Who is Richard Farr Dietrich?
Or, Whatever
Happened to That Cute Kid and Handsome Dog?
|
|
|
1938-39? 1957
Well, I dunno, I've checked with the usual suspects--nature and
nurture, heredity and environment--who are supposed to be the responsible
parties in these matters of identity, but it's hard to credit the story they've
come up with. And it all seems so
superficial. Anyway, here it is, and
never mind that it reveals a certain addiction to slinging the bull on the
narrator's part:
YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR
PREPARING
FOR THE BULL
First of all, no bull about it, I am
a late edition of a certain gene pool. Does
that matter? Maybe,
maybe not. Many Americans are on
a genealogical quest for ancestors these days because they feel that they'll
answer the question of who they are by finding out who their ancestors
were. There may be something to that,
although not in the way most think.
Finding "royal blood" in the gene pool, for example, probably
tells you nothing about who you are, but finding Tourette's Syndrome
might. Take, for example, the evidence of the following photo,
suggesting that I was destined for a throne. Alas, it never panned out,
depending upon what "throne" you're talking about.
|
QUEEN DOLLY & KING DICK &
THEIR COURT (Latin
Club? Circa 1950) |
|
|
Whatever, I have found investigating
my family tree most worthwhile (and this tells you something
about who I am) because it fulfills the hope that I am at least descended from
interesting people, some of whom are interesting because of the way they tried
to avoid being interesting.
Like my boringly virtuous parents.
I found in the family tree the outlaws and victims of catastrophe I was
hoping to find, for such notoriety is crucial to a narrative such as this, but
the boringly "straight" relatives were just as fascinating because
their virtue seems to have been hiding something.
So let's begin this autobiography by
climbing around that family tree and checking out the monkeys, starting with me
and working our way down limb by limb.
I was born, not quite ready for the
New Age, on the cusp of Aquarius,
It took me a while to get out of Port
Clinton, however, which wasn't all bad because there was
lots to see and do there. Port Clinton was then a town of about 3,000
souls between Toledo and Cleveland on Lake Erie and known as the "Gateway to the Islands," referring to
Put-in-Bay (also called "South Bass") and about a dozen other islands
reachable by ferry or other boat from Port Clinton.
Port
As a kid I used the peninsula below like I owned it. The Yacht Club & neighbors indulged me.
And this is what my backyard looked like in the old
days:
Below
is what the downtown looked like, south from the river, in the 1950s, my
heyday.
Look
for a '49 black
the
cars I drove in that decade of miraculous but clueless youth.
Was it always summer in Port
Clinton? Only when I want to remember the place fondly.
All too often it froze my bones. To make the picture a little more
complete, then, the following photos (scenes around our house) remind me of one
of the principal reasons I left Beautiful Ohio and settled in
But let's remember it as summertime,
shall we?
In addition to all its natural
attractions, with water water everywhere, Port
Clinton and its environs has a bit of national
history behind it, at least one item of which has something to say
about who I am. First, let's review the
items that didn't directly touch me but mattered in the sense that they helped
define the community I grew up in.
Port Clinton was named after that
far-seeing master of city and country planning, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, who, after laying out the grid for
Manhattan and having the Erie Canal built, had plans to build a canal from Port
Clinton to the Ohio River, which he thought would open the interior of the
country up to boat trade (But the railroads took care of that, Clinton not
being quite far-seeing enough). Perhaps in anticipation of becoming a canal
gateway, Port Clinton began as a major boat-building center. [One of my
best friends as a kid, by the way, was Scot Reynolds, the son of the manager of
Matthews' Boat Works, who never ceased trashing Chris Crafts. Scot is the
one on the left below (1948), getting the credit from the mayor, but I'm the
one on the right who actually sold the cat-tails (a claim Scot can't defend
himself against, having passed on to that great scout camp in the sky).
