Faith Works 6-26-21

Faith Works 6-26-21

Jeff Gill

Changes for the better all around

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What is better?

This is a question I was asked after last week's column, and one I'm delighted to answer.

Now, in keeping with my observations from before, I'll note again I only arrived here in 1989, but I got to Licking County, Ohio as soon as I could! And I have access to bits and pieces of the historical record back through earlier decades, but those are often bloodless and cold pieces of data, which might miss out on lived experience.

I do wish I'd gotten here soon enough to see the railroad roundhouse for myself, just east of downtown. I'm sorry never to have seen four (or was it five?) theaters letting out at night around Courthouse Square all at once, or smoke billowing from the tall stack at the Wehrle Stove Works off Union Street; it would have been cool to visit the aluminum plant south of town to see them making structural members for the Goodyear F2G-1 "Super Corsair" but in 1945 I probably would have been shot as a spy if I didn't have a job there.

So I know there were many good things happening in Newark and around our county in earlier days. My challenge was about making too easy a leap into presuming if the parts we knew were good, then the times were good. If life was good for a few, and not for the many, there's a theological, let alone a practical argument against calling that situation "the good life." Are there elements and pieces and parts of the way of life our community knew back in previous eras worth preserving? Certainly, and from the archival and interpretive work of The Works as a museum, let alone the ministries of many area churches, we have plenty of energy and interest in conserving much that has been and still is good.

What's not worse? Or better yet, what is better today? I am glad you asked. As Newark City Schools work to get their graduation rate up over 90% and keep it there, did you know that this is significantly higher than the same statistic would have been any time after World War II? It's true, but so many get the impression that grad rates are down from partisan rhetoric. In fact, we simply used to accept dropping out much more easily as part of life, and didn't expect school districts to see much more than 50% of the number of students who started first grade cross a platform for a high school diploma.

And in fact Newark has long been a leader in special education for students with a variety of disabilities, physical and developmental, but the truth is we only required all U.S. school districts to educate students with physical and mental disabilities after 1975, with many programs only getting fully engaged from 1990. We can and should be proud of Eleanor Weiant and those around here who began education for children with disabilities in 1952, and got a dedicated school built for that in 1967, but it was sadly a choice, one that many districts didn't make until required to, and not that many years ago. Today, such education is a norm and incredibly helpful for both persons with disabilities and their families.

We have lost factories, much of the manufacturing base that built our area; places like the Heisey Glass factory closed in 1957, and many more factories in the Seventies and Eighties shut down or drastically trimmed workforces. What we have today, though, is not just a service economy expansion, but a vibrant region for employment, advancement, and innovation.

The Newark-Heath-Licking County Port Authority is an engine of economic vitality that I'm always amazed people don't know more about. Centering on the former Newark Air Force Base in Heath, it's now a series of plants and factories and warehouses where food stuffs are made, materials are shaped, and products shipped around the world, with many excellent jobs for both tradespeople and college grads alike.

Denison University and The Ohio State University's Newark Campus are utterly different than they were in student makeup and course offerings back when I first moved here. They reflect our entire community and the whole nation in ways we can be proud of; Central Ohio Technical College has four campuses in our immediate area and they are opportunity factories in their own right.

There's more about what's right in our community and our country I'd love to tell you about next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if he could have anything back, it might just be The Jimmy Dean Show on Thursday nights after Mom got home from choir practice. Tell him what you value from the past at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

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.