The Wizards on Walnut Street by Sam Swicegood

The Wizards on Walnut Street by Sam Swicegood

This is a fantasy novel set in Cincinnati, which I read as part of my project to read books set in my hometown. It's about a young person who, when their dad passes away, discovers that instead of having a boring corporate job, their dad was actually a wizard—and in order to find out why their dad died, they join the same wizarding firm.

Published: 2018
Acquired: December 2023
Read: July 2024

As a book, it is most assuredly okay. The book is self-published, and in need of a good editor in two different ways. The book has a fun premise, and Swicegood does a good job of merging wizardry with humdrum corporate life. At first I was suspicious of the book's seemingly sub-Pratchett footnotes, but I soon came to look forward to the funny and situationally appropriate excerpts from the employee handbook. The world Swicegood builds up is interesting; the three principal characters are fun. The climax is clever, one of those ones that uses previously set up rules of the magic world to good advantage. My favorite joke in the whole book is one that plays with perspective very well, when you are following a group of dark wizards in a meeting but then find out where they actually are.

But I found that the main character, Andy, often made decisions for reasons that needed to be spelled out more; in particular, their joining the wizarding firm seemed pretty arbitrary. The investigation of the conspiracy was pretty sloppily done. Basically, Andy bumbled along for over a hundred pages, not really learning anything, and then a minor character comes to him, conveniently tells him everything that's going on, and promptly vanishes from the narrative. I found Andy's relationship to their dead father pretty unclear; mostly it seemed like they hadn't really known their father, but every now and then there'd be a reference that indicated otherwise, like it was a relic from an earlier draft or something. I think a good developmental editor could have pushed Swicegood to do a strong revision that would have brought all this out more.

It also desperately needed a copyeditor. Lots of bad punctuation, missing words, poor formatting. I can't remember the last book I read that had so many typographical errors.

I read these books for the local color; Wizards on Walnut Street has more than some but less than others. There are a couple good jokes about Cincinnati chili, some of which I hadn't seen before. But if Swicegood really wanted to sell that Andy was an awkward out-of-towner in Cincinnati, he should have had all the other characters constantly asking them where they went to high school!

The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati by Lee Davis Willoughby

Americana: The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati
by Lee Davis Willoughby

The Making of America was a series of novels published from (according to LibraryThing) 1979 to 1987; there were an astounding fifty-six of them. They chronicled, as far as I can tell, the settling of the American West, but I don't think they had consistent characters or stories. The first few books are credited to a number of different authors, but beginning with book nine, they're all the work of Lee Davis Willougby... except that Lee Davis Willoughby didn't exist, it was a pseudonym for a variety of authors. LibraryThing lists six different authors known to have written under the name.

Published: 1990
Acquired: December 2022
Read: June 2023

In 1990, there was evidently an attempt to recapture the success of The Making of America with a new series of novels, Americana: The Making of the Cities. Three volumes were released, covering Cincinnati, Omaha, and Baton Rouge. These evidently were less successful, for these three were it, and thirty-three years later, I am the only person on LibraryThing to have logged any of the three novels. I picked up Cincinnati as part of my project to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati.

The novel focalizes the development of Cincinnati from the 1830s to the 1860s through a German immigrant, one of the first to come to Cincinnati. As the descendant of German immigrants myself (though they came over later, in the 1870s), I was particularly interested to read this take on it.

Alas, as you might have guessed of a pseudonymously written work of the type where you might pump out seven books in a year... it's not very good. I think my biggest problem is that despite the title, you don't get much of a sense of the city. Most of the book is given over to the melodrama of its protagonist's life, with the development of the city as a vague background. What is it like to walk around and live in Cincinnati in 1830? 1850? 1860? We only get glimpses. Facts about the history feel crowbarred in to prove the writer did their research; people will say things like, "Cincinnati has more people per square mile than any other city in the Union," or mention that Frances Trollope has visited the city for no real reason, or suddenly start talking about the creation of the Mount Lookout Observatory, and then go back to what they were supposed to be saying. There are a lot of neat aspects of Cincinnati history to be uncovered, but they aren't really integrated into the story.

The story in the foreground is pretty meh. The protagonist is a real piece of work, brutal in business, forceful and exploitative of women, callous toward people of color. Whoever Willoughby was in this case, their writing ability doesn't rise to the level of making this interesting to read about; our glimpses of the protagonist's mind are trite. As the book goes on, more and more of it is given over to this subplot about potential incest involving the protagonist's children. It goes on too long and it's just not very well written.

It's 372 pages long, but I blazed through it in less than two days. Before reading it, I was mildly curious about Omaha, but given the quality of this one, I won't be seeking out any other Lee Davis Willoughby... whoever they were.

