Who is Richard Farr Dietrich?

(continued)

---

Now the Farrs, my mother's family.

Will they prove as interesting? It's almost too much to hope for. But wait and see.

The Farr family can be traced further back, although the origins are murky indeed. Coming to this country in the 1870s, later than the Dietrichs did, my great-grandparents John and Margaret Farr emigrated from Longtown, England, on the Welsh border, an old Roman fort town. Down the hill from this tiny village stands the ancient church of Cloddock, surrounded by tombstones, many of which carry the name of Farr (and the names of those families they married into--the Pritchards, Parrys, Joneses, and Thomases).

The tombstones go back at least five generations, to a William Farr born in 1724. Apparently the Farrs were mostly "yeomen," meaning small farmers. They owned land but were lower in rank than the gentry. If the older tombstones had not had their inscriptions worn off, I might have discovered Farrs going back to at least the early 17th Century, for a family story has it that the Farrs of Longtown were all descended from Farrs who had migrated there from Scotland at that time.

Three dark-eyed Farr brothers, the story goes, fleeing from the law, eventually made their way from the far north of Scotland to settle in Longtown early in the 17th C. They fled the law, opposing legends have it, either for stealing sheep or for political reasons, possibilities that can be reconciled by the fact that in those days a certain political motive was sometimes disguised as something else. Those were the days in Scotland of the "land clearances," when absentee aristocrats evicted people from their homes and destroyed the homes to make room for more sheep, who were more profitable. What the law called a "sheep stealer" may simply have been someone who fought the eviction, although I wouldn't rule out a vindictive theft or two. Whatever, I'm encouraged to see that there are outlaws on this side of the family too. In a world in which wickedness owns almost everything, you especially can't have enough thieves in the family. Speaks well for family spirit.

To check out this Farr legend, received in correspondence from a distant relative in Longtown, my wife and I one summer visited a small hamlet called "Farr," situated along "Farr Bay," in the middle of coastal northern Scotland, just east of Tongue and near Bettyhill.

Standing where his ancestors once stood,

Dick looks positively mythological.

The splendid but chilly beach along this coast is nowadays called "the Viking Riviera" because so many Vikings strayed south off their usual course between Norway and Iceland and landed there, many settling and becoming Scottish clans. We learned this when, to our amazement, we discovered a small museum in the bleak, empty land between Farr and Bettyhill. The curator explained that we would find no Farrs in Farr, nor would we find any on the region's various registers going back to the beginning of the 17th C., and the reason was not that the Farrs had all left but that most likely there never had been any!

According to the curator, in the 17th C. all of the families in this part of Scotland were descended from an original Viking chieftain named Kai, whose sons where all "MacKai," meaning "son of Kai" (and thus the origin of the McKays and Mackeys), and since everybody had the same last name, so to speak, they distinguished themselves from others who had the same first name by taking a place or a job name as their last name. A John MacKai who lived in Farr, for example, might call himself "John Farr" to distinguish himself from other John MacKais who lived in the area but not in Farr. But "farr" is simply a Norwegian word for "shepherd" or "land of shepherds," and so "John Farr" perhaps simply equated to "John the shepherd." Whether the "Farr" last name was taken by the three Farr brothers who fled south because "Farr" was where they were from or it was what they were, they may also have used it to disguise who they were, if indeed they were hunted for political or legal reasons. Once settled in Longtown, the Farrs appear to have become model citizens, but perhaps this is another instance of living down a disreputable past. Sometimes boring is good.

At any rate, breaking the chain of respectable yeomanry that five or more generations of Farrs had established in Longtown, my great-grandparents John and Margaret came over to America in the 1870s, bringing my grandfather William Farr when he was a small child. Somewhere in the early 1900s Bill Farr married Margaret Wahlers, who may have been from Schlieswig-Holstein, once Danish but perhaps German at the time. Don't know anything heroic about the Wahlers, except that a cousin named Bill was signed by the Cleveland Indians, and I guess that will have to do.

