A little known film about people and places in and around Groveport and Canal Winchester is getting a much broader audience, thanks to Patty (Meade) Kallies, Destination: Canal Winchester and the Internet.
Destination: Canal Winchester Executive Director Bruce Jarvis told the Old Town Committee at its June 3 meeting about a 1937 film Kallies gave him that had been transferred to DVD.
Kallies, a lifelong resident of Groveport, appears in the film.
After adding a Swing-era soundtrack and an opening title explaining what little is known about the film, Jarvis uploaded it to YouTube to share with the world.
“Up until now, I think this film has only been shared among a group of history-minded folks in the area,” Jarvis said. “I received it through Kallies. She’s freeze-framed at one point in the film as a third-grader coming out of the Groveport school building.
“I think it’s important for a broader audience to see this because it is unscripted and shows what life must have been like here in 1937,” he added.
“It was very unusual for someone outside of the movie or corporate news industry to have a movie camera in those days, so it is something of an enigma for a small town in Ohio.”
According to Jarvis, the filmmaker is unknown.
“Things like this only become significant after the passage of time,” he said. “When transportation, fashions and fads change is when we realize that they’re gone forever.
“Funny thing is that it doesn’t seem very significant to anyone as it is happening because it’s so commonplace — but it would be great if some group took on the responsibility of storing digital images as a legacy for future generations.
“That will take someone with the mindset that they are planting an acorn, knowing they probably won’t be around to sit in the shade of the large oak tree that grows from it.”
Jarvis said the Groveport Historical Society and the Canal Winchester Area Historical Society will retain copies of the film as a part of their archives. He said the 2012 Destination: Canal Winchester promotional video may be another item that could be preserved for the future.
“There is a strong and unintentional parallel between this 1937 piece and the 2012 piece,” he said. “Both films attempt to show our towns at a specific point in time in a fun and lighthearted way.
“The 1937 film shows several school activities, including a great scene of school buses getting ready to take kids home, with the rest of the film making a deliberate attempt to document the businesses and shopkeepers, with scenes in between of people going about their daily routines.
“If we appreciate seeing our towns as they once were, we need to thank the people who took the time to show us, and we should take pictures of what’s happening now because future generations will also enjoy seeing what’s changed over time,” Jarvis said. “These are going to be the good old days for them.”
Interviewed by WBNS-10TV in regards to H&R Block’s coding error when submitting tax payer returns to the IRS. At the time of posting I still don’t have my return, originally submitted 01/29/2013.
I’d like to tell you the story of a 6-year-old girl, a journalist and an ill-fated Princess Castle.
Once upon a time there was a young fairy princess without a castle, so she put together her site development plan, a list of likely variances, and marched down to her city’s planning and development department to get approval. However, the mean old city official denied her plans and wouldn’t even recommend them to planning and zoning, in part because there’s no agricultural zoning within the city limits – so what’s she gonna do with all those unicorns?
Around my house these are the sort of stories we tell, mostly because Sophie, my 6 year old, gets stuck hanging out with me at city meetings I have to cover for the newspaper. She likes a good story before bed and what’s better than dreaming big, castles and unicorns, or maybe, more relevant to this discussion, what about dreaming about say a new library project, or just trying to get site certification – so you’re ready when the next big project comes along.
And I think that’s what’s brought us all together today. I love to tell stories, and planners are not just technocrats, fussing about with development text – planners are storytellers too. Or at least that’s what I believe they should be.
And not in that cynical, storyteller equals liar sort of way.
If a project’s ever going to happen there are stories that have to be told to connect the vision to the place, people to the project.
Ultimately, when you consider public projects, where there are many stakeholders who need to get behind it, you’re going to have to tell them a story, a short one, one that quickly moves through the important data to get to the conflict, the hero (that’s you), and the resolution. And it’s that conflict and resolution that will sell the vision.
Kurt Vonnegut, a favorite author of mine, left us eight rules of short story telling.