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

Originally published: 2019
Acquired: December 2022
Read: April 2023

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

I read this middle-grade novel told in free verse about a teenage girl fleeing Syria to Cincinnati as part of a project to read books set in my hometown.

I may have to conclude that YA books told in "poetry" are just not my jam and never will be.

Review: Stringtown on the Pike by John Uri Lloyd

Hardcover, 414 pages
Published 1900

Acquired July 2019
Read November 2019

Stringtown On the Pike: A Tale of Northernmost Kentucky by John Uri Lloyd

I read this as part of my project to read novels set in or near my hometown of Cincinnati; "Stringtown" is a fictionalized version of Florence, Kentucky, about 12 miles away from Cincinnati, and 26 miles from where I grew up. A few scenes are set in Cincinnati, as the protagonist goes to UC for chemistry classes. It's set shortly after the Civil War, and I gather was very popular in its day. (Lloyd wrote a further five novels about the denizens of Stringtown.)

It's also inexplicably boring. People just talk and talk about stuff that doesn't matter; there's no coherence to this thing, and when there is, half of it is in terrible black dialect, so it's virtually unreadable. I got bogged down in this book for months. Tons of side-stories that go nowhere, a main plot that borders on the incomprehensible, a romance you won't give two shits about. I regret slogging through to the end.

Review: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Hardcover, 492 pages
Published 2016
Acquired December 2016
Read June 2019

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

This is a re-telling of Pride and Prejudice, but that's not why I read it; I read it as part of a mission to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati. Sittenfeld grew up in Hyde Park, and even though she hasn't lived there in her adult life, her brother PG Sittenfeld is a member of city council. The local color is pretty good: Darcy and Liz bump into each other at Skyline, people are always making out-of-towners try Graeter's raspberry chip, and the Bennets size up a sister's potential by asking where he went to high school. It's much more East Side than the Cincinnati I grew up in, but Sittenfeld gets the vibe of the richer-than-you East Side families pretty good. (As snobs, they are of course offended when someone from a coastal state like Darcy is snobby to them.) The mother in particular felt like a real Hyde Park woman, with he slightly concealed casual racism. So that was fun, although the last quarter of the novel largely abandons the Cincinnati setting.

As a novel otherwise, it's okay. Its cardinal sin is that I don't think the antagonism between Liz and Darcy comes across like it ought; he's an outright asshole to her in scene one, but from then on he's behaves so mildly toward her it's hard to see why she's mad. And I think that's the point (I haven't reread Pride and Prejudice since early in my M.A., so my memory is foggy), but Sittenfeld doesn't convince you that Liz would be so negative toward him. Whereas he kinda feels like he's barely there! There's a lot of good tie-ins to contemporary issues, but the way reality tv takes over the plot in the final quarter feels very implausible and out there. I also felt there was a lot of clunky exposition in the beginning, and contrived circumstances, designed to get the reader up to speed on why five unmarried women would still be living with their parents.

I did really laugh loudly at the epilogue, though, so there's that.

Review: Double Dutch by Sharon M. Draper

I have two new reviews of Doctor Who audio dramas up at Unreality SF: the fifth Doctor and UNIT in The Helliax Rift and the sixth Doctor and Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Iron Bright.

Trade paperback, 183 pages
Published 2004 (originally 2002)
Acquired December 2014
Read December 2016

Double Dutch by Sharon M. Draper

This is another Cincinnati-set book, part of my goal to read all the novels set in my hometown. Double Dutch is by Sharon M. Draper, a Cincinnati-area high school teacher; the book's main characters are eighth graders on a local Double Dutch team. Their dream is to qualify for the state competition and then compete in nationals in a year where the national competition is being held in Cincinnati. There's not a lot of local color to be honest: quick mentions of things like the Cincinnati Post are basically it.

Other than that, it's an okay book. Some of the characters are fun, the central dilemmas (a girl who's managed to make it to the eighth grade without being able to read, and a boy whose dad has abandoned him) are interesting, but some of the dialogue is very awkward and a couple of the happenings are incredibly contrived, even melodramatic. The resolution to the bullying subplot grates the most. It is aimed at middle-schoolers, though, so I'm not exactly its target audience.

Review: 42 Miles by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer and Elaine Clayton

If there's anything I like about Big Finish, other than Charley Pollard, it's that I'll occasionally pick up an adaptation of a tv programme I've actually never seen and end up enjoying it. Such is the case with Callan, which comes across to me as a less glamorous Danger Man, or a lot like series one of The Avengers (the UK tv programme, not the Marvel comic). So, read my review of Callan, Volume One at Unreality SF.

