Faith Works 6-19-21

Faith Works 6-19-21

Jeff Gill

On reconsidering the good old days

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When I first came to Newark, for an interview in the summer of 1989, I was put up for the night at what's now the Doubletree.

I arrived for a first stage evening meeting and then was taken to the hotel where I'd be picked up the next morning for more face-to-face discussion of what, obviously, ended up becoming an offer to come from Indiana to Ohio.

That evening, though, I was still hungry, and walked out in the late evening twilight and took a stroll around Courthouse Square. I was impressed by the 1876 building at the center, but . . . yeah. If you remember downtown thirty-two years ago, it was not calculated to impress, definitely not on a weeknight evening. I went, inevitably, to Wendy's, an anchor of the square for many years.

Now I know more of the history of the square, and have ghost memories of things I never knew, but in reading and repetition have become a part of my impressions when I go places in Licking County. I've heard about dinners after church at the Hotel Warden, seen some of the mirrors and woodwork from the dining room preserved after it was torn down in 1959 by Robbins Hunter, Jr., now part of his octagonal study added behind the Avery-Downer House in Granville. The Warden had some 90 years of history on the square, but Wendy's is now pushing past half that. Someday, it too will be a "remember when?"

And downtown Newark has much more going on than it did when I first mulled over moving here on my fateful first lap around the square. I passed the decaying Midland, empty and looking like it, let alone the faceless Auditorium Theatre building already doomed. We still have some empty storefronts, but trust me there were many more back in '89. The talk at Wendy's was about the just opened, brand new . . . jail, just a few blocks east across the bridge. (I had no idea how much time I'd spend inside there, soon and very soon.)

More recently, as I've been pleased to join a number of social media platform discussions of Newark and Licking County history, I've noticed a number of comments made about "the good old days." It's hard to challenge the wistfulness of views from 1950 or 1960 of a bustling downtown square, parking all full and every storefront gleaming with lights and business, and folks reminiscing about coming to one of our four Park Places to find almost all their shopping needs filled.

Yet as both a parish preacher and quondam historian, I am stuck having at the very least a personal hesitation in hearing "the good old days" about back then. And a certain call to preach, ethically and theologically, weighs on me, because I know some things from the records and from years now of quiet conversation, about what was behind the bustle and the apparent prosperity and supposed normality of "the good old days."

Bernard Kerik was police commissioner in New York City when 9-11 struck now twenty years ago; he had already been at work recovering some of his painful family history when those tumultuous events happened, and out of his role, a book contract quickly put those researches on display. His mother died in Newark, Ohio in 1964, and you can find a copy of "The Lost Son" to read the painful details of her death. And the circumstances bely a simple reading of downtown Newark in those days as "good old" times.

"Why emphasize the negative?" is a question people like me get asked when we just bring these matters up. Prostitution isn't new in human history; poverty and exclusion and even racism have a long narrative behind them. But the reason some of these stories get pulled back into public view is because it's very hard to build a strong building on weak foundations (there's a parable about this). Unacknowledged history can come back to bite you in odd, subterranean ways.

We are in fact still not far, historically and socially speaking, from when people of color felt at risk downtown after sundown. When prostitution was common and fairly public; when persons of a different sexual orientation knew they could be beaten and abused without having any recourse to the law. When women's roles were tightly constrained at best. The days were good for a narrowly defined number of people.

So we talk about both past triumphs and also tragedies because we are trying to create good days for more people than we used to. For as close to everyone as we possibly can. We still have a ways to go, but we've come a long way, even just since 1989.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been proud to help recover and restore both history and architecture in our community since he moved here. Tell him what stories you think we need to reclaim at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.