Bill and Margaret's Wedding Picture, 1891

Bill Farr started as a farmer in Danbury but eventually worked for the railroad as a telegraph operator when he moved into Port Clinton.  That's him on the right: 

He also seems to have had some amazing interest in a young game his grandson would one day play for keeps.  In the photo below Bill Farr, with the bow tie, is the coach of what I was told was one of the country's first semi-professional basketball teams (1904).  

While on their farm in Danbury, Ohio, William and Margaret Farr had two children, my mother Marion Margaret Farr (1908-1987) and my Uncle Jim (1907-1926). The (circa 1912) picture below shows this charming couple:

Mom and Uncle Jim

At the age of 19, Uncle Jim unknowingly added plot interest to this story by spookily drowning in the Portage River across from the Yacht Club and just a few hundred yards from where I spent most of my youth. That coincidence ought to be dramatic enough for me, but sometimes I let my imagination run riot when I contemplate the fact that Uncle Jim's drowning took place just before my parents' wedding in 1926. I ask you, how many incest-romances have a sibling committing suicide just before the other sibling's marriage? Of course no one has ever suggested the drowning was anything more than an accident, but why did my parents go ahead with the wedding so soon after? Consider further that at that 1926 wedding, which must have had a pall over it with Marion's brother barely cold in the grave (Wait! Did they even find his body?), Marion Farr and Richard Dietrich made such a handsome couple they were dubbed "The Hollywood Duo." Mom was a bombshell! Dad was a Bogart! And Uncle Jim was drownded.....

Mom and Dad in 1926

Well, you know, add catastrophe to outlawry, mix in a vague hint of brother-sister incestual feelings, and you're beginning to have a very interesting family indeed! Even the boring ones have interesting reasons for being boring!

At any rate, I think you're beginning to get some idea of who I am from my tastes in family history and storytelling. I agree with G. B. Shaw, "If you can't get rid of the family skeletons, you might as well make them dance." It helps of course that the ones I've made to dance are beyond caring whether they're made to dance or not.

Even so, I'm now going to make an effort to get back to reality here. Just the facts, ma'am.

After a brief tour of duty managing a Kroger store in Perrysburg, Ohio (near Toledo) and in Oak Harbor, my father was assigned to the Port Clinton store, and so my parents lived there from then until they retired to Melbourne, Florida. My sister Marilyn (1929) and I (1936) were born when our parents lived in a small house on 5th St. in Port Clinton. 

 Shortly after my birth, they moved to a larger house on 4th St. (a few blocks west of the house on 4th St. where the grandparent Farrs had moved from the country, Bill Farr now being a telegraph operator for the railroad).

Dick Jr. and sister Marilyn circa 1939

[My sister Marilyn Green, by the way, now lives with most of her large brood in Fremont, Ohio, just southwest of Port Clinton, although Griffith, Indiana holds another branch, and combined they have made me a great-Uncle and great-great Uncle many times over. The story of the Greens and the Sewalls is another whole epic or two, which I will mostly leave to them, but here, on the left, is a shot (circa late 1950s) of nephews Mike (1953) and Jim (1952) and nieces Cathy (1955) and Mary (1954), before they started making such a "great" uncle out of me, and, on the right a shot of me and Marilyn's firstborn, Jim (1954?), in front of the old boathouse, now torn down :

In 1941 my parents moved across the river from the town, and I spent the rest of my boyhood living in a two-story red brick house on "River Front," later inappropriately renamed "Brooklyn St," which was situated on the Portage River just west of the Port Clinton Yacht Club where the river bent north to follow its rerouting through rock walls to Lake Erie. The front of the house looked out toward Lake Erie through "The Log Cabins," but the property, with a dock and boathouse, was on the river and its back looked out over the river toward the town.  The ferryboat to the islands used to park just across from us, as did the fishing fleet.

The way the front of the house looked then, with the great Chinese elm in the back.

Dad landscaped this lot to the teeth.