Hardcover, 73 pages
Published 2008
Acquired October 2016
Read October 2017

42 Miles by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer
illustrated by Elaine Clayton

A book of children's poetry about a kid with divorced parents (one of whom lives in an urban downtown, the other of whom lives on a farm), with mixed-media scrapbook-style illustrations, is not really my thing. But it's set in the Cincinnati area, so here I am. It's okay. Distressingly little local color (it's not even clear what direction the protagonist's father's farm is from the city), so no points on that front. I think it mentioned Cincinnati chili, which is the bare minimum, but now I can't find it. As a book, it's not great either. I did like that the protagonist's parents have been divorced as long as she can remember, so it's not a blindsided-by-divorce book or a my-parents'-breakup-was-my-fault book, but rather a how-do-I-live-two-lives book. However, the reconciliation between her two "selves" comes very suddenly and seems unearned. I don't think it's up to much as poetry, either, and the illustrations were just kind of there.

Review: The Serpentine Wall by Jim DeBrosse

Hardcover, 327 pages
Published 1988
Acquired December 2016
Read June 2017

The Serpentine Wall by Jim DeBrosse

My ongoing mission to read books set in my hometown of Cincinnati has not always yielded good literature or good local color. A lot of the books feel like they were written by someone who had never set foot in Cincinnati, even if the writer actually had! Delightfully, though, The Serpentine Wall is brimming over with local color, from the title on down. DeBrosse really captures my hometown with lots of details and jokes. The book begins with a fire on an Ohio River steamboat by the local landmark of the Serpentine Wall! The fact that Cincinnati has two major daily newspapers (though not anymore) is a key point, and there are characters seemingly derived from Larry Flynt and a combination of Simon Leis and Charles Keating (a major subplot is about pornography distribution, appropriate for Cincinnati's very moralistic climate). I don't know that it was a terribly good mystery (the villain is pretty obvious), but I loved reading it, getting that frisson of excitement every time a place or idea I knew appeared, something people who live in New York City or Los Angeles must be numb to, but which I rarely get to experience.

Review: Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler

Trade paperback, 325 pages
Published 2014 (originally 2013)
Acquired December 2014
Read November 2016

Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler

I read this as part of my ongoing project to read more books set in my hometown of Cincinnati. Calling Me Home alternates between two first-person narratives, one in the late 1930s in northern Kentucky (a fictional town outside Newport, which is right across the river from Cincinnati) about a white girl in love with a black man, and one in the present day in Texas, where that white girl (now grown up) is accompanied by her black hairdresser on a cross-country drive back to Cincinnati for a funeral.

It's okay. The present-day narrative is pretty boring, to be honest, as the hairdresser encounters racial microagressions and experiences some stereotypical drama with her teenage son and frets over her own romance. The past narrative was better, and really came alive for me at a couple key points, one of them being a short-lived reunification that the girl has with her black lover-- I really felt their desperation and their hunger. There are a couple twists, one of which is incredibly obvious (yet many reviewers on LibraryThing expressed surprise at it), but worked for me emotionally anyway.

There was the occasional slip-up. I don't think Kibler is very good at capturing the nuances of racism: her racist characters are all ridiculously evil people, while all of the nice characters are secretly not racist. Probably the worst part of the whole book was that the hairdresser learns a moral lesson from the flashback narrative that sounds like it came from a greeting card. Like, you just heard this tragic tale of racism, and that's what you take away from it?

Bonus Nitpick: As a Cincinnatian, I was happy to see a little bit of local color, like the street car, the incline, and chili parlors. But there was a pretty big research fail when a coney is described as a plain hot dog:

A coney has chili on it, c'mon! Kibler has obviously not ever eaten one (some Cincinnati chili recipes do include cocoa powder, but there's no way you would taste hints of chocolate), but at least she could have looked at a menu.

My Radioactive Childhood

 

Something recently reminded me of the fact that I grew up a nine-minute drive (fewer than three miles as the crow flies) from a nuclear material processing facility.

On top of Mount Rumpke...
courtesy Brandon C on Flickr

I do delight in telling people that I grew up about five minutes away (also fewer than three miles) away from Mount Rumpke, the highest point in Hamilton County-- and the sixth-highest garbage dump in the United States. When I was in the fifth grade, there was a landslide that exposed 15 acres of waste. The gas released into the atmosphere could be smelled from miles around. We had to have indoor recess for a week, because of how bad it was. Later that year, a lightning strike caused the dump to catch on fire. It burned for six days.

Anyway, three miles in the other direction (I grew up in a nice neighborhood I swear) lies the Feed Materials Production Center (Fernald site), a facility for converting uranium ore into metal, for use in nuclear weapons. Its various plants came on-line 1951-54; by 1989 it was essentially closed because demand for refined uranium had declined substantially with the winding down of the Cold War.

