Places Gone, 1

I was thinking the other day about all the places I once knew, places that are now gone. Razed, mostly. Some of them had enormous emotional significance to me (Hiram High School); other absences evoke mostly sorrow, regret, but not the psychic power of some of the others.

I think I'll do a little series about them--not every day, just now and then. I will try to do them in chronological sequence, but I know I'll mess up. In some cases I'll have pictures; in others, not. (In some cases the pictures are somewhere, but I'm not sure where--in some album whose location I can no longer remember.)

The first is the farm of my great-grandfather, Warren A. Lanterman (1866-1963). His daughter, Alma, would later marry G. Edwin Osborn, and their daughter was my mother, Prudence Osborn, born in 1919. (I and my son, Steve, share an "Osborn" middle name.)

For more than 90 years, Grandpa Lanterman (I never knew his wife, Persis, who died in 1946 before I was two years old) lived on a farm on Four Mile Run Road in Austintown, Ohio. I visited it in childhood and was stunned when he beheaded a chicken (for supper) and saw the thing, headless, sprinting around the barnyard--like, well, like a chicken with its ... Tasted good, though.

His farmhouse was one story. Simple. And in the evenings, in the spring, summer, and fall, he would sit there, his work done, and listen to his beloved Tribe on the radio--and dip ginger snaps in his coffee. And maybe take a snort of Old Overholt (his favorite brand of rye whiskey). He had a couple of sayings I remember: When I get to be 100, I'm going to start going back the other way. And I'm lookin' for a rich widow in poor health. He loved the horse races, too.

Back in the mid-1970s Joyce and I drove out to Four Mile Run and took photographs of the farmhouse (then converted into a duplex), of Four Mile Run Christian Church (his), and Four Mile Cemetery, where now he now lies with his wife and son, Bill, who died in 1951 when I was a six-year-old kid. The funeral of Uncle Bill was the first one I attended, and I remember, sitting close to the open casket and thinking He's breathing! I whispered this intelligence to my mom, who shushed me.

Anyway, Joyce and I put together a little album for my grandmother--the places she'd grown up--and gave it to her for Christmas one year.

The next time we drove to the site, the place was gone. Razed. And a small brick apartment building stood there. No indication that it had ever been a farm.

A Google image search just yielded nothing I can use here. I will look later through some albums and see if I get lucky. If I do ...

The pic at the top of this post shows Grandpa Lanterman and other family members (he's the oldest in the photo--duh) at Thanksgiving in, oh, 1956? 57? in Hiram, Ohio.

One more quick story: When Grandpa Lanterman finally had to give up his farm, he came and stayed with us in Hiram, Ohio, for a while--occupying MY bedroom! I remember he was horribly constipated, and the doctor came and ... relieved him. I was in, oh, 8th grade, maybe, and it's an image I will never forget. A bit later, he moved to Enid, Oklahoma, to stay with his daughter, who nursed him for a a half-dozen years until he died. Then ... back to Four Mile Run Cemetery.