Our house had a twin next door, occupied by the people (the Hecklers) who owned "The Log Cabins," a resort of about a dozen cabins which was just across the street and between us and Lake Erie. There was a period there when I grumblingly mowed the lawns of the Log Cabins, the Hecklers, our lawn, and the lawn of Mrs. Kelly, a ship captain's widow who had the only house on the river between us and the Yacht Club. The Log Cabins were eventually demolished and replaced by condos. The Yacht Club later bought both Mrs. Kelley's house, which they tore down and replaced with a swimming pool, and our house, where the keeper now lives on a property denuded of all the wonderful landscaping my father so lovingly worked on.

See the evidence of the crime below, from the 1990s:

To continue with the theme of the despoliation of a beautiful past (or the polluting of the environmental gene pool, so to speak), Port Clinton today is mostly condos and marinas and fast food joints from end to end, as its summertime population at times quadruples its wintertime population of around 7,000. During the new-fangled annual summer "Walleye Festival," I'm told, visitors are thicker than June bugs. And they now have an annual "Walleye Drop" in the winter, during which a huge papier-mâché fish is dropped into the river right across from my old home. I'm told that David Letterman split his 1999 New Year's Eve show between the ball-drop in Time's Square and the Walleye Drop in Port Clinton, Ohoho.

Incidentally, we didn't call them "walleyes" when I was a boy, we called them "pickerel." And nobody seems to remember how to cook them. Squirt a whole pickerel with lemon juice, wrap it in bacon and an oiled cooking bag, and bake at 350 degrees for at least an hour. It is to die for.

This recipe was my father's, I am amazed to realize. My housewife mother did all the cooking, except for the pickerel. An inveterate fisherman on weekends, my father always had a boat in his boathouse, a 32 foot sea-going Maine fisher being the most fondly remembered.

The great boat, just off our dock (with the ferryboat in the background) and samples of the fish Mom & Dad caught on Sunday mornings, while I was at Sunday School and church representing them.

With a dock on the Portage River about 100 feet off our back porch and a beach on Lake Erie about 100 yards off our front porch through the Log Cabins, much of my youth was spent on or in water and boats. Home or away, you'll often still find me around water.

Around the bend from the Yacht Club is Lake Erie. To the left of those rocks on the left is my old swimming hole, so to speak.

However. However. Seldom were there other children to play with in that neighborhood, which was mostly inhabited, and then only in summers, by tourists and yacht club members, and so I grew up lonely but imaginative, a tad bookish, and self-sufficient. Outdoorsy despite the bookishness, I spent many wonderful hours engrossed in heroic pretense traversing the mystical trails of the fantasy kingdom of the marshes around the western perimeter of the Yacht Club (now filled in and occupied by tennis courts!) and the small fill-dirt hills around the outside rim of the Yacht Club's lagoon. Grandpa Farr, who lived with us at the beginning, added immeasurably to that pretend kingdom by teaching me to read and write well before other kids my age, a head start I never outgrew, as wonderful book followed wonderful book, until I now live in a house of books, the kingdom of the wise. That childhood was a foolproof recipe for becoming a devoted reader and writer.

But then there are the ways we try to contradict our upraising. And find that it gets us in the end, anyway.

Because my parents had a tendency to keep their old homes rather than sell them, to which they added a few other small homes later on, including the Farr homestead on 4th St. when my elderly grandparents moved in with us, they supplemented their income by renting houses. My dad could do almost anything in the way of plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, etc., and so they did all their own remodeling and maintenance. There was always a project going somewhere. I did not participate as a youth, being above all that mere practicality (it's a wonder the vertigo didn't strike!), but strangely in my adulthood I find myself with the same tendency to have a construction or remodeling or landscape project going somewhere, somehow. As a kid, I mostly ignored my father's attempts to teach me plumbing, carpentry, etc., and thus I have had to learn all that the hard way. To that end I still use some of my father's old tools. At last I must admit that, despite my best efforts to avoid such a fate, I am my father's tool.

Another example of the rebellion that turns on you is in the attitudes toward work I've had through my life. Today I share my father's workaholic nature, loathing time wasted on the unproductive, but it was not so in my Port Clinton days. I lived to play and hated every minute of the many hours I was forced to work, mostly at hard jobs, as my parents insisted that childhood be a time for growing up and preparing for adulthood. Where did that idea go?