Though I think it was technically known the plant was there, it operated until the 1980s in relative secrecy. But in 1981, wells near Fernald were discovered to be contaminated, which was not disclosed to the public until 1984, local residents initiated a class-action lawsuit. In the interim, residents had drank from those wells. In 1986, two storage units vented when they oughtn't, and another cracked. According to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, "from 1952-1989, 470,000 kilograms of uranium dust and 160,000 curies of radon-222 were released into the atmosphere, while 90,000 kilograms of uranium were released into surface water." Energy Department officials told the plant to continue production without regard for environmental laws.

the Fernald employee newsletter

Public outcry was exacerbated by the way the plant covered up its activities. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported

In 1955, Angelo Gallina was severely burned by uranium-laced acid when he tried to clear a clogged chute with a sledgehammer. Rather than being hospitalized he was treated for two weeks at the plant's first aid station. During his recovery, he was escorted to the plant to shuffle paper so that the management would not have to report a lost work time accident.

Later, the paper discovered that researchers had a secret laboratory to conduct radiation experiments using the body parts of deceased employees and private citizens.

We didn't move to that house until 1990, and most of my memories of the controversy come from later, around 1994-96, when there was a lot of controversy surrounding FERMCO, the contractor hired to clean up the production site. (I think they were spending wastefully and also keeping things from the government.)

My mother use to make jokes about Fernald and its effects on us. In 2013, a University of Cincinnati study found a higher rate of cancer among former Fernald employees than the general population, but participants in the Fernald (Resident) Medical Monitoring Program (open to anyone who lived within five miles of the plant from 1952 to 1984, so not us) actually reported lower than average death and cancer rates than the general population.

It's a nature preserve now. I've never been.

Christmas Special

Merry Christmas to all of you out in blogland. I've been on a whirlwind trip to see my/my wife's family-- one day of travel, two full days with one family, another day of travel, two full days with another family, and then another day of travel. It's always good to come home, of course, and one wishes we could do it more often; geography keeps us at about three times per year except for extenuating circumstances. In six months, we might live somewhere different, and this might make it easier to come home frequently, but it might also make it worse.

Travel logistics meant that for the first time in my entire life, I had to miss my extended family's Christmas Eve get-together-- at which I usually play a key role as emcee of the Yankee swap gift exchange! But even aside from that, it was sad to not spend the holiday with my grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins and cousins' kids. Instead (for reasons too complicated and too stupid to explain) my wife and I spent Christmas Eve in a diner in Athens, Ohio. Thankfully, some traditions remain intact (watching the Doctor Who Christmas special, eating Christmas dinner with my family and my grandmother, even if it wasn't on Christmas), and some new ones seem to be forming (my wife is making headway in her attempts to make Weihnachtsstollen an annual thing).

Of course, there's been a lot of presents as always. Highlights have included a cocktail set from my wife, a Death Star that dispenses jelly beans from my brother- and sister-in-law, a Star Trek redshirt hoodie from my mother, soundtrack CDs from my mother-in-law, socks from my father-in-law, and many many books. Here's some of them:

As you can see, I netted all of the Ancillary books, which I've been yearning after for a while; I feel like I never read enough current science fiction. (I asked for recent sf from SantaThing; I haven't got my SantaThing books yet, so hopefully I didn't also get the Ancillary books there!) I also got a whole mess of books for my project to read more fiction set in my hometown of Cincinnati-- six of them to be precise.

Just looking at them, my favorite is The Serpentine Wall, a mystery novel by a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer:

The Serpentine Wall is a bit of a local landmark, a long, snakey wall on the Ohio River with huge steps:

It's the best place to watch Cincinnati's fantastic river-based Labor Day fireworks. Some of the Cincinnati novels I've read haven't felt very Cincinnati-y; I'm anticipating good things from this one.

On the other hand, I'm a little dubious about Seventeen Blocks from the River. For one thing, I'm the only person to own a copy on LibraryThing, which means it's even more obscure than The Picshuas of H. G. Wells. Secondly, this is its author blurb:

I mean, single out your one son for being adopted and Jewish, that won't make him feel weird at all.  Also, "a leaf in the wind"???

It's getting late, so I'll wrap this up. Incidentally, a Merry Christmas to all of you at home, and remember to keep Christmas with you all through the year!

How Now Pink Cow?: The Origins of Red Cream Soda

One of the things you learn when you move to a different region of the country is that many things you took for granted as being part of The Way Things Are turn out to be only The Way Things Are In The Place That You're From. Like, I was in my mid-twenties when I discovered what people from Cincinnati usually call "gym shoes" are in the rest of America called "tennis shoes" or "sneakers." Or, for example, my wife is really fascinated by how folks here in New England don't eat as many Jell-O-based foods as we do in the Midwest. Some regionalisms become points of cultural pride (we Cincinnatians love to talk about our distinctive chili, of course), but I suspect many more pass unnoticed because you never think about them until they're gone.

