Over Here: 6 – Notable Neighbors
...Mr. Williamson was the kind of guy I imagined ate his meat raw and probably worked off steam by clawing at a bare, rough-hewn wooden post in the evenings. He looked almost absurdly tough, and it was authoritatively spoken by the adults in town that he actually was tough! I thanked the Lord more than once for the fact that he was on our side!...
Continuing his autobiography, Ron Pataky recalls his celebrity-loaded boyhood neighbourhood.
Two doors down from our 137 address lived Scott Brown, proprietor of Brown's Drugstore, located down around the corner and a block to the right on Fourth Street. I can only presume that he was a pharmacist.
To us boys, though, he was just a super-nice, semi-balding guy who owned a small drugstore, best known to the kids as the place for assorted penny candies and rich, nickel-a-dip ice cream. But, he also was a well-known and popular cartoonist whose work frequently appeared on the national scene, in the likes, for example, of the Saturday Evening Post. We all called him Brownie.
Up the street on the corner lived Jimmy Lymper, a local basketball coach, who also was widely-known as an Ohio Basketball Association referee. We'd actually see him officiating at various basketball venues during state-wide tournaments, and it was a big deal indeed. His wife, Christine, was one of mom's very closest friends.
The Lympers, incidentally, owned the very first television set in the neighborhood, a depressing, seven-or-so-inch round thing that hypnotically flickered the likes of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie for whomever happened to be assembled at the time.
Color TV and air-conditioning were still maybe a hundred years away, although funeral home fans were plentiful, and a few of the better wax candy confections already contained sweet liquids for tasty and proper hors-deurve-ing. We had popcorn, too, and, should ice cream be required, Brownie's was only about a two-or-three-Orange Crush pee away, as a Crow flies! (Damn! I think I've metted my mixaphors again.)
Coach Jimmy was the father of four daughters, with nary a single boy child to show for what I presumed were his considerable efforts. Jimmy was a little guy, but he possessed the kind of rippling Mediterranean muscle coordinates that made for enough pepper in his veins to stuff those fabulous Greek olives. He also was as sweet a man as ever graced the war-torn planet. Of Greek heritage, Jim had shortened his name from the original Lymperopolis.
Directly next door, to the right from the street view, lived the Williamsons, he of no little fame as a fireman. But not just a fireman. Mr. Williamson was the guy who drove the back end of the city's single, huge, hook-and-ladder truck, and we'd often see him neatly tooling that baby through town traffic en route to one variety of pyrotechnic event or another.
We, of course, would wave like crazy as the monster passed, but he invariably seemed a bit too involved in his work at the moment to wave back. When we'd mention it later in the backyards - and we always did - he'd apologize and gruffly promise to wave the next time. But he never did.
Mr. Williamson was the kind of guy I imagined ate his meat raw and probably worked off steam by clawing at a bare, rough-hewn wooden post in the evenings. He looked almost absurdly tough, and it was authoritatively spoken by the adults in town that he actually was tough! I thanked the Lord more than once for the fact that he was on our side!
Up around the corner on Heineman Boulevard (why a street running only two blocks would be called "Boulevard" is anyone's guess), lived the Mattox family, headed (although there was an unseen father somewhere, rumored to deliver bread for a local bakery) by Margaret Mattox, an equally well-known feature writer for the Mansfield News Journal.
Finally, there was Frank Daniels, Sr., who lived with his wife and son, Frank Jr., just down the street. Frank Sr. was a featured singer with the Mansfield Mennenchoir, a semi-professional group of singers who performed far and wide.
Although rarely spoken of, we all knew it wasn't every neighborhood that could boast this sort of celebrity status. On any given day, we might see a neighbor on a basketball court, or on a stage, or atop the back of a hook-and-ladder, or whose latest cartoon was in the Saturday Evening Post, or whose latest interview was in that day's local paper.
It came very near to being celebrity-overload, although most of us managed to bear up under it. We were somewhat less successful at concealing our exalted status when in the company of fellow urchins from lesser neighborhoods.
