It was 5 a.m. I had no idea what Bobby Swiss did for a living, what time he got up, where he went, if he even went anywhere. I wanted to be sure that I didn’t miss him.
Coffee, orange juice, muffin, and strawberry yogurt in the Hampton Inn lobby, another coffee to go, then back onto 675 South. Within twenty minutes, I was in my car, parked on Galewood, watching the house where he lived. The steam from my coffee made a crescent on the windshield. The paper cup warmed my hands. I squinted into the summer sun, rising in the east, behind the house.
At six-thirty, he came out. I knew it was him. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, had a cigarette in his mouth. Tall, strong, his hair shoulder-length, brown, combed back behind his ears. He hadn’t shaved. The rhythm of his body, the way he walked: I realized who I was seeing. I was seeing Adam.
He got into the ’87 Olds parked in the driveway. When it pulled out, I saw the license plate: jesusrox. I started up my car, followed the early morning exhaust cloud north on Galewood.
Galewood curved west, became Bingham. At Woodman Drive—Wright Brothers Parkway—he turned left, driving along the perimeter of a classic factory, the Delco Plant: acres of parking behind wire fencing, thousands of cars. Smokestacks, gray vats, electrical transformers.
He turned right, into the entrance driveway—a long, wide road leading into the grounds—stopped at the gatehouse, said something, then was gone. I pulled over at the foot of the entranceway, sat for a minute more, then drove away.
II
Dad attended grade school at St. Paul’s Catholic Elementary School on Sackville, near Parliament and Queen. Born in 1904, he was there from 1910 to 1918—eight years that were the extent of his formal education. At age fourteen, he went to work.
He told me the Christian Brothers taught him. The boys and girls were in separate classes, played on separate sides of the school grounds at recess. He said Brother Jerome, his eighth-grade teacher, could plunk an eraser off a kid’s head from thirty feet, a trick that was held in high esteem by his students. No one complained to their parents. If they did, they got whapped again. You must have deserved it, they were told.
He was an altar boy, serving Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s Church, across from the school. The image of my father as a kid in grade school is hard enough for me to conjure up. The thought of him as an altar boy is almost incomprehensible.
The whole area was called Cabbagetown. Irish Cabbagetown. Up until the 1950s it was pretty much a slum. Today, it’s quite gentrified, diverse, interesting, downtown, central—trendiness mingled with vestigial traces of the old, the seedy. Corktown was a part of it—the part south of Queen, where St. Paul’s was. Quite appropriate, since Dad’s paternal grandfather, a shoemaker by trade, one of my great-grandfathers—who had the same name as Dad’s father, Matthew Nolan—was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1842.
It was in the newspaper just recently: six coffins discovered during playground construction at St. Paul’s School, which was built upon a nineteenth-century cemetery. Burial records show that nearly three thousand Catholics were interred there between 1847 and 1857. No one knows how many bodies were buried between 1822, when it opened, and 1847, when records began. Thousands more, presumably. Also in the area is a mass trench, containing more than eight hundred Catholics who died of typhus in 1847—emigrants who had escaped the Irish famine only to perish thousands of miles away, be buried in that strange, hard soil. The cemetery was closed in 1857 because it was full; grave markers—not the bodies—were removed in 1870.
As a child, my father played atop their bodies. Brother Jerome wielded his eraser there. They are still there, an entire community, founders, shoring us up, unsung.
My father and Brother Jerome are still there too.
Jeanne: He told her he was working in a factory in Dayton. That’s how I know what I know.
Delco. It fit. Owned by General Motors. Jesus. I even had a Delco battery keeping the electrics in my ’93 Honda Civic humming. I saw the irony: maybe Bobby Swiss had made the unit that helped power me here, to Dayton, across Mad River, to this low floodplain of the Great Miami, seat of Montgomery County.
Down a funnel. Inevitable.
My map told me I was actually in Kettering. From what I could determine, Dayton was a metropolitan area that included the cities of Kettering, Miamisburg, Xenia, Fairborn, Oakwood, and Vandalia. Population of Dayton was around two hundred thousand. If you included the greater metropolitan area, it went up around a million.
