The View From Mount Pleasant: Thoughts On Veterans' Day

With two little babies at home in Lancaster, Ohio, my Grandfather, Marvin Lester Reid, answered his country's call.

Marvin Lester Reid, December 16, 1945, in Japan.

He served in the Pacific. I know this not because he ever spoke of his service, but because my Mom had a little red kimono he sent home to his baby girl, and I once saw a portrait from a studio in Japan, in his dress uniform with a vase of orchids placed in the corner. I saw that photo when I was in college, in a shoebox of family photos. I had never seen my grandfather as a young man, and was startled: I felt like I was looking at myself. Same long face and big earlobes, same lanky frame. I was never a stout Gregory/Hosfield, always more of an attenuated Reid. I was home relaxing on a break from studying English literature, looking at a portrait of my Grandfather at exactly my age, on leave from defending his country.

He was a man of small town Midwestern civic virtue, in the best possible sense. He took obvious pride in his two story white wood frame house, with L-shaped front porch, set up on a steep embankment like all the houses on East Allen Street. He built a brick walkway the length of the long narrow backyard, lined with a long garden of roses, currants, and every vegetable you could grow in Southeastern Ohio. In a shady corner, a porch swing hung from an arbor he built under a crabapple tree. At the terminus of the walkway, paved with bricks salvaged when Lancaster paved its streets with asphalt, a white frame garage that looked more like a stable housed his immaculately waxed Ford LTD, traded in every four years at the local Ford dealer for an updated version of the same.

Jessie and Tim get a good seat on the stoop for the parade, January 4, 1971, Lancaster, Ohio, where my Mon's parents, Lester and Martha Reid lived.

 He did the family's shopping, and going "marketing" with him was an adventure. I loved riding in those plush velour Ford seats, as we went to the butcher, to farmstands, to places that had good butter and cheese. Even when Kroger put in a new, larger supermarket, he still shopped like he was at the local butcher or bakers, speaking to the deli man about cheeses, checking the produce carefully, scrutinizing cuts of meat and engaging the head butcher if something didn't look right.

He knew the proper seasons and places to gather morels, when the hazelnuts would be prime for gathering on Mt. Pleasant, where the best blackberry brambles were. Though his heart was too weak to scale Mt. Pleasant, he encouraged us to climb to the top, while he rested on a boulder. He wanted us to see that view: Lancaster's rows of neat frame houses, the beautiful fairgrounds, the rich fields that stretched all the way to the Hocking Hills.

Back at the house on Allen Street, I knew that at some point the first floor parlor had been converted to the master bedroom, the dining room was made into the living room, and the back porch enclosed as a bath. I knew Grandpa Reid had difficulty with stairs, that his heart had been weakened by rheumatoid fever picked up while serving in the Pacific. But I never thought of him as disabled: he worked all his life, tended his garden, took care of his home. I never heard him complain or express regret.


Holidays and special weekends were spent down in Lancaster. My Grandmother's table strained under the weight of robust turkey breasts and dozens of pies, of glistening glazed hams and cheesecake with homemade black cherry topping. Adults gathered around the kitchen table for Euchre and Camels, cousins sprawled on the living room floor with dogs and games of our own invention. When it was time to leave my grandmother and grandfather kept bringing more and more parcels of food to the car for us to take home. Thy wanted to make sure that way up in Akron we would still have good butter (and homemade rolls and drumsticks and pies and casserole.) My grandfather always told us to be careful (I think he mistrusted my Dad's Japanese cars) and lingered on the front porch until our car disappeared down Allen Street.

I have a brass antique car piggy bank, my Grandfather gave one each to Tim and I, from The Farmers & Citizens Bank of Lancaster. I am sure it is conglomerated into Chase or PNC or somesuch by now, but it always reminds me of him, his pride in his community, how he thought Ohio was the most beautiful place. I think we used to think he was a little provincial, old fashioned. But he had seen other continents, and oceans, and to him, the Grand Canyon could never compare to Old Man's Cave, Buckeye Lake was at least the equal of Captiva Island, Mt. Pleasant a more than splendid enough view.