I'm not quite sure of the logic of this cat-tail drive, but apparently it was
my maiden voyage as an environmentalist. Those cat-tails have since
mostly been bulldozed:
Other items of national interest,
just east of Port Clinton, include the Confederate
cemetery (formerly a prison) on Johnson's
These orchards were part of a rich
farming community around Port Clinton on all sides in my youth that made Sunday
drives enjoyable episodes of fruit-picking, corn-harvesting, and the like. The
cider available in the fall was real cider,
that after a week or two of sitting on the back porch took on the kick
of a mule. I would kill for such cider
today.
There is one national celebrity,
however, who affected me personally. I
refer to Commodore Perry, who of course
in the War of 1812 defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie and whose
heroics--"We have met the enemy and they are ours"--called for the
later construction of Perry's Monument on
Put-in-Bay, straight off
Port Clinton. The inviting
presence of this memorial occasioned many thrilling trips in my youth over
A "defining moment"
certainly arrived the first time I climbed Perry's Monument. Unfortunately, these "climbs" (i.e.
elevator rides to the top of Perry's Monument) revealed that I suffered from
somewhat less-than-heroic vertigo the minute I moved from the elevator to the
observation platform at the top. This vertigo constituted one of my principal
introductions to the discrepancy between the world as I wished it to be
(something I could comfortably look down upon from angelic heights) and the
world as it was (dizzying whenever one tried to elevate). And since no one else in my family seemed to
suffer from vertigo, it brought home the fact that one can be peculiar even
among one's near clones. Gene pools are
as likely to spawn difference as similarity.
Had I been able to stand up on
Perry's Monument (I usually fell to my trembling knees soon after getting off
the elevator at the top or plastered myself against the wall furthest from the
edge), I might have seen the ghosts of speed boats past darting here and there
among the islands and, on a clear day, sensible Canada lining the northern
horizon. For those islands in mid-lake also served as transfer stations for bootleggers from Port Clinton and
Exciting stuff, that bootlegging, but
my boringly virtuous parents had little to do with that beyond perhaps
purchasing an illicit fifth of bathtub gin from time to time and, after
Prohibition was repealed, sharing the ownership
of one of those used, varnished speed boats for a while. It took some digging and some serendipity to
get to the reasons for my parents' virtuous but boring lives. Here are my
virtuous parents, Marion and Dick Sr., and their virtuous son and daughter, Dick
Jr. and Marilyn:
My parents were Marion
Margaret Farr Dietrich (raised as a farm girl in Danbury, Ohio) and Richard Franklin Dietrich (born in Milan, Ohio
but raised mostly in Gypsum, Ohio, site of large gypsum mines and factories).
insert map of Port
The fact that my father was born in
Milan, the same town Thomas Edison was, illustrates how lightning can strike
the gene pool right next to yours, so to speak, leaving you to wonder why yours
missed all the excitement.
Well, never mind geographical location,
where had boring Richard and Marion come from, gene-pool-wise?
From not-so-boring ancestors, it
turns out.
First, Richard's family--the Dietrichs
and the Fabians.
My father's great-grandparents, John & Minnie Dietrich, apparently emigrated
from
The notorious Ernest Dietrich, my grandfather.
See below a portrait of the reprobate as a young
man:
Frederick
& Hannah with family, circa 1894
It was marriage that made Ernest Dietrich
notorious, thanks partly perhaps to the woman he married, my grandmother Emma
Amanda Fabian, in 1895.
First, a bit about the Fabians, who also had some Wargowskis in the geneaology suggesting a Polish connection as well.
I vaguely remember a story that the Fabians
had emigrated (from a part of
Whether the story about the
draft-dodging "Uncle Otto" is true or not, Otto's sister, Emma,
certainly earns her stripes in this story by showing us the importance of being
Ernest. Ernest
and Emma Dietrich, apparently living in first
Quite a brood.