I stopped at a 7-Eleven, looked up Delco in the phone book, and called. I told the woman who answered that I was a journalist doing an article on factory shift work, and asked them how long a typical shift would be at their plant. The one that starts at 7 a.m., for instance.
“It finishes at five. Shifts are eight hours, with an hour for lunch or dinner, and two half-hour breaks.”
I hung up. I had a whole day ahead of me. I bought a pocket guide to Dayton.
I’d seen Wright State University from my window at the Hampton Inn. Like Bowling Green, I wanted to see more of it.
It was enormous, a huge campus. And beautiful: trees, ravines. I parked the car, got out, walked for a bit.
My guide told me that its charter was less than thirty years old, that there were sixteen thousand students here, more than ninety percent of them Ohioans, that there were seven hundred thousand volumes in the libraries. As a state university, its tuition was around four thousand dollars—double that if you were from out of state—staggering sums to me, especially when you factored in living expenses as well.
In the bookstore, Dayton’s aviation pioneers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, were represented by a silhouetted logo of their famous biplane. A metaphor for discovery, change, literally throwing off earthly shackles, defying gravity, they had taken flight, freed themselves.
As at Bowling Green, and as I had the previous evening from the window of my room at the Hampton Inn, I pictured Adam sitting in libraries here, surrounded by seven hundred thousand books, studying in the state where he was born.
Research, books, community service, the arts and sciences—opportunities engulfing these people in their green and gold sweatshirts, under the bright Ohio sun.
In my mind, Adam and I became one. I was attending classes with him. If I had gone to university, would I have been smart enough to understand what was happening to me? Was there a way to learn what I wanted to know, especially when I wasn’t even certain what it was that I wanted to know?
I envied Adam his life. I envied him that he still had a father.
It was 10 a.m., was warming to a hot, clear day.
In the night all things were possible, anything could happen. The dreams had proven this to me. Things changed, ever so subtly, every time I awoke. The world shifted, in fractions, the past and the present existing together, inside me. My mind roamed free.
The sun beating down changed all that.
The booklet in my hip pocket told me that Kettering, where Bobby Swiss lived and worked, was named after Charles F. Kettering, who, along with Edward Deeds, developed the modern automotive starter and ignition systems.
I sat in my Honda, keys in hand. I looked out through the windshield into the glare of morning, tried to will the night magic to appear. I inserted the key into Kettering’s ignition, turned it, heard the Delco battery fire the noisy valves of my 1960 Chev to life. I closed my eyes, saw the shaky three-speed gearshift on the steering column, felt its wide bench seat beneath me.
ELEVEN
I
West of 675, off Shakertown Road, just outside Kettering, I saw the Belmont Auto Theatre.
$6.00 A CARLOAD
OPEN WEEKENDS
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER
HEATERS WILL BE FURNISHED
FOR YOUR COMFORT
NO ALCOHOL
ON THIS
PROPERTY
I got out of the car, stood with my hands in my pockets. Then I went up to the fence and peered through.
I know a lot about
drive-in theaters. I’ve made it a point to find out. I like them. I bought a book about them once— written by some guy who had taken a trip along Route 66, searching them out. He liked them even more than I did. I’ll tell you a little bit of what I know.
By the early thirties, Detroit was rolling cars off the assembly line, Hollywood was churning out movies. The first drive-in opened in New Jersey in 1933, an unexpected offshoot of the two growing industries. Over the next decade drive-in theaters began to appear all over the States: Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, New York. By 1942, there were ninety-five of them, scattered across twenty-seven states.
As I recall, Ohio took the concept to its bosom: it had more than any other state. Eleven, I think. Like the one I was looking at right now. Good old Ohio.
During 1941-45, the War years, for all the obvious reasons the whole phenomenon flattened out. But it blossomed again with a vengeance after the War. Before 1950, their number had increased from around one hundred to over eight hundred. By 1958, there were close to five thousand.