It was an icy January when he died, salting those steep front steps on Allen Street. He didn't want the mailman to have a difficult time. He slipped and fell to the base. He died of head injuries. Of course, you could say that a septuagenarian WWII veteran with a weak heart had no business being out in an ice storm on those steep slippery steps. But that was not my grandfather: you salted your steps. You served your country. You looked out for your community. That is who he was, and what he did.

Every Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, I think of Lester Marvin Reid. I think of his soft spoken civic pride, his dutifulness, his love of country, of nature and things that grow, the way he provided for his family. I see those virtues in his daughter, and only hope that I can become a worthy grandson.

My Mom found the photo: my Grandfather, Marvin Lester Reid, on leave from the Pacific. My Mom, on the left, looks so much like my sister here. And I have my Grandfather's earlobes and forehead. Except for my Grandfather's uniform, I am certain my Grandmother, Martha Plank Reid, stitched everyone's clothes here.

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They Tore A Schoolhouse Down Today

I’m always sad to see a classic three-story red brick schoolhouse torn down.

September 24, 2009. Philadelphia, PA.

I DO understand, it is being done in the name of our children's brighter future. The new school, I am sure, will be smart-wired and green and energy efficient and ADA compliant and all those good things.

William Brantly Hanna Pvblic School, 1908-2009.

But, still I can't help but think we lose something intangible.

Could not shake the feeling, she was not quite ready to go.

I taught in one of these sturdy old behemoths, General Wagner Middle School in East Oak Lane, Philadelphia. Shabbily maintained though she was, smelling of sour milk and old floor wax, she had good bones. Beneath grime and neglect, at least a little grandeur undergirds bureaucratic negligence. On certain clear sunny mornings after a holiday floor buffing, you almost felt hopeful ascending that marble staircase.

I am pretty sure the School Reform Commission is staffed by those same people as on the committee in 12 Monkeys.

An inherent public spiritedness pervades these durable old structures. From the carved limestone nameplates to the embellishments in stone and copper, a trace of civic pride remains from when this was a bustling city, a growing neighborhood, a new school, a hopeful place.

Before it was a boulevard, it was Broad Street, and there was a red brick schoolhouse there.

 Maybe my own past haunts me here. The low-slung brick and cinderblock elementary school I attended sat on the former playground of a three-story red brick schoolhouse it replaced. Broad Street School's cornerstone sat in the courtyard of our new school, a vestigial remnant of what was no longer there. Its presence was felt, but rarely referred to. One of my older teachers (she seemed elderly at the time but was probably only in her 50s) told the story of the students and teachers walking across the playground from the old school to the new on that bright spring morning in 1970. They carried their old books across the asphalt to the new.

The Broad Street name plate, in DeWitt's courtyard

That story stuck with me. I remember the jarring feeling as a student at the new Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary School, opening my battered old red Dick and Jane reader in Mrs. Suter's first grade reading class, to see "Broad Street School" stamped on the inside cover of that tattered old text. In a few months those battered old readers would be replaced by the new McGraw-Hill Reading series, orange and green and yellow and alive with 70s color, as the adventures of Dick and Jane and their ornery pet goat gave way to stories about Hector and We Lei.

Gordon M. DeWitt faculty, circa 1974

A shiny new school is a good and hopeful thing. All children deserve it. I just fear that something solid and durable and permanent is being replaced by something lesser and synthetic and faux stucco and somehow more shabby. I hope that is not the case. I hope for the students at whatever the school is that replaces Hanna, that it stands as a beacon in this rough but enduring neighborhood, that it stands among but above the rowhomes that it surrounds, that it offers a vision for the future that respects the place where these children come from, but also sheds a light toward someplace new and unforeseen.

A mighty task for a mere building to perform. I hope our school reform leaders understand that it takes more than a new building. Even our neglected aging red brick behemoths, on certain February mornings when the winter sun hits the buffed marble staircase jut right, were big enough places for the most audacious of dreams.

And I just couldn't shake the feeling that Hanna wasn't quite ready to go.