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BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO Last week, two Massachusetts women lost their jobs for a failed attempt at humor in Arlington National Cemetery. People who were particularly offended mounted the effort to have them fired.
If only it were the first act of disrespect at Arlington, I would be able to offer up more outrage. But I seem to have grown desensitized to public stupidity. From the self-absorbed people who are unaware of their surroundings at even the most sacred sites, all the way to the forgotten FBI investigation of the mishandling of human remains at Arlington, the Facebook frenzy over this random act of brainlessness seems somewhat disingenuous. Maybe I’ve just been conditioned to expect people to act as if every tourist attraction — even if it’s a war memorial or national cemetery — is a cool ride at Disney World. Here’s what happened last week to prompt the firings: Lindsey Stone was hunched next to a sign in Arlington cemetery that reads “Respect and silence,” holding up her middle finger and pretending to shout, while her friend Jamie Schuh snapped a photo. The “humor” was that they were challenging authority, as they are apparently wont to do.
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BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO It was almost six years ago that I wrote about the idea of creating a holiday parade in downtown Wilmington. After the column appeared, I became part of the committee to create Wilmington’s HomeTown HoliDazzle, working at the outset with several of the people who have labored tirelessly every year since then to make HoliDazzle come to life each November. However, I’ve never actually been able to experience HoliDazzle in person, which broke my heart. The military moved our family in the fall of that year, a couple months before the first parade, and we haven’t been able to travel at Thanksgiving. I do remember receiving beautifully detailed, thoughtful emails from friends and fellow committee members who attended and enjoyed that first HoliDazzle parade in 2007 — it made me feel a connection, however small, when I was hundreds of miles away. The military moved our family back to Wilmington this summer, so I am pretty darn thrilled to experience my first HoliDazzle (and Merry TubaChristmas!) on Saturday, which will be the sixth annual event. HoliDazzle brings 10,000 people to downtown Wilmington each year, and I cannot wait to be one of them. Following is the original column, published in the News Journal on Jan. 4, 2007. *** I stood in downtown Lebanon with 39,999 other people early in December and thought, “What does Lebanon have that Wilmington doesn’t have?” I mean, we have a quaint and picturesque downtown, with its beautiful architecture, active business community and government offices that haven’t relocated to a strip mall.
A few of the best restaurants in town even eke out business in the midst of a chain nation. So why were thousands of people gathering in downtown Lebanon instead of downtown Wilmington? Why were people shelling out money all over Warren County? A parade. A holiday parade. Everyone loves a parade. But not just any parade, I’ve come to believe. A parade with a twist. A parade with specificity. A parade like Lebanon’s annual horse-and-carriage parade, which drew an estimated 80,000 people (40,000 in the afternoon, and 40,000 in the evening) and brought participants from hundreds of miles away. The mild weather helped this year’s attendance in Lebanon, but I also saw thousands turn out in last year’s bitter cold and freezing rain. Lebanon cashes in on its historic appeal by harking back to the pre-automobile era, with horse-drawn carriages decked out in jingle bells and sparkling lights. Towns in eastern North Carolina, where my husband and I have lived, capitalize on their nautical appeal by holding Christmas flotillas, parades of boats decked out in lights, viewed by multitudes of people in waterfront downtowns. Heck, we even drove 600 miles to see a flotilla this year. OK, so we technically went for Thanksgiving with friends, but a medical emergency nixed those dinner plans and thus made room for the flotilla to become the highlight of the trip. The point is that a holiday parade is a perfect way to show off a downtown and open local doors to people with Christmas lists in hand and money in their pockets. So I propose a New Year’s thought (I wouldn’t dare create resolutions for anyone), borrowing on an idea from my adopted hometown of Richlands, N.C.: Let’s start a nighttime tractor parade. That’s right — our farmers can bedazzle their John Deeres, make merry with their Massey Fergusons and alight their Allis-Chalmers tractors. They can compete for bragging rights. They can celebrate their final long nights in the fields. They can bring us, our kids, our parents and our friends into downtown Wilmington in the middle of the cold months. Along with celebrating Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Eid or winter solstice, we can celebrate our city’s farming roots. We’re a farming city — our only “skyscraper” is a feed mill. We’re a farming county — with 840 farms, according to the 2000 census. We do it well, and we should create our niche with the area’s only nighttime tractor parade. It might start small, as the Lebanon parade did, but it could likely morph into a regional event. Antique tractor owners might trailer their model B tractors from parts unknown to get a chance to show off for an appreciative audience. Urbanites might bring their kids here, and we’d gladly take their cash. There’s a whole year now before the Wilmington Tractor Spectacular would have to begin. Think we could do it? BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO If we’d had a million dollars and a hovercraft, we may have continued living near Washington, D.C., many more years.