And the one near Copiague, New York, on Long Island, almost overlooking South Oyster Bay and Ocean Parkway—that was one of the largest, one I wanted to get to, but never did. It hosted twenty-five hundred cars, had an additional twelve-hundred-seat, heated and air-conditioned indoor viewing area, playground, cafeteria, and restaurant with full dinners. A shuttle train took the moviegoers from their cars to the various destinations on the twenty-eight-acre site. I also heard of one in Lufkin, Texas, and another in Troy, Michigan, both of which claimed parking space for three thousand vehicles.
Onward and upward, fun and novelty for everyone, unlimited expansion. Playgrounds might incorporate minitrains, boat and pony rides, talent and animal shows, even miniature golf. Fried chicken, burgers, pizza: fast food was a natural.
In the 1960s and seventies, the party wasn’t quite over, but it was ending. The numbers leveled, the enthusiasm waned. By the end of the eighties, they were closing with regularity. Suburban ones were engulfed by housing and shopping developments, their property too valuable. Many of the rural ones just withered and died. There are close to a thousand dead drive-ins across the U.S., weeds sprouting freely—graveyards, the speaker posts like headstones.
The States has fewer than a thousand left. Canada has about seventy-five.
The drive-in theater. Although you can find one in most countries on the globe, they’re a particularly American hybrid. Passion pits for teens, cheap entertainment for families. Young couples with an infant could avoid the hassle of a baby-sitter—just plunk junior in the backseat with a bottle, let him sleep.
Yet what was its life span? Seventy years? Eighty? Like a person’s: birth, development, excitement, expansion, set- ding, then decline.
When I was a kid in the 1950s, I always wanted my parents to take me to a drive-in movie. It never happened. They would just chuckle when I mentioned it. It wasn’t something they could relate to. I guess there’s no better way to build an obsession.
The first one I ever managed to get to was with my older cousin Jo-Anne—Eleanor’s daughter—and her boyfriend (later husband) Bob. They were teens and my brother Dennis and I were six and eleven. It was summer vacation, near Bancroft, Ontario, some 160 miles northeast of Toronto, where Jo-Anne and Bob lived. Just outside of town, you turned off at Bird’s Creek, onto a dirt road.
The Bancroft Drive-in. I loved it—a horror double bill. On a hot July night, Dennis and I sat in the dark, in the backseat of Bob’s car, enthralled.
Last summer, when Jeanne and I were visiting a friend who has a cottage in the area, I detoured down that road just to have a look. The road is paved now, and there’s no sign of the drive-in theater. It’s gone. Vanished. Not abandoned or grown over, just gone. Houses line the road. After more than forty years, I couldn’t even determine where exacdy it had been. I even wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing.
But I didn’t. It’s still there. I know it is. Like my ’60 Chev, like everything else that ever existed, it’s all there. Because it happened. Because I was there. Because it’s inside me.
I remember a summer evening in my teens, cruising around Toronto in my father’s car with my buddy, Joe. We ended up on Kennedy Road, north of Eglinton, near the Scarboro Drive-In.
Summer ’61. I was seventeen. Mantle and Maris each had thirty-five home runs by mid-July, and Ford Frick, Commissioner of Baseball, ruled that for either of them to beat Ruth’s record of sixty, they had to do it in 154 games, instead of the new, expanded 162-game schedule. Gus Grissom was pulled from his Mercury capsule The Liberty Bell in the Atlantic near Grand Bahama Island, just before it sank three miles to the ocean floor. The baseball Leafs were probably playing the Buffalo Bisons down at the old stadium near the foot of Bathurst. I think that was also the summer that Cupcakes Cassidy was at the Casino (“Tops in Variety and Burlesque”) at Queen and Bay.
If I’d stayed home on a Saturday night, I’d end up sitting with family—Mom, Dad, Nanny, maybe Dennis too—all compromising on acceptable fare on the RCA black-and-white: Gunsmoke at eight; LawrenceWelk at nine. My only hope was talking them into switching from good old Lawrence at nine-thirty to Have Gun Will Travel. Now that wasn’t bad.
Anyway, the Scarboro Drive-in while cruising. From the Terrace was playing. Adult entertainment. I don’t remember the second feature.