Something I only realized in the past couple years is that red cream soda is a regionalism. In Ohio, Barq's doesn't just sell root beer, but also "red creme soda." And Big Red was a staple of my high school years visits to White Castle. (There are other red cream sodas, apparently, but those are the big two for me, anyway.) Red cream soda ostensibly has nothing to do with any red fruit flavors, unlike some other red pops (like the strawberry-flavored Cherikee Red of Scranton, Pennsylvania). Information seems to be scant, but a Texas Monthly article on Big Red claims that despite its (infamous) bubblegum flavor, "the flavor is actually a combination of lemon and orange oils, topped off by a dollop of pure vanilla for a creamy aftertaste." And what we know about the origin of Barq's Red Creme Soda would also seem to indicate it contains neither bubblegum nor fruit, though I don't think it tastes like non-red cream soda.

But red cream soda is not a thing you can buy here in New England. Discovering this sent me on two quests: one, to bring some red cream soda back to New England with me, and two, to discover the origin of this regional foodway.

(My research largely consisted of Googling, so you're going to get what you pay for here. Maybe an more in-depth investigation awaits in my future. See below for sources.)

As far as my second quest goes, I learned Barq's is one of the oldest root beers in America, though not the oldest, and for a long time it didn't even call itself a "root beer," because a competing company had the term trademarked. (Later, the federal government banned caffeine in root beer, so Barq's removed "root beer" from its name again. You can read all sorts of fascinating things about the history of Barq's at the blog of Todd Nelson, most of which isn't relevant to my purposes here.) Edward Charles Edmond Barq, who had won a gold medal for his orange soda at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, started out in New Orleans, but by 1897 was set up in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Barq's biological son eventually took over his business, but Barq also had an adopted son, and Barq sold or gave him a production facility back in New Orleans. The adoptive son, Jesse Robinson, ended up with his own Barq's company, which had exclusive rights to the Barq's name and formula in all of Louisiana.

Most of what you can find about the history of Barq's focuses on the root beer, but eventually I discovered the origin of their red creme soda, and it shows that red cream soda has even closer ties to Cincinnati than I thought. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, in 1937, three men from Cincinnati purchased a Barq's franchise and begin bottling root beer and creme soda locally. It was one of these men, Richard Tuttle, who had the idea to add red color to Barq's previously amber-colored creme soda. The resulting red creme soda was so popular that the parent company back in Biloxi adopted the same change. (Tuttle experimented with a bunch of other colors, too, but I guess red was the only one that lasted.) The New Orleans Barq's company adopted it, too, where the pop went under the name of just "Barq's Red Drink."

Big Red, which started in Waco, Texas, claims to be the original red cream soda, however, beginning life in 1937 (the same year Tuttle started his franchise), as the Sun Tang Red Cream Soda, before becoming Sun Tang Big Red Cream Soda, and then just Big Red. Supposedly the name changes came about because one of the company execs heard his golf caddies calling it "Big Red"; read here for the whole story. Though in high school we would always get four Big Reds and a Crave Case at White Castle, I find that Barq's Red Creme Soda has more of my allegiance-- perhaps I was subconsciously picking up on its Cincinnati origins?

John Ruch claims Big Red started life as "Big Green," but red turned out to be the more popular color-- but I can't find any mention of that on the Internet except at his blog. He also claims that red cream soda is actually not a cream soda; the designation is just used to make the suspiciously fruit free "red pop" have some kind of legitimacy.

I also learned that in Canada, almost all cream soda is red cream soda, to the extent that "cream soda" is understood to be red by default. Not sure how that ties in to everything else here.

I can conclude on something I do know for sure, having also achieved the goal of my first quest. If you have red cream soda, you can make a "pink cow," which is just a root beer float (i.e., a "brown cow") but with red cream soda.

This is the one I made myself Tuesday night. It was definitely delicious.

Works Cited

Billman, Rebecca. "Barq co-founder dies: Richard S. Tuttle Sr. added dye to soda to create red pop." Cincinnati Enquirer. 13 Jan. 2000. Web. <http://enquirer.com/editions/2000/01/13/loc_barq_co-founder_dies.html>.

Nelson, Todd. "Barq's Root Beer." Recycled and Recounted. 16 Oct. 2015. Web. <http://recycledandrecounted.blogspot.com/2015/10/barqs-root-beer.html>.

Patoski, Joe Nick. "Big Red." Texas Monthly. N.d. Web. <https://web.archive.org/web/20090506061432/http://www.texasmonthly.com/ranch/readme/bigred.php>.

Ruch, John. "Red Soda." Stupid Question (TM) Archives. 27 Mar. 2008. Web. <http://stupidquestionarchives.blogspot.com/2008/03/red-soda.html>.

