The best shutdown post you will ever read: a national park and the midnight marauders

Portion of Riverview Road in the CVNP where the Doubler Bros. farm once stood.

The Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP) is Ohio's only national park. And while the GOV shutdown has the CVNP closed for business, this place has been on my mind plenty this summer and so I thought I'd blog about it, if for no other reason than to wield whatever power I may have in this nationwide debacle.

Back in the 1970's when the Park Commission came through to organize the CVNP, it was unpopular to say the least among the farmers and families that populated the more than 30,000 acres that would become the park. Their land was purchased under an eminent domain mandate.

Plenty of angered families returned to their property after the deals were signed and the keys were handed over to strip whatever they could from the soon-to-be-demolished structures.

And you can count my family among them.

Great Gramp Doubler had passed on by then and Gram was in a home, but the rest of the clan was plenty ambulatory and then some. I have only vague memories of that night when we all descended on the Doubler farm house and busted in through the cellar, but the event is crystal clear to my mom.

"We took everything we could lay our hands on," she recalls. "We were like a bunch of silly kids." Dad stripped walnut paneling from the dining room. Another faction dug up bushes and flowers. They pulled light fixtures from the walls. I remember roaming around furtively; after all, I was part of an outlaw gang. I wanted so badly to find some remnant--a tiny ceramic figure or mysterious jar, but there was nothing. Who cared about cabinet door pulls? The adults were acting crazy.

"It was one of the funniest things I ever remember doing," says Mom. "We took everything we could find." They filled the back of my cousin's truck and then we situated ourselves atop the loot and sped away gloriously into the night.

So goes history.

Nefarious activity notwithstanding, much of the 275-acre Doubler farm would become a nice chunk of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is a profoundly emotional place for me. And while very few members of my family remain, I am damn glad that hallowed acreage is a park and not a parking lot.

Yeah, yeah. Now for some pix to verify that dirt's history.

That's my great Gramp Doubler, bottom left. His brother Dan is bottom right. Their mom is seated on the left next to some aunts. That's my great great great Gramp Vaughn upper left and my great great Gramp Doubler top right. This photo was taken circa 1895. The house in the background was built around 1850.

That original farm house survived the bulldozers and is still standing. I took this pic in 2007. My great Aunt Elaine (Dan Doubler's wife) lived here when I was a kid. She was in a wheel chair. I used to sit in the kitchen with her while she scooted around telling me stories and pouring glasses of lemonade. Toward the end, Aunt Elaine got a bit goofy and she would fire away at "woodchucks," which were perhaps both real and imagined. The walls were riddled with bullet holes.

That's my great Gram and Gramp Doubler in front of their barn. Great Gram Doubler was born in 1889, so I'd guess this was taken around 1920, give or take a few years. They were married in 1911. Before that, Gramp Doubler played semi-pro baseball.

The barn's long gone, but the stone ramp to the main barn door (you can see it in the pic above) remained until a couple of years ago. The Goat took this pic of me in 2007. At that time, I also took a rubbing of the "signature" on the left.

 

Great Gramp Doubler ran the farm with his brother Dan.

The Doubler Bros. calling card, front and back, which Mom preserved on a decoupaged plaque. To describe the map on the back as "not to scale" is (ahem) generous to say the least.

This was the house great Gram and Gramp Doubler lived in, and the one my kin ransacked back before the Park Commission demolished it. This house was right across the street (Riverview Road) from the barn and original farmhouse pictured above.

Great gram Doubler circa 1972 or '73. She was something: cooked most of her life on a woodfire stove, drank Southern Comfort and loved a good boxing match. I still have her 15" cast iron skillet ...

... and her blood in my veins.

Great Gram Doubler and yours truly, circa 1975 in the kitchen of the big farm house.

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Livin' la vida online

Erin O'Brien circa 1973.

Dear Friends,

Your humble hostess will be conducting a workshop, Living the Online Life, at 7 p.m. on February 7th at the Cuyahoga County Public Library's Strongsville Branch.

This event is free, open to the public and frankly, it's going to kick ass. Follow the above link for details and registration.

Thank you for your continued support.

Love,

Erin

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The good ol' days

So I'm driving down Royalton Road doing about 40 and some idiot in front of me starts chucking garbage out of the passenger window. I've got two teens in the back and it's raining like hell. There's a semi on my ass.

"Jesus Christ," I mutter. "Would you look at this jackass?"

Then he tosses out a big coffee can, which most likely has Mini Cooper tire-chewing capabilities, so I brake and swerve. The truck behind me lurches. I swear with more intent.

"MoOOoom," my kid admonishes.

##

Dear Youth of America: This is a rare site nowadays but people used to chuck garbage out of their cars all the time. The litter you see around roads and highways isn't one tenth what it was back in the 60s and 70s. The turn around was due largely by the Keep America Beautiful campaign. Behold the iconic crying Indian:



And it wasn't just garbage on the street.

There were parts of Cleveland that always smelled bad back then, particularly those surrounding the steel mills. Out-of-towners would wrinkle their nose when you got to the Pershing exit on I-77 SB and say, "What's that smell?"

By the time I was a shiny-faced field engineer with BP in the late 80's, things had gotten better, but the old timers used to like to talk about, well, the old times. They had names like Denny and Lou and Harry.

"Back in the day, we didn't have to worry about all your regulations," Lou would say. "We didn't have any regulations." Then he'd lean back in his chair, put his feet on his desk and take a long drag from his Pall Mall. "Back then the answer was smokestacks. You just pushed the smoke way up high where it didn't bother anyone. Back then, kid," he'd say, then purse his lips into a perfect O and blow a plume of smoke straight up by way of demonstration, "dilution was the solution to pollution."

Guys like Denny and Lou and Harry loved that line.

Lake Erie sometimes smelled bad, particularly during long dry summer spells. The shore was infested with rats, which did not deter my playmates and me from crawling under Lakewood Park's northernmost fence, scattering down the escarpment and poking around.

Then there was the Cuyahoga River.

In the late 60's and early 70's, the Cuyahoga was simply terrifying. This was no silly group of hippies protesting a pipe trickling some dubious liquid into the river. Everybody knew the Cuyahoga was filthy and dangerous. My nightmares were filled with images of falling into the thick black water and being surrounded by the industrial bridge pilings, the massive ore boats and tugs. I still occasionally dream about the murky waters of the Cuyahoga.

Think I'm exaggerating?

~~CLICK HERE~~

That picture of the Cuyahoga was taken in the 60's. You have to see it to believe it. I wanted to embed it here, but the Plain Dealer denied my permission request.

So then, Youth of America, be wary of ham-handed righties telling you how deregulation is a good thing and how the (admittedly sometimes exasperating) EPA needs to be defunded. No, I can't say pollution would return to what it was 50 years ago, but I'd hate to find out what might happen to a river that I've literally watched come back to life over the past 40 years.