We didn’t drive the car in. We parked it on a dirt road and went in on foot, across fields, through ditches, over a barbed-wire fence—all in the dark.
I remember my feet were soaked, that Joe fell on his back, his leg hooked onto the barbed wire, that even as we were doing it, we knew it was insane.
Why did we do it? Because we were seventeen. It was wonderful.
That was my second time at a drive-in. Under the summer stars, beside a speaker post at the rear of the lot, we sat down on the grass, ate popcorn from the concession booth, and watched Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
II
After I got my own car, the Chev, I tried taking girls a few times. The North-East. The Dufferin, the Scarboro, the 400, the 7&27. Most of my dates thought it was kitschy the first time, but I can’t recall any enthusiasm for a second visit. I took Fran, my first wife, once. She didn’t like it. I began to think I was the only one who liked them.
I gave them up for years. Until Jeanne. She liked them. Adam liked them. We had fun.
By then, there were only two left: the 400 and 7&27. Now, they’re both gone too.
“Did you ever go to the drive-in back home?” The first time I asked her, we were driving down the 400 into the city. You could see the multiscreen complex off to the west.
“Yeah, I went, lots. The Trail Drive-In, about a mile south of Ashland, on Route 60. Right near Crisp’s hot dog stand. Crisp’s had apple turnovers with powdered sugar and ice cream. Good eatin’. If we didn’t go to Crisp’s, we’d hit the Bluegrass Grill on Winchester. Get a hot dog and a root beer, or one of their Flying Saucer Burgers, with the special sauce.” A smile. “The Trail’s gone now. Wollohan’s Home Improvements is there.” She toyed with her hair, that way she has. “There were others. Flatwoods had a drive-in—The Corral, across from Espy Road. Another one in Summit. Huntington had one—called The East. Had a rising sun on it. I think it’s still there. The others, though, like The Trail, they’re all gone too.” She was remembering more. “Sometimes we’d go farther, make an evening out of it, maybe even a night. But that was part of the fun.”
I brightened. “Where’d you go?”
“Across the river, into Ohio. The Kanauga, near Gallipolis. Route 7 North, on the Ohio River. About thirty miles.” She was warming to it. “Bunch of us kids from Ashland might go in a couple of cars. Sometimes, a lot of the boys would hide in the trunk and we’d sneak them in. That was part of the fun too.”
“Ever get caught?”
“Nope. Place was started up by a local family after the War—passed down through genera
tions. It’s still family owned and operated. Lot of ’em are. We think they knew, but didn’t care. I remember Monday night was Carload Night.”
“Most women I’ve met haven’t liked drive-ins,” I said.
“You like ’em?”
I nodded. “Love ’em.”
“Well, fella,” she said, “this is your lucky day.”
I looked at her, at the smile.
“Again,” she said.
“Others were near Lexington: Mount Sterling, Paris, Stanton, Winchester. Went to the one near Mount Sterling a couple of times, but that was pretty far. Must have been a hundred miles. Besides the Kanauga, we tried the Scioto Breeze, outside Lucasville, north of Portsmouth. Another one near Jackson, Ohio. And one in West Virginia—on Route 35 at St. Albans. That’s near Charleston. It’s closed now. I heard they turned it into a lumberyard.”
I stopped and looked at her.
“Yeah?” She tossed the hair from her face.
“Amazing.”
“What is?”
I shook my head. “I never thought I’d find you.”
That summer, 1989, after a trip to Boston, on our way back through New York State, we dawdled, enjoyed the drive. Around dinnertime, we pulled off I-90 through East Greenbush, outside Albany, and looked for a place to stay for the night. At the Econo Lodge in Rensselaer, I got out, went inside, and asked the girl at the desk how much.
“Fifty-four ninety-five. Unless you want the upgrade. It’s got a fridge, coffeemaker, hair dryer …”
“How much?”
“Fifty-nine ninety-five.”
“Upgrade me.” She didn’t know who she was dealing with.
I saw it while browsing through brochures and a local newspaper, sitting on the bed in our fabulous room, looking for a place to eat. Jeanne was studying the hair dryer. “The Hollywood Drive-In,” I said.
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 36