There were countless benefits to living in the D.C. suburbs, but the cost of living, the traffic and the distance from our families in Ohio were major downsides. Clinton County has its own perks, of course, and in the season of Thanksgiving, I’m sharing some of what makes my family and I grateful to live here. *Seeing stars. The night sky is unpolluted at our house, so the sight of billions of stars in cloudless darkness even makes taking the trash to the street an opportunity to stare up at the sky in awe. *Lack of traffic jams. Sure, we sometimes get stuck behind a tractor or two, but there’s a comfort in knowing that a 20-minute trip away from Wilmington is pretty much always going to be a 20-minute trip -- not an unexpected two-hour exercise in frustration. *Graeter’s ice cream. I sure did miss Buckeye Blitz. *Cornfield sunsets. Almost every night, I snap a photo of the sun setting beyond the fields. It’s like ever-changing art. It may not be an oceanfront vista, but dusk here among the rolling hills is pretty darn close. *Tomatoes. Inexpensive, plentiful tomatoes grown in southwestern Ohio soil taste like BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO This Sunday, if you want to personally thank a veteran, just turn left at the sweet-and-sour chicken. You’ll likely run into someone who has fought for your freedom.
If you want to thank someone who has gone out of his way to make those veterans feel special, just look behind the counter at No. 1 China Buffet. As he has done for at least 12 years -- first in Hillsboro and now in Wilmington -- Billy Kong has opened the doors of his Chinese restaurant to military veterans, offering them his appreciation and a free meal. A man who was 12 years old when his family moved to New York City from the Fujian Province in China now hosts what has become Wilmington’s preeminent celebration of Veterans Day. For Kong, it’s simply a way to give back. “That’s the best way for me to express myself, to say thank you,” he says. For those who’ve seen the gratitude on the faces of the veterans, it’s a stirring display of generosity. “It’s amazing. It’s just packed from the time he opens to the time he closes,” says Keith Knauff, who owns Knauff Satellite Sales and Service in New Vienna. Knauff has gone along when his brother, Phil Knauff, who served in the Army BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO Megan Holland and Jordan Woolums have worked hard to secure spots on the soccer team at Indiana University, a Division I school that has been a member of the Big Ten conference since 1899.
They’ve played together for two years in college, after participating most of their lives in various leagues and soccer clubs: Jordan in St. Louis and Megan in Cincinnati. They’ve spent untold hours together as Hoosiers, running drills, competing in matches, and traveling around the Midwest and as far as Malibu, Calif., and Tampa, Fla. But it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that Jordan, Megan and their parents realized their relationship can be traced back almost 50 years to tiny Martinsville, Ohio, population: 462. Megan, 20, is the daughter of Bryan and Julie Holland. Julie grew up on a farm outside of Martinsville, where she was known by her maiden name, Julie Cramton. Jordan, 19, is the daughter of Larry and Mickey Woolums. As a boy growing up in Cuba, Ohio, Larry was then known by his middle name, Keith, and is still called that by family members, including his mother, JoAnn Woolums of Wilmington. BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO Emily nearly kept my fiancé from making it to our wedding in 1993. Just three years after the honeymoon, Bertha tried her best to destroy our new house. Her big sister Fran blew into town two months later, crashing through our fence and taking several prized pecan trees with her. A Category 3 hurricane, Fran was a monster storm that killed 27 people overall and destroyed 696 homes in our North Carolina county alone. The only reason Fran was not even more destructive was because Hurricane Bertha, also arriving in the summer of 1996, had essentially cleared the way weeks earlier. Sneaky Emily had brushed the Outer Banks before heading back to sea, so the military gave the go-ahead for my fiancé to travel to his own wedding. Bertha, a Category 2 storm and the first hurricane I’d ever lived through, felt more like an extreme, long-lasting Ohio thunderstorm. It also seemed to forge a oceanic path for dozens of subsequent East Coast hurricanes, ending a 36-year lull as it became the first full-fledged hurricane to directly hit the North Carolina coast since Donna in 1960.