The final rule, because rules aren’t any fun if you feel you have to follow them in order, is: “give your [audience] as much information as possible, as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. [They] should have such complete understanding of what’s going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
For all of you, that audience is most likely people you talk to, not readers. Like the residents you’re going to engage and try to convince that the new high-rise-princess-castle being built next to their single family home is a really great idea.
In 1959 Ray and Charles Eames created a film for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, where they were explicitly asked to create something to improve political relations between the US and Russia. So the Eames told a story about how people are drawn together and the development of cities.
Specifically, the Eames’ used narration and more than 2,200 iconic photos of cities and people in both Russia and the United States to tell the story of the commonalities between the two peoples, at a time when both nations were in the depths of the cold war.
If you think you’ve got some opposition to overcome in your project just consider that perspective.
The film begins with the heavens and the narrator saying: “The same stars that shine down on Russia shine down on the United States…this is the land, it has many contrasts…but people live on this land and, as in Russia, they are drawn together in towns and cities.”
The story begins very broadly, sort of how you might look at the impact of a project on the community at large, before whittling down to the specific neighborhood being impacted. The four and a half minute film takes us from this light-year-away-view down to the exacting similarities of daily life rapidly.
That’s also one of Vonnegut’s rules: “Start as close to the end as possible.”
In the world of civic projects this doesn’t mean that you should keep your story about an upcoming project secret, waiting until you’re just about to put shovels in the ground. What it means is, when you’re telling people your story, you know, trying to tell them the story that’s going to get them to suspend reality of their daily grind, and buy into the vision you have, of that high-rise-princess-castle – you need to leave the past behind.
Another of Vonnegut’s rules, the first rule in fact, is: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
By beginning with forward motion, vision, you’re avoiding bogging your audience down with past arguments that will grind their potential enthusiasm to a halt. Often, the very audiences you’re addressing are the same people who originally thought up those roadblocks; so unless you’re looking to have them tell you a story, skip it.
Speaking of audience, Vonnegut suggests that we craft our story for one person, as he puts it: “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
For our concern, that means foregoing the one-story-fits-all model of talking to stakeholders. Remember, no matter how popular 50 Shades of Grey may be, some people just aren’t going to trade The Marriage Plot for it.
To that point, The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling said one of his biggest problems in storytelling is to provide a different voice from his own for characters. He said, “If you close your eyes to who’s speaking, and just listen, you can’t tell the difference between any of my characters, that’s something I work hard at licking.”
Author Christopher Hitchens makes a similar point, suggesting that this is particularly important, not to go for a one-size-fits-all answer. Hitch said: ”When I write I try to write as if I’m talking to someone, and if I’m told that a reader felt personally addressed, then I think I got it right.”
But you might be thinking, I don’t have any characters in the story I’m trying to tell. I just want to get this building built. It’s a damn good idea and so on.
Thing is, there’s always a character in every story, but it might not be a person at all. It may be the building. It may be the voice of the opposition. It might likely be the neighborhood itself that your project is going into.
Vonnegut has advice about characters as well; in fact four of his eight rules deal primarily with them.
Here are two that really apply: give the reader at least one character he or she can root for (such as a great project) and every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water (or in our case, maybe a water fountain).
And that’s it, that’s most of Vonnegut’s rules for short story telling applied to your world. If I could offer one last thought, it’s this. Step away from the jargon laden planning documents for a moment and consider practicing the art of story telling, just for a little while. It will change your way of thinking and how the people around you understand your ideas.
The U.S. Department of Education released its 2012 list of the top 25 most expensive public universities. Four of those top 25 are Ohio schools, including two in the top ten, The Ohio State University and Miami University.
That puts Ohio in second place overall for most expensive public universities, beaten out only by our neighboring rival Pennsylvania, for this dubious honor.
So, umm, go Bucks?!
And go they will, OSU leadership recommended a 3.2 percent increase in undergraduate tuition and fees for the 2012-2013 school year just weeks ago.
