Butler County, Ohio

I spent a marathon day in Butler County, Ohio Tuesday, after a three hundred mile drive Monday from Morgantown to West Chester Township, at the southeast end of the county, just north of Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located. Butler County lies between Cincinnati and Dayton, mostly on the Miami River, just east of Indiana.

Richard Butler, for whom the county was named, was a Pennsylvanian charged with "negotiating" the Natives out of their land in what was, just after the American Revolution, the Northwest Territories. He was killed in a battle, won by the native tribes, where the Americans were commanded by Arthur St. Clair, for whom St. Clairsville, the seat of Belmont County, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from Wheeling West Virginia, is named. The largest city in Butler County is Hamilton, named for the one-time US Treasurer, and now Broadway star, Alexander Hamilton. It was Hamilton's idea to sell off the Northwest Territories to settlers to pay off the new country's debts from the war. In a park in Hamilton, there is a sculpture of a pioneer family next to a restored log cabin. Brave settlers! There is not a whiff of apology to the displaced Natives. Only at Miami University, in Oxford, at the northwestern edge of the county, is there a Department of Mayamee Tribe Relations.

There was lots of news about Butler County this week. An election took place Tuesday to replace John Boehner, who was the congressperson from this part of Ohio. The woman whose kid fell into the gorilla exhibit at Cincinnati Zoo was from Butler County; the courts decided not to charge her. And a fifteen-year old who shot several of his classmates with a gun he pulled out of a lunchbox, was sentenced to detention until age twenty-one. In a classic made-for-TV moment, his mother cried out at the trial "He has a good heart."

There are eighty-six sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Butler County. I picked ten to go see on Tuesday, randomly, every tenth one on the list. I added two - one in West Chester Township where I was staying, and one in Oxford on the campus of Miami University, because that's where it was. There's a small Conservative synagogue in Hamilton, and a mall outside of Middletown, the second largest city in the county.

West Chester Township is what Joe's demography teacher at Hebrew Union College called a "Boom Berg," i.e. a brand new city just far enough away from a major center, that seems to spring up overnight. In this case, it is just outside of the county that contains Cincinnati. Most of the township is new office parks, lots of new hotels (I stayed at a fine example of the chain I typically stay with, at a very good price). Nearby  is a planned development of pretty houses, townhomes and apartments, with trails and open space provided. And lots of shopping- not fancy, but big box names and chain restaurants. After a nap and a check of Facebook, I found a trendy supermarket chain, and thought I would go there for dinner. Instead, I had dinner at an Ohio-based chain restaurant.

Sunset in Hamilton on June 6 was at 9:11 P.M. Technically, western Ohio should be on Central Time, but I was happy to have late daylight to explore. I found a 1944 Voice of America station, moved inland for fear of attack on the coasts. I drove north to Hamilton and found the synagogue. I realized I enjoy cities more than rural areas, and decided to look for more than the two places I had planned to see in Hamilton.

The weather ranged from 53-73 F Tuesday, with alternate sun and clouds. Average weather in Hamilton at this time of year is two degrees warmer than Morgantown in the morning, and five degrees warmer in the afternoon. Tuesday was cooler than average.

I started my exploration with the Conrey House also called the "Spread-Eagle Tavern," although Wikipedia says there is little evidence that it was ever anything but a house. It sits back from Cincinnati-Columbus Road, which says it all. I parked on a suburban side street across the road, and walked up to take a photo. When I came back, a pleasant woman asked me what I knew about the house. Although she has lived near it for many years, no one seems to know much about it. The house is now a private residence. I told her where to look on Wikipedia for more information

Places I was to look for that were Native mounds (typical of the area) were unmarked and hard to find. One old farm didn't photograph well. Although I had carefully written out directions to each of the twelve places I was to visit, I found myself turned around more than once. Rather than a GPS system, I think my next purchase will be a compass for the car. I did find the Samuel Auspurger Farm, now called Chrisholm Historic Farmstead, near the town of Trenton, between Hamilton and Middletown, now operated as a park by Butler County. The house dates from 1874 and replaces an earlier house that burned.