Our friends who lived with their young children in a mobile home on Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base hunkered down for both hurricanes at our off-base house, playing Yahtzee by candlelight to calm nerves. Our inland home had stood standing since the late 1800s, so we figured its odds were better than something put together in a factory in the 1980s. My husband already had a healthy respect for hurricanes, ever since he flew into Okinawa in 1991 during Typhoon Kinna, as part of an airline’s misguided attempt to “outrun” the storm. Airplanes and typhoons do not play well together, and even the crew was terrified. Bertha’s 100-mph winds sounded as if they would peel off our metal roof like a sardine can. Fran roared as if it would peel the entire house from its foundation. But we were lucky. We survived mostly unscathed. But those storms destroyed building, roads and lives. I can still picture the refrigerators floating next to upside-down fishing boats and cars that had been tossed into the water like Matchbox toys. Hurricane winds uprooted many of the Bradford pear trees planted near the Marine base in honor of each of the 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors killed in the Beirut bombing in 1983. A local car dealership quickly raised the money to replace the memorial trees, but it was another loss those families shouldn’t have had to bear. What I know from the post-hurricane months (and years) is that the American Red Cross, chartered by the U.S. Congress and sustained with donations, appears in a disaster area even faster than the TV news satellite trucks and the Davey Tree bucket trucks that stream in on the highways. I also know that long after most of the outside help and attention has turned elsewhere, coastal communities struggle to rebuild. We survived those major hurricanes, and minor ones in other places, which I reminded myself Monday night as gusts up to 40 mph battered our house in Clinton County, 600 miles from the nearest coast. Just as I have done for countless hurricanes over the past 16 years, I carefully tracked the official hurricane symbol, the one that looks like combative commas. I’d never had to worry about wind-chill factors during hurricane spin-up, though. Hurricane Sandy was predicted to be extremely dangerous and was threatening friends and family in Washington, D.C., and New York City, which worried me even more. A first-grade friend of ours, Liem, heard the storm news near D.C. and said he found it hard to believe it would be bad because “‘Sandy’ sounds like she’d be a nice woman.” He had a point. “If they really wanted us to be worried, they should call it ‘Hurricane House-Destroyer’ or something like that.” Adding “Superstorm” before “Sandy” certainly helps make it a more appropriate moniker. I calmed my nerves by following the pre-disaster protocol of heading to the grocery store, ready to grab the last of the bottled water and bread -- a half-baked move in a landlocked Ohio town. The Kroger shelves were fully stocked late that afternoon. That’s not to say Ohio hasn’t been affected over the years by its share of hurricanes and hurricane-created weather. The path of Hurricane Katrina, the costliest U.S. hurricane, went directly through Clinton County in 2005, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Since 1888, more than 15 hurricane paths have come within 100 miles of Wilmington. Usually, Ohio feels the effects of far-away hurricanes in the heavy rain that they bring. But the biggest impact came in 2008, without much rain, when Hurricane Ike’s winds caused $1.1 billion in damage to our state. Growing up, I’d sometimes question why I was called a Hurryin’ Hurricane, but it makes a little more sense these days. |
Eileen Brady:Observant and curious. Good listener. Archives
March 2014
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