This tuition increase was announced on the heel of a Dayton Daily News story stating that last year the university’s salary bonuses increased by 89 percent.
In that article, Ohio University economics Professor Richard Vedder said, the scale of these bonuses are “not the norm in higher education,” and that he has “never seen anything like this – never.”
Fortunately (at least for those bonus recipients) the school has gotten the support it needs to produce results – at least that’s what OSU President Gordon Gee said.
During a press event in January, Governor Kasich said, “I can tell you Gordon Gee said that this administration is more friendly to higher education than about any place in the country, and Gordon says that now that we have what we need we better produce for the governor.”
But what was the context of that quote?
Kasich was speaking about a new minority jobs program he’s piloting at three community colleges and how those are being funded. At one of the colleges, the Lorain County Community College, the program will be funded through tuition revenue, which is increasing by another 3.5% due to diminished state funding, according to the LCCC Board.
Kasich’s patent response to complaints about reduced funding? He said that the LCCC should “better husband their resources and have a focus.”
Kasich went on to say that he wouldn’t raise taxes to help the situation, that raising taxes would make the state less competitive, that it would “kill the state.”
So what exactly would raising taxes do to kill Ohio? Nothing Kasich isn’t already doing, himself, by pushing tax increases down to the local level, where the cost is born upon the smallest group of people, often across those who are most hurting.
And according to a recent Institute for a Competitive Workforce, U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, Ohio universities rate below the national average on almost every measurement.
Which brings me back to the top 25 most expensive public university list.
When Kasich said he wants to keep our state competitive is he referring to lists like this? Because if we keep reaching for the top of that list, the only students our universities will have will be the ones whose parents received $1 million bonuses.
But, like those administrators taking bonuses while doling out tuition hikes, Kasich’s attempts at Union busting and defunding of education means his actions against Ohioans ring truer than his words.
Standing in the hail and rain, alongside fourteen other men, we await the kick-off. The ball spiraling through the air while fifteen hulking monsters run toward us, looking to pummel whoever receives the ball.
As in life, there are no pads in rugby, and few moments to rest. Broken bones and black eyes are par for the course. That alone makes most people think we’re all a bit nuts to play this sport, and maybe we are.
In the best-case scenario we’re thought of as men’s men. And in more ways than one we may be that too.
Until a couple months ago I hadn’t played rugby for several years. Part of why I stopped playing was that I didn’t feel the sort of camaraderie with my old team that I do now.
That was mostly because many of my old teammates, like so many teammates on so many different sports teams in my past, felt comfortable making the same tired old jokes about being gay or denigrating women.
And sadly, instead of telling them to stop, that I was offended, I quit.
But now, the rugby team I play for is part of the IGRAB league, the International Gay Rugby Association and Board.
And if I were gay that would seem obvious, however I’m a hetero man, playing in a gay rugby league because, even though it is defined in part by sexual orientation, it is somehow less filled with sexual politics than a straight league.
So what is it that in this day and age, where you would be hard pressed to find a sports league based on race, you still have sports leagues based on sexual orientation?
Most of my teammates have some experience playing on mostly straight sports teams. They said in that environment they usually felt they couldn’t be honest, and needed to test the waters before coming out. That coming out process is hard enough as it is, so to do it simply for a recreational sports team can be a tough decision to make.
Of course I can imagine what some of you are saying, well don’t ask and don’t tell.
But when you’re first getting to know someone, particularly in a social setting, like adult sport leagues, after talking about the weather, how long does it take before the conversation strays into the realm of work and more to the point, family.
And that’s the subtle, or maybe not so subtle, difference between the leagues. Joining a straight rec league generally means people will make the assumption that you’re straight. With gay rec leagues there just doesn’t seem to be an assumption, whoever you love is all right.
So can we finally stop with sexual orientation being used as a political football, and instead just get back to playing some football?
The one conceit I’ll give is that for all of my talk about peace and love, it’s never alright to love the other team, especially not in rugby.