A childhood remembered in Dover, Ohio
This is for Tim Dummermuth and all the other kids in the “neighborhood”… This is the way I remember it; feel free to chime in with your thoughts and other memories that you want to share. Speaking of sharing, share it with those mentioned in the story if you are friends with them on Facebook.
I came into the world on November 6, 1961, at Union Hospital in Dover, Ohio, three months before I was expected. I was only three pounds then, a tiny screaming ball of fury, as fierce as I was fragile. My grandfather, never one to soften a sentence, took one look at me and said that if something as ugly as I was, could live, it would be amazing. Grandpa had a way with words. Looking back now, I can hear the rough humor in it, and underneath that, maybe even a little fear disguised as a joke.
I was a sickly infant at first, and before I was two years old I had surgery for a hernia I had been born with. But children are stubborn little miracles. I grew stronger. I got better. And by the time I was about four, my mom and dad bought a house on Fourteenth Street, a place that would become more than an address. It became the landscape of my childhood.
Fourteenth Street was the kind of neighborhood people talk about as if it belonged to another country. There were kids everywhere, close enough in age to form our own small tribe: Tim, Kevin, Mike, Troy, George, Roger, Jay, both of my sisters and the Marlowe girls up the street. Kevin had an older brother who seemed impossibly grown. Tim had twin sisters, and to little kids there was something nearly magical about identical twins, as though the world had made a copy just to prove it could.
We ran that neighborhood as if it had been given to us. We rode our bikes for hours and hours, miles and miles, though most of those miles were simply circles around the same block. The repetition never bothered us. Every lap held the possibility of something happening: a race, a dare, a scraped knee, a new rule for an old game. We played Freeze Tag, Mad Monster, and Red Rover until the streetlights came on and the voices of our mothers, or the whistle from Troys dad, called us home. Not to mention the football and baseball games in the empty lot beside Mike’s house. I participated in those games but when you have zero eye/hand coordination, it doesn’t really help you make the local little kids leagues. Back in those days, everyone didn’t get a “participation trophy” like today.
There was a generosity to those days that I did not understand at the time. We held Muscular Dystrophy festivals in the neighborhood to raise money for the Jerry Lewis telethon, and my mother was wonderful at creating games for us. We put on plays, usually led by George, the neighborhood thespian, who seemed born to stand in front of other children and tell us where to go and what to say. We sang songs. We made signs. We believed our little efforts mattered. Maybe they did.
The adults watched over us in the loose, familiar way people did then. They were present without hovering, close enough to rescue us and far enough away to let us invent ourselves. Roger lived down the street, and he and I shared a terror of storms. Our fathers decided one day that the cure for fear was exposure, so they had us sit with them on my front porch as thunder rolled in. Then lightning struck the house. Whatever lesson they hoped to teach us was lost in the flash and crack of it. It did not work out too well for Dad at the time, though storms do not bother me now. Maybe courage came later, as it often does.
Mike lived across the street, and with him I learned that childhood logic could be both brilliant and deeply flawed. One day we were busting caps with a hammer and decided matches would surely make the whole thing better. To get them, we formed a plan. Mike hit my hand with the hammer, and while his mother tended to my supposed injury, he slipped inside for the matches. We discovered soon after that caps do not make much noise when you light them on fire. It was a lot of scheming for very little reward, which describes much of boyhood better than I would like to admit.
Fire, unfortunately, interested me more than it should have. There was a greenhouse in the neighborhood with a field beside it, and one day I decided to stomp down the weeds and try to get a fire started. One of my sisters told my parents before anything terrible happened. I got the punishment I deserved, and I can say now with gratitude that somebody loved me enough to stop me before a foolish moment became a tragedy.
Over time the neighborhood kept changing, as neighborhoods do. The Reynolds family moved in with two daughters, adding new voices to the street. The Beasleys lived across the way. Mr. May, the high school speech teacher, lived down the street, part of the cast of adults who gave the place its shape. Every house had a story. Every porch seemed to hold a witness.
What I remember most is not one single event, but the feeling of belonging to a place before I knew places could be lost. We were children in motion, skinned knees and dirty hands, shouting across yards, laughing in the street, testing danger, testing friendship, testing the patience of every parent within earshot. We thought the block was the whole world. In some ways, it was.
My dad still lives in that same house on Fourteenth Street. He is the last relic of my time in the neighborhood. All the others have moved on or passed away. That fact feels almost impossible now, like a thread still tied to the boy I was. The neighborhood has changed, and so have I, but when I think of growing up, I return there first: to the bikes circling the block, to the games and storms and summer evenings, to the people who filled those days without knowing they were becoming part of my memory forever. I had a good life in that neighborhood. I know that now, more deeply than I ever could have known it then.
There is so much more to the story…this is just the early years. I hope you all enjoy it.