Alert New London!: The Lost Names of the Backroads of Rural Ohio

I recently had cause to be driving around the backroads of Butler and Hamilton Counties, Ohio, right on the Indiana border, in this area:

It's a pretty undeveloped area, lots of farmland and tiny little towns that consist of one stop light and three stores. It was a nice, sunny day, so it was a good drive, made especially so because I got to drive past one of my favorite roads, Alert New London Road. It's not important enough for Google Maps to label at the zoom level I was using when I took this screenshot, but you can see it there. It's the road that connects the towns of Alert and Shandon. I like it because it sounds like an order: "Alert New London! The Indians are coming!"

I must not be the only person who thinks it's a good name, as there's apparently a Columbus, Ohio, dream-pop band called Alert New London.

The road's name's origins are pretty mundane, however. A lot of roads in this region (and I can't imagine this is an uncommon thing nationwide) are simply named for the two places they connect: Alert New London Rd., Cincinnati Brookville Rd., Okeana Drewersburg Rd., Hamilton Scipio Rd., Peoria Reily Rd., Reily Millville Rd., and so on.

This may seem like a boring naming scheme, but I will tell you as someone whose belief in his own sense of geography sometimes outstrips his actual abilities, these naming schemes sure could help you in the pre-smartphone era when you were driving around lost in the backroads of Butler County. I remember coming upon Oxford Middletown Road in the middle of the night and arbitrarily picking which way to turn on it, figuring that a 50% chance of ending up where I wanted to be (Oxford) was better than the minuscule chance I'd had up until that point.

A lot of these roads are the only remaining signs of the existence of the places they once connected. Scipio is a sort of nonplace on the Ohio-Indiana border, for example, one of those places Wikipedia calls an unincorporated community, and there's nothing to indicate any real town-ness other than that houses cluster there. As far as I can tell (admittedly just from an evening's electronic research), according to the book Thunder in the Heartland: A Chronicle of Outstanding Weather Events in Ohio, Scipio was destroyed in 1884 by a tornado:

Now all that remains of Scipio is its name on roads and cemeteries, little bits of history that have escaped overwriting but lost their context.

Like I said above, Alert New London Road connects Alert to the town of Shandon, but as you might guess if you've been following me so far, Shandon used to be called New London. In fact, Shandon is ostensibly the Butler Community to have had the most names, having also been known as Paddy's Run, Vaughan's Crossing, Glendower, Cambria, and Bagdad. The locals, who were Welsh, wanted the post office to be called New London, but the postmaster general called it Paddy's Run after a local stream, but the locals found being called "Paddies" offensive. Hence all the fluctuations as they tried to settle on something everyone could accept. (At one point the citizens boycotted the post office to get their way.) Things were apparently finally stabilized in 1906, when the U.S. Board on Geographic Names issued the following ruling:

It seems they had a lot of options to rule out.

Now, I've known of New London, Ohio, for at least twelve years, but looking at the map today, the first time doing so after eight years of being a Connecticut resident, what immediately jumped out at me was the juxtaposition of New London and New Haven, which are of course both major cities in Connecticut. Northern Ohio was originally the "Western Reserve" of Connecticut: could my adoptive state have also influenced the southwest corner of my birth state?

The answer is mixed. New Haven, Ohio, an unincorporated community now surrounded by the Miami Whitewater Forest, a county park, was definitely named in honor of Connecticut. It was founded in 1815 by Joab Comstock, a native of New Haven, Connecticut, and the first frame house was built in 1826. By 1894, it had a population of 200; now its population is almost 600. Comstock apparently liked founding villages, because he had also founded nearby Crosby in 1801, which was named after his wife's maiden name. New Haven's location was picked because it was at the intersection of the Cincinnati-New Baltimore highway and the Hammond-Lawrenceburg road. I guess those last three places were much more important in 1815 than they are in 2016, because I don't think there's much to be got out of being at their intersection today.

The appearance of a New London, Ohio, in 1803, twelve years prior to the founding of New Haven, Ohio, seems to be a complete coincidence. Even though the two Ohio towns, some four miles apart, both share names with prominent Connecticut cities, some fifty miles apart, I can find no indication that the naming of New London, Ohio, has anything to do with New London, Connecticut. The settlers of New London, Ohio, were predominantly from Wales (hence one of its many names, Glendower), and though I don't know why the Welsh might have wanted to name a city after London, England, I feel they had even less reason to name one after New London, Connecticut.

The influence of Connecticut on the parts of Ohio outside of the old Western Reserve seems to have been pretty limited after all. So the very supposition that launched me on this investigation turns out to have no basis in reality, though I have learned a lot about the area of Ohio I once called home. Seriously, now I want to drive back up to Shandon and look at its Old Welsh Cemetery!

Review: Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan

My most recent audio drama review is up at USF, on a "Big Finish Classics" adaptation of a book very near and dear to my heart: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Find out what I thought!