I can't remember at what age I began work, but it was quite young. I think I began at about eight or nine with selling on downtown street corners "The Port Clinton Herald and Republican." Dad had me bicycling around town with grocery store flyers soon after, and I recall some bitter moments hopelessly pushing a broom over a grocery store parking lot. One exceptional, shining moment in my work life occurred when I won a prize for selling the most light bulbs of anyone in the Cub Scouts, as I left no door unknocked upon and a glorious career in sales seemed to beckon. But mostly it was drudgery. I sacked a million potatoes in the back of my father's Kroger store, and then when he moved across the street to Sorenson's Grocery I followed him into my first serious, full-time jobs, working all summer six days a week and then on Saturdays during the school year. Fridays and Saturdays were from 8:00 to 8:00. I did every job there was to do, being especially responsible for stacking shelves and setting up and striking the produce stand outside each day, and I even clerked. This was back in the pre-self-serve days when you sidled up to a counter with a grocery list and the white-aproned clerk got everything for you. In this I learned to be polite to people and to banter with them, lessons seemingly unavailable to today's youth.

My hardest but most educational jobs came with physical maturity. In the summers of my 18th and 19th years I worked at the canning factory at the eastern end of 4th St., sometimes working double shifts when the trucks of tomatoes lined up outside. Many 16 hour days were spent, say, pushing empty catsup bottles onto a revolving disk that sent them onto the bottling line, while other times I might be outside pouring tomatoes or other farm products onto the conveyor belt that took the fruit past a row of frowsy ladies peeling and inspecting before it was elevated to the cooking vats. On double-shift days I would fall into bed at midnight and refuse to credit the alarm going off at 6:00 AM the next morning. I wanted to die, after a bit.  And I can still smell that sweet tomatoey aroma that hung over the whole town during the height of the tomato canning.  

But there were compensations. For one thing, I encountered strange, exotic people. The Mexicans living out back in shacks, who did most of the grunt work, gave me my first cross-cultural experience with a minority group. PCHS did not have a single African-American in its 1954 graduating class of 96 students, let alone a Mexican, so it came as quite a shock to find myself in daily contact with people of such dark complexion who barely spoke English. But I became friends with a couple of them, learned much from them, and curse myself to this day that I did not follow up that friendship outside the factory.

The canning factory was hard work, but little did I know that it was just tuning me up for worse to come. For the next five summers, when home from college, I worked at Celotex, one of those gypsum plants in Gypsum, not far from the old Dietrich homestead. Called a "roustabout," I again did every job imaginable, but mostly I worked on the loading docks with the old pros, either slinging wallboard and lath into box cars or trucking 100 lb. bags of plaster onto trucks. It was piece work, and the old pro you were teamed up with took delight in making the college kid keep up. It was backbreaking, but teaming up with the likes of "Pappy," a gnarled man in his 60s who looked exactly like "Popeye," complete with pipe, or with mustachioed Wes, the only black man I've ever gotten to know with any intimacy, was an education in itself. I learned all about "the proletariat" there, which made me impervious to theoretical arguments about them later on. "The proletariat" just wanted to get the hell out of that factory, but stuck it out so that their children could get out. Meanwhile they had as much fun on the job as they could by telling bawdy jokes and good-naturedly hazing the college kids, then drinking and carousing after work. The sudden advent of TV got some of them home a little earlier, I guess.

Another thing I got from those work experiences was the relatively muscular and supple body of an athlete. I haven't always trained and sometimes weigh too much, but I've kept on with the games, despite some killer injuries and knee operations. All of the games. Below I'm doing my Mark McGwire routine at an annual faculty-staff softball picnic, not too many years ago.

Big Stick

But back to the future. It was Port Clinton that made me into the bookish jock I am today. The great joys of my teen years were books, girls, and sports. The reading was indiscriminate and, clueless about the classics, I didn't read anything really worthwhile, outside of possibly a few classic Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, but at least I came out of this with the habit of reading and the need for it. I was clueless about girls, too, but dated the hell out of them and learned what joys they could bring to alleviate the frustrations they imposed, we having arrived on the scene too early for "the sexual revolution." And I was especially clueless about sports, though I played them all with great zest and some skill and lettered in basketball.  I always had a ball in my hands, it seems.  But why am I out of uniform on the top right?

Clueless about religion as well, despite or because of my 10 years of perfect Sunday School attendance, I tried to play sports like a good Christian should. Which, for example, lost me quite a few rebounds I should have had on the varsity basketball team. When I got to college, all this changed, as I started playing with guys who never worried about being "nice." Once I stopped worrying about being "nice" (and who are the "Jocks for Christ" kidding?), I became quite a decent athlete, in lots of different sports, and I went on to play intramural, city or county league ball until I was near fifty. These days it's tennis, racquetball, bicycling, and exercise machines, although "The Grumps," the latest name for my group of bookish jocks, still occasionally skip off to an over-60 basketball tournament, when injuries allow.  Originally, in graduate school, our teams were called "The El Rancho Chargers," after the street we lived on in Tallahassee while attending Florida State U.   At a recent volleyball party, we had a reunion of the old "Chargers":

And then came what I refer to as "The Uncoachables,"

masquerading as the Faculty Football Team (circa 1975).

I am the glue-fingered tight end in the middle of the back row.

And the beat goes on, with new "ringers" all the time:

"The Grumps," as they're now called, can't stop!

A selection of "Uncoachables" or "Grumps" (take your pick),

take a break from backyard volleyball.

But they're always # 1:

I observe now that this story has changed from emphasis on family to emphasis on extra-family matters, as I follow the thread of my life into my teens, twenties, and beyond, but an underlying note through it all is the effect Port Clinton had on me. This has turned out to be more a paean to Port Clinton than it started out to be, or at least the Port Clinton of my youth. I realize now how much that town contributed to the building of my identity, and I'm probably also trying to make up for the warped perception I had of it at the time I lived there, forty years ago. Port Clinton was a wonderful place to grow up, but I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that I was lonely and frustrated in my ambitions there, and the town seemed backward and provincial. When I left for college, I went to Miami U. in Oxford, Ohio, down near Cincinnati, partly because it was about as far away as I could get and still be going to a state university. I considered it a reversal of sorts when, upon graduating from Miami with a degree in Psychology in '58, I was forced to attend nearby Bowling Green State University for my M.A. in English because I could save money by commuting from home. But then, after turning down a teaching assistantship at Ohio State U., it was on to an exotic Tallahassee and Florida State University for my Ph.D., the University of Delaware for my first full-time teaching position (5 years), and then, after not being able to snag the job I wanted in California, back to Florida at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1968, where I've been ever since.

Living northwest of Tampa in Odessa, I enjoy a quiet life in the country with my wife Lori that affords me time to do the writing and reading I so enjoy, with lots of tennis and country walks or bicycling worked in.  Here we are on our neighborhood courts, no doubt on a Saturday morning:

The country quiet is occasionally interrupted by welcome visits or phone calls from friends and our three, luverly children.

Rick, from my first marriage, is a computer techie in Oxford, Ohio, where he attended his father's alma mater, Miami U.

The essential Rick would probably not be just getting out of a swim meet, as he is above, he'd probably be seated at a computer eating a hot dog, but his father has taken liberties with his image here, its being the essence of his father to do so. Following are images he'd perhaps rather see, Rick as Peter Pan (1986?) and Rick as computer whiz (2000):

From Lori's first marriage, we are blessed with Travis and Lynn Marie Ruse.

Lynn Marie is a dancer and teacher of dance who operates her own dance troupe in New York—Freefall LTD. But she makes most of her living by teaching Yoga, having twice made trips to India for special instruction.

The Essential Lynn Marie & Her Dance Company--"Freefall"

Travis is a photographer and Photo Editor for INC Magazine in New York. In 2000 he teamed up with sculptress/ physical therapist Cynthia Halpern to produce our first grandchild, Hope.

The Essential Travis

The Travis & Cynthia Dance Co., so to speak.

With the sweet addition of Hope Charlotte Ruse, born on 1/1/ 2000:

The Hopester shows grandpa around the hood.

The Hopester is the one who should be wearing the 01-01-00 cap.

The Hopester gratifies grandma.

And then came Eva in 2001.

And now we have a dynamic duo for granddaughters:

All of which added up 10 or so years ago to a portrait of a late 20th Century family, one of the characteristics of such a family being that the portrait already needs revision:

A Very Post-Modern Family: The Ruse-Dietrichs

Above, Travis-Lynn Marie-Lori-Rick-Dick

Below, A Revision Thereof, as Cynthia Joins In:

Cynthia-Travis-Lori-Lynn Marie in Washington, D.C.

Lynn Marie's being a devoted denizen of the East Village in New York and Travis & Cynthia being Brooklynites gives us an excuse to visit one of our favorite dens of iniquity--NYC. Not that my wife needs an excuse. Lori loves to travel even more than I do and will pack her bags at a moment's notice.

Here's Lori in Athens

Here's Lori in Venice

This could go on and on, but suffice it to say:

Here's Lori ready for anywhere!!

Although strangely she claims that her favorite restaurant 

is our back porch, at sunset.  Go figure!

Anyway, we've toured much of Europe and the British Isles on an annual basis and make annual trips to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, a sample of which appears below:

Dick contemplates Lake Ontario from the back yard of our favorite Niagara-on-the-Lake B & B, The Silvermist.	After marathon bike rides along the Niagara Parkway, we usually end up on Queenston Heights, half way to Niagara Falls, where Lori typically refreshes herself with a tall beer

But our dreams and longings take us most often back to our favorite haunt, the Greek Isles, especially the mystical Santorini, an island that plays a crucial part in my apocalyptic novel, The Final Solution, now available at  http://www.iuniverse.com/marketplace/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0595132731 and soon, hopefully, available at www. barnesandnoble.com. A later novel, Earth Angel, is also available at amazon.com.

Although I've now gone on to the writing of fiction and plays in which I can indulge such dreaming and longing, I can't leave this account of my life without at least mentioning the many very undreamlike years of work at and for the University of South Florida. While Lori thrived there as the gatekeeper to seven presidents, before retiring in 2002, I've ground out a relatively rewarding and fulfilling academic career there as well, some of the aspects of which--publications, courses, editorial work, curriculum vitae--can be viewed by clicking on other links on the Ozymandias Home Page. You'll also find there some hints as to how reading has shaped my perspective on the world.

So enough. Sum it up, narrator. Who is Richard Farr Dietrich?

It seems R. F. D. is where he was raised, especially, but also the families that begat him and he begat, the woman he loves, the friends enjoyed along the way, the things he does, and the way he does them. If this ends not with an essence of personality established, it's at least a hint at a work in progress. Other than that I can't say here, for only fiction can do justice to the inner life. Watch out for the Great American Novels to follow.  I'll conclude now with a gallery of guises that the old shape-changer has assumed over the years, just to remind me of who I've been:

Spent many hours with old "Butch," my brindle bull terrier, who didn't mind jumping into that river.

Here I am, on the right, tossing Queenie's puppies around at the Heckler's next door, with some relative of theirs and Judy, my first girl friend, a daredevil.  We played tackle football, one on one, and she left me prostrate in the dust.

Above my sister has her hands on cousin Kenny Dietrich, whilst I look small beside my cousin Jim Dietrich.  Uncle Fred's  & Aunt Inzie's kids.  Notice how that bike made it into every picture in those days.	Many hours were spent flying high in this swing, but here I'm keeping scaredy cat Maryann Riggalls from Utica, NY, close to the ground.

Seven years in the high school band playing baritone is the only thing that kept me from playing football and out of traction, which, later, just playing touch football sent me into.	This guy I don't know at all.   He went to college and got some knowledge and lost his hair, poor schlump.

This guy got married and had his hands full.

This guy wore Speedos and made a swimmer out of Rick.

----------------------------------------------------

Last updated 21 June 2004

R. F. Dietrich (Ozymandias Home Page)