an unfortunate lapse of performance atschool), the young university student took me there to find Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, my firstlook into the world of higher erudition. I can’t say that it worked wonders on my imagination, then.Grandfather’s house, Laurel Court, was another home to all us kids. He had married for a secondtime and Mother Kate tolerated almost any kind or number of invasion if it was reasonably quiet andbehaved. Better yet, she had wonderful cooks and a kind, friendly butler named Brown who didn’t watchtoo closely when we’d take down the key to the cellar or to the freight elevator....both prohibited areas.Mr. Corbett, the head gardener, was far tougher. No climbing on the statuary. No climbing on trees. Noscuffling up the pebbles in the garden walks or frightening the giant carp in the Japanese garden. He wasright, of course, but he didn’t have the ‘touch’ which Brown had, which even made one careful to washdirty hands before playing the grand piano or the dinner chimes. A favorite phrase of Brown’s has stayedwith me to this day: Remember, Chil--tee, you can catch more flies with honey than you can withvinegar!College Hill was a bee-hive of activity areas for growing boys and life had much honey in it. Iremember so many kind, generous people like Mr. Theobald 18 , the letter carrier who walked an eight-mileroute TWICE a day but who could take time to visit a new pup; Mr. Hildebrand, the neat night patrolman;‘Whitey, the dean of route seventeen’s motormen who’d let you ride home from the movies when you’dspent your last dime....but remember the next week to collect it for the company! Yes, ‘the cars’connected us to a big city which started at the bottom of the hill but the ‘best place in town’ was up top.18 In a 1994 letter, Mr. Thomson described Mr. Theobald as ...He was a dignified, but affable, white-haired man whom I confused with Uncle Sam...220