Trade paperback, 416 pages
Published 2003  (originally 1994)

Acquired July 2014

Read December 2015

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan

The latest installment of my intermittent quest to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati, the "Queen City" of the title. Of the ones I've read so far, this is definitely the most Cincinnati, down to the Roebling Suspension Bridge being featured on the back cover, and passages praising the beauty of Union Terminal. Part of my reason for reading novels set in my hometown was to access what I imagine people who live in New York City or Los Angeles experience all the time when consuming media, a feeling of familiarity. I will admit to a certain frisson when reading that the protagonist, Verity, grew up in Miamisburg (40 miles up the Great Miami from where I grew up), or travels to Lockland (where I worked for a year). Cincinnati also has a depth of history that renders it well-suited for Goonan's project here; near its end, the novel becomes about history and how we remember things, which is apt for a city some accuse of being too obsessed with its past. (It's hard for me to imagine that conservative Cincinnati could ever become the fourth city in America to vote to undergo nanotech enhancement, though; fifty-fourth seems more likely.)

I liked the protagonist, but aside from those aspects, much of this novel was frustratingly obscure. I'm not sure I really grasped what was going on except in the broadest of strokes, and I wasn't really encouraged to put the effort into figuring it out. Goonan clearly has a way with words, but that way is often confusing. There are three other books in this series, but this one was not engaging enough to incline me to read them given that the action moves away from Cincinnati.

Review: William Wells and Maconaquah, White Rose of the Miamis by Julia Gilman

Trade paperback, 317 pages
Published 1985
Acquired December 2012
Read May 2015

William Wells and Maconaquah, White Rose of the Miamis
by Julia Gilman

I'm on a project to read fiction set in my hometown of Cincinnati, tired by years of American fiction that seems to equate "New York" or "Massachusetts" with the entirety of the United States. First up is William Wells and Maconaquah, a fictionalized version of the lives of two white settlers who were taken by the Indians as children and raised among them. It's very uneven: Gilman has a very distanced narrative perspective, so it's impossible to get emotionally invested in this book, as one never really cares what happens to either character. At one point, William Wells essentially decides to sell his people out to the whites, but apparently he experiences no emotions over this, despite having an Indian wife and children-- later he commits bigamy with as little introspection. Meanwhile, Maconaquah drops out of the book for hundreds of pages at a time, so I'm not sure why she rates being in the title. The title characters barely even meet, to boot! Worsening all this is that Gilman is just not a very good writer, with lots of awkward dialogue exchanges especially, and lots of characterization told but not shown.

The book is good at delineating exactly how and why the Indians were screwed over by the white invaders, but I could have read a good history book if that's what I was after. In the end, very little of the book was set in Cincinnati, anyway. Its setting ranges from eastern Pennsylvania (the Wilkes-Barre area) to Kentucky to Fort Wayne, Indiana, with just a couple chapters set at Fort Washington, in what would later be called Cincinnati.

(Cheese) Coney (Islands)

the cheese coney in its natural habitat

A couple months ago, I used the phrase "cheese coney" to the consternation of those around me. This surprised me; as a Cincinnati native, I know that my people's distinct form of chili is not known everywhere, but where in the world does the chili dog not exist? What I did not realize is that even though the chili dog is ubiquitous across America, the term "cheese coney"-- or, more properly, "Coney Island hot dog"-- is not. From my involved research on the subject (i.e., reading some Wikipedia articles), it is unclear to me if the terms "chili dog" and "Coney Island hot dog" are synonymous, or if the cheese coney represents some kind of subset of chili dog (and if so, what distinguishes it). Obviously, in Cincinnati your cheese coney will have Cincinnati chili on it, but you can have a cheese coney other places with other kinds of chili on it, right?

I sort of forget about all this until I recently came across the following infographic (from The Food Republic):

click to enlarge

The coney is about one-third of the way down, ensconced between the Montreal, the Italian, and the Kansas City. (Is that right? Should their names be preceded by definite articles?) Only upon seeing the coney surrounded by geographically named hot dog variants did it occur to me to ask, after 30 years of eating cheese coneys, What on Earth does a cheese coney have to do with the place of Coney Island? This quickly led to a second question I'd never thought to investigate before, either: Why is there a place in Cincinnati called "Coney Island" which is not on an island, and does it have anything to do with delicious food?

Things I Learned about Cheese Coneys:
Like all foods, no one agrees on who invented the cheese coney or where. Wikipedia claims (I know, but I'm writing this blog entry in 30 minutes, and you're getting what you're paying for):

In 1913 the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce in New York had banned the use of the term "hot dog" on restaurant signs on Coney Island, an action prompted by concerns about visitors taking the term literally and assuming there was dog meat in the sausage. Because of this action by the Chamber of Commerce, immigrants passing through the area didn't know the sausage in a bun by the American moniker "hot dog." Instead, the handheld food would have been known to immigrants as a "coney island." 