But the problem was that the Fab Five depicted
above weren't all the children ol'
Ernest had. It seems Ernest had a second family in
What must Emma have been like to
drive Ernest to such importance? Or was
he the "cur" and "base coward" the newspapers said he
was? One wonders what the happy family below knew
about Ernest in 1912, just before he went bananas and married the second woman:
Dietrich
Family
Well, I'm real sorry I missed that
party, aren't you? Imagine how much more
sour the expressions on the faces would have been, especially Emma's, if they
had known that just a few months hence Ernest would run off to Detroit to marry
the woman from Sandusky, two days after promising a judge he would do
better to support his and Emma's five kids!! Although he and Emma were still officially
married, apparently she had to haul him into court to support the family. Sounds like an absentee father. What's missing here is any mention of the
possibility that Ernest had for some time devoutly wished for divorce but was
prevented from it by circumstances.
Divorces were not as easy to come by in those days. Could it be that he lived on and off with two
families for nine years because he couldn't figure a way out of that?
Whatever, let's at least consider the
possibility that Emma was not blameless.
A clue to Emma's character may arise from the way Emma treated at least
one of her children. Because during the
nine years between 1913 and the 1922 (?) divorce,
when Ernest seems to have been absent much of the time, and three of the
children were still young (Dick was 5 in 1913), justifying Emma's staying home,
her older sons were forced to support their mother. Here's Uncle Fred,
for example, working his milk route over brick-paved streets:
But the older Rollie
and Fred were able to at least complete high school, whereas Dick, despite being a very promising student, was
forced to quit school in the ninth grade (when he was 16) and go to
work. Dick was not grateful to his mother for this. The (circa 1920) picture below
suggests a boy wanly enjoying what little is left of his boyhood:
Did
Dick know that his days as Tom Sawyer were numbered?
Dick Sr., as I came to know my father, all
too soon after this picture was taken, at the age of 16 (1924) became the
manager of Kroger grocery stores in Oak Harbor (upriver to the west of Port
Clinton) and Perrysburg (near Toledo), but most of his long career of managing
Kroger stores occurred in Port Clinton. Here's Dad, on the right in both
pictures, first as the manager of the Perrysburg store and then of the
|
|
|
After quitting Kroger's in the early 1950s
when he found running the town's first Kroger supermarket too aggravating, he
managed Sorenson's old-fashioned Grocery Store for a few years (where I worked
summers and Saturdays as a teen-ager), and he had brief stints as an
all-purpose construction worker and a salesman of Pontiacs and Cadillacs. Eventually he settled into his final job of
credit manager at
It's significant that I knew almost
nothing of this dark side of the family history growing up, although I always
wondered why there seemed to be resentment about the monthly check my father sent
to contribute to my grandmother's nursing home upkeep. The much-abused Emma lived to be 99, by the
way, which gave that resentment ample time to build up and occasionally boil
over. Although longevity must have been
in the genes, because Emma's brother and a first cousin topped 100, there were
grumblings among her children that it was mainly bile against her bigamist
ex-husband that kept her alive.
What I mostly remember about my grandmother is not that she was "a woman
wronged" but that, on visits to her Gympsum home
when I was quite young, she always treated me to fantastically delicious
home-grown tomatoes, home-baked bread, and home-churned butter. Here's
the grandma I remember, feeding her chickens after feeding me:
Later, on her obligatory Christmas or
Thanksgiving visits, I recall her as a rather shapeless, burping old lady,
always complaining. But it appears she
had a talent for writing, maybe even bore a life-long frustration at being
unable to fulfill it, and so it's fair to consider the possibility that being
saddled with five kids while Ernest cavorted about might have done this
potential New Woman in.
At any rate, once, near the end of
her life, she sent me perhaps the only letter she ever wrote to me, which did
indeed reveal both her talent and her frustration, but which principally
revealed her life-long grievance, for it came with 1922
(?) newspaper clippings denouncing Ernest Dietrich as a cad for practicing
bigamy and forgery and pronouncing him well deserving of jail. I knew
why she had written. She wanted
vindication from me. She had heard that
I was a writer of sorts, and she hoped I would someday tell her story. Here it is, grandma, though I'm sorry I never
met my grandfather Ernest or got to hear his side of it. Although
he probably would have just told a tall tale similar to the ones he is reported
telling various women and various judges.
Speaking of those judges who sentenced Ernest, the one in
|
Please note:
You're about half way through. To continue, click HERE. |
----------------------------------------------------
Last
updated