Kettering
I wasn’t much aware of discrimination until I was in elementary school in Kettering, Ohio in the 1960’s. Kettering was a suburb of a booming Dayton. Back then, Dayton was a “heavy” industry town with Frigidaire, Delco, and National Cash Register all having big assembly plants. And of course, there was Wright Patterson Air Force Base north of town, the biggest employer. It was, and still is, a major Base, but back then it was a Strategic Air Command base as well (SAC). Huge B-52 bombers with nuclear bomb payloads flew low over our house on course to land at Wright-Pat. The garage door would go up and down by itself as they came in a few hundred feet above the roof, receiving some “top secret” transmission I thought.
But Frigidaire, Delco and NCR were all in the south part of town. You could have a good paying union job on the assembly line, and live in Kettering. Racial discrimination wasn’t so much a thing in Kettering – or maybe it was everything; it was a single race town. There were only three black kids in my school, and two were in my Scout Troop as well. I don’t know how much discrimination they faced, though I expect there was a lot. We didn’t talk much about race. We just were friends, and it wasn’t an issue we discussed.
On the Hill
But I did understand living “on the Hill” or in the “Plat”. Dad was the General Manager of one to the two television stations in town, WLW-D. We lived “up on the hill”, on a street named for a Kentucky bourbon, Echo Springs. I had a 1950’s childhood in the sixties: we played in the woods and on the streets, out from after breakfast to home for dinner. Our gang of kids all lived nearby and road our bikes all over lower Kettering. We could walk to school at Southdale Elementary, and, then, when we moved onto Van Buren Junior High School, raise a lot of “hell” in the neighborhood and on the school buses.
In the Plat
The “plat” was the Huber Homes built on land to the southwest of “Big Hill”. They were sandwiched in all the way up to South Dixie Highway, with the Delco and Frigidaire plants just across the street. Dad’s TV station was down that way as well, making it an easy commute for him. But even though my “gang” got in trouble from time to time, at school you always heard people blame any mishap on the kids “from the Plat”.
I don’t think they ever got in trouble for what we did, but they seemed to get blamed for about everything else. “Plat” kids were “trouble” we were told, though some of them became my friends at Van Buren. I don’t think that I realized the economic or regional discrimination back then. Lots of the kids who lived in the Plat had parents who came North from Appalachia to work in the factories. Looking back – I understand now that accent and income pegged those kids as “trouble” more than their actions.
Wyoming, Wyoming
After ninth grade, Dad got a promotion, and we moved back to Cincinnati. It was the only move that I remember complaining about –I was just about to go to Fairmont West High School, and I was going to lose my friends. But that was the “family business”, we moved when Dad needed us to move – four times while I was in school. So it was high school at Wyoming in Cincinnati, an up-scale suburb was a racially diverse population.
But being racially diverse didn’t mean that the students were all that integrated. We all were in class and played sports together. Bob and I were the only white sprinters on the track team, but there wasn’t much socializing after. It was the early 70’s, and there were still unwritten lines that didn’t seem to get crossed.
Town Gossip
All that memory came flooding back last week when I read the local posts on Facebook. What used to be the gossip at the Nutcracker Restaurant or an article in the Pataskala Standard now is the fodder for chatter in the “Pataskala Group”. School’s out, and there are kids out on the street. It’s reminiscent of my Kettering days: kids riding in packs on bikes – the “Huffy Gang”, and middle schoolers and high school freshmen walking in groups down the roads. There are few sidewalks in Pataskala.
Some of them are harmless – headed to the Dairy Hut for the soft-serve cone, or up to Taco Bell. But, as in every small town, there are kids out looking for trouble. Petty vandalism, snagging unattended bicycles from front yards, and harassing adult motorists by refusing to leave the middle of the road is a their version of fun.
Skaters
But in the Pataskala Facebook forum they are summarized as one of three kinds of kids. The first “bad kids” are “skaters”: kids with a skateboard attached at all times. There are lots of good kids that skateboard: it requires a high degree of physical skill, technique, and “practice man, practice”. But to the unknowing adult it’s the “skater look” that condemns them. Oh, and the fact that they ride down the streets, and perform tricks off of whatever curb or rail they can find. Those kids could use a skatepark rather than condemnation, but with funds always short for the Parks and Recreation Department, and soccer the “king of the fields”, a skatepark isn’t coming soon to Pataskala.
Trailer Park Kids
And the other groups that gets blamed for being “rotten” in the summer time, are defined by their residence, and thus their income. There are the “Kids in the Greens”, the local government subsidized housing, and the “Trailer Park Kids”. They catch the blame for most of the “kid trouble” in this small town, unfair to all of the “good” kids who live in the same locations. It’s short hand for low income kids, and that’s just as wrong now as it was when the kids “from the Plat” got harassed back in good old Kettering.
I spent eight years as the Dean of Students, the discipline guy, at the local high school. I knew the “rough” kids that lived in the Greens or the Trailer Park. But I also knew the “good” kids, trying to do the right thing, who lived in those areas. And there were kids who lived in the affluent areas, Beachwood Trails or the Oaks, who were plenty as “rough” as those kids living in apartments or double-wide’s. It’s was always about the kid, not the location or the money.
Folks in Pataskala need to get that right.
It only just now occurred to me that in all the years I was in, or associated with, Troop 819, there was not a single black kid in our troop. I’m not sure why that was. Maybe it is b/c those kids’ parents weren’t involved in scouts, so they didn’t get involved in scouts. maybe it was something else. I’m 100% sure it was not due to anything from our Scoutmaster, who, as you know, had the BEST of character. there was a lot of “de facto” segregation back then. still is.
Of course, there were never any black kids on our swim team. And our coach, who you would remember, but who I won’t name, was an overt racist. I remember specifically swimming against a “black school” (Withrow) & him leading the team in racist banter. He said, “you can’t call them spades. So call them shovels.” Yuk yuk yuk. What a jokester. Unlike our Scoutmaster, he was the worst of men. He was an ignorant hillbilly. I can’t think of one good thing to say about him, after he was my “coach” for 4 years.