But it also says the Coney Island hot dog may have been first served in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Jackson, Michigan. Not sure why Coney Island itself is not a contender!

the two Coney Islands
courtesy Google Street View

There are also restaurants called Coney Islands, which I did not know. They're primarily in Michigan, I guess. In this case we do know the original: two Greek-American brothers created a restaurant called "Coney Island" in Detroit in 1914, and because they didn't trademark the name, they had many emulators. The best part is that their many emulators included themselves; in 1917, a business dispute led them to split into two separate, adjacent establishments on Lafayette Street: American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island. They're still both there!

Things I Learned about Coney Island, the Place in Cincinnati, Not New York:
I don't know when I learned Coney Island was not originally a place in Cincinnati-- for me that's still the primary association. We used to go every summer when I was in Boy Scouts, for the Dan Beard Council Family Jamboree. I don't think I've ever ridden on one of the park's amusement park rides, but I have spent the night many times, and handed out samples of freshly cooked Dutch oven cobbler! (Our specialties in Troop 641 were peach, apple spice, and, best of all, chocolate cherry.) I still remember watching The Incredible Mr. Limpet, and when its cartoon fish protagonist declared he was going to swim to Coney Island, thinking he had an awful long and circuitous route to follow given he was starting in the Atlantic Ocean!*

Coney Island in 1965

The answer to the mystery is relatively pedestrian. An 1870s apple farmer on the Ohio River used to rent out his farm for events, and soon realized he made more money from that than apple farming. He built a bowling alley, a dining hall, and a dancing hall as his popularity grew, and eventually sold it; the new owners dubbed it "Ohio Grove, the Coney Island of the West" in 1886. By 1887 they officially changed the name to just "Coney Island"! A brazen piggybacking on a more popular brand, I guess, but it apparently worked. It was apparently known as "Cincinnati's moral resort," which is totally the kind of thing Cincinnatians would be really into.

I have no clever ending to tie all this information together, but man, I could totally scarf down three Skyline cheese coneys (onions, no mustard) right now.

* I hadn't thought about this film for decades until composing this blog entry. Reading the Wikipedia entry, it sounds absolutely awful.

A Republican I Can Support (Though Maybe Not-- He's Pretty Big)

Trade paperback, 249 pages
Published 2012
Acquired February 2012
Read March 2012

Taft 2012

by Jason Heller

As a Cincinnatian (in spirit, if not current geographical location), I felt compelled to pick up Taft 2012, a book that asks the question that I suspect is on everyone's mind this primary season: "What if William Howard Taft suddenly reappeared and decided to run for president again?"  The premise reminds me, oddly, of the 2006 Robin Williams film Man of the Year, in that it features an unlikely outside candidate running for president, who is used to poke at the partisan problems of modern American politics, ultimately somewhat toothlessly.

The best part of Taft 2012 is that it's funny and light.  It never wears out its welcome, and even though Jason Heller goes to the fat jokes perhaps a little bit too much, I laughed at them more than I didn't, so it's hard to complain too much.  He doesn't even rely on the stock man-out-of-his-own-time jokes too much, perhaps aside from the bit where Taft tries to come to grips with Twitter.  The book is also peppered with little interstitials between the chapters, taken from media broadcasts, web postings, and the like; my favorite had to be the Etsy listing for a Taft mustache, but they were generally entertaining.  I enjoyed the first half of the novel, where Taft adjusts to life in 2011, but also kept on waiting for something more substantial to happen.

Unfortunately for Taft 2012, it also wants to be more hard-hitting and incisive than it is.  It keeps its references to contemporary politics vague (besides a couple oblique Obama and Romney jokes), and the only issue the resurrected Taft tackles is overly processed food, which isn't exactly controversial.  (Weirdly, I think, he connects it to the molecular gastronomy movement.)  And even that becomes bogged down in this weird conspiracy story, Taft 2012 having fallen into the same trap as Man of the Year: it is so unlikely for its central character to achieve political prominence that explanation of how it happened ends up taking over the story at the end.

I'm not sure what I think of the ending.  On one hand, it goes somewhere unexpected, on the other hand, it's kind of a more realistic take, and on yet another hand, I'm not convinced realism is what anyone wanted out of Taft 2012 to begin with.  The epilogue was oddly touching, though, for a book whose central character wasn't exactly deeply characterized.

Heller is a first-time novelist, and I think sometimes it shows; his dialogue is a little rough at times, and the novel doesn't always immerse you in a place.  Maybe this is sour grapes, as I was excited to read a novel with scenes set in Cincinnati, but the book is sometimes too light on scene-setting details.  This gets better as it goes, though; when the setting returns to Cincinnati later, there are some nice references.  Not a single one to chili, though!

It's fun, it's quick, and even though Heller never uses the phrase "Cincinnati Fatty" (one of Taft's actual press nicknames), it's still very enjoyable.