My original plan was to find Butler County's Courthouse in Hamilton, and one other old house, called Edgeton, located in a 1950s suburban part of town. Instead, I spent an hour or so in Hamilton, and explored much of the central part of town. Hamilton flanks the Miami River. There are active railways through town, and at one time there was a canal to connect Lake Erie to the Miami River and thus the Ohio as well. Much of the town seemed derelict to me. Many of the old houses are now  halfway houses. There were lots of tattoos, smokers, and people who looked like they had seen better days. I did see some office workers, better dressed and coiffed, out to a handful of lunch places along High Street, the main downtown drag. I lunched at a chain sub shop in a strip mall in what had been the nice part of town (near the synagogue). Directly across the street was a pawn and gun shop. Throughout the county, there were more prosperous looking suburban neighborhoods.

Middletown, north of Hamilton, and separated from it by farmland, is smaller, and looks worse. Main Street, south of downtown, is lined with beautiful old homes, mostly well maintained. The center of town looked almost empty. There is a mall ten miles east, which I visited. It is almost empty, with Sears and Elder-Beerman still open. On the way back, I noticed that  the mall was in the next county.

It was getting late, I was far from my hotel, and needed a nap. Heading back south, I found OH-73, which I knew went to Oxford. I decided to go. It should have been ten miles. Instead, it was twenty-one because of an outrageous detour that took me back south to Hamilton before I could go north again.

Eventually, I got to Oxford, home of Miami University, a public college. Two buildings date from 1825 and 1839. In another building, I found murals about multiculturalism and a Department of Confucian Studies, where students learn Chinese language and meditation techniques. Until this time, I had thought of Butler County as a place of no intellectual life at all. The buildings on the wooded campus are all marked with names and dates. I found the McGuffy House, where the author of early twentieth century reading texts lived and worked.

North of Oxford is a restored covered bridge, and at the north end of the county, extending into the next county, is Hueston Woods State Park, mostly forest, but with a lake and a swimming beach. Some were in the water at the beach, but the weather wasn't that warm.

US 27 runs from the northwest part of the county into Cincinnati, I figured I would take it  to I-275, the loop around CIncinnati (I dare not call it "the beltway"), then find Tri-County Mall in Hamilton County, and eat dinner at the food court. There was also a ten mile detour on US 27. I found the mall by seven. It has a Macy's and a Sear's, but most of the other stores are closed. Nearby, there are "Town Center" type developments, featuring cheaper big box stores, all laid out in a seemingly random pattern off the highways. I had a plate of chicken teriyaki served up by a Mexican cook, and headed back to my hotel, napless, by 8:15.

Here are the pics:

Voice of America Bethany Relay Station, 1944, West Chester Township

James D. Conrey House, 1840?, West Chester Township

Butler County Courthouse, Hamilton, 1885, remodeled 1912

Dixon-Globe Opera House, Robinson-Schwenn Building, Hamilton

Lane-Hooven House, German Village, Hamilton

Public Library, Hamilton, 1885

Library interior

YMCA, Hamilton

Beth Israel Synagogue, 1931, Hamilton

Second National Bank, Hamilton

Civil War Monument to Union Soldiers, 1905, Hamilton

Pioneer cabin, with statues of a pioneer family, Hamilton

Miami River Bridge, Hamilton

Railroad bridge over the Miami River, Hamilton

House in Dayton-Campbell Historic District, Hamilton

Edgeton, historic house in Hamilton

Rossville Historic District, across the Miami River from downtown Hamilton

Samuel Augspurger Farm, now Chrisholm Historic Farmstead, a public park, near Trenton (named for Trenton, NJ)

House in South Main Street Historic District, Middletown

House in South Main Street Historic District, Middletown

John B. Tytus House, a National Historic Landmark, South Main Street, Middletwon

downtown Middletown

a mural in downtown Middletown

vacant movie theater, Middletown

Diversity mural, Miami University

Elliott Hall, 1839, Miami University, Oxford

Stoddard Hall, 1825,Miami University, Oxford,

A quad, Miami University

McGuffey House, Oxford, now part of Miami University

Pugh's Mill Covered Bridge, north of Oxford

Pugh's Mill Covered Bridge

Lake and Beach at Hueston Woods State Park

 Most of my info is from plaques around Butler County, what I see on my own, and Wikipedia. Factual errors are my own.

This was an epic trip, where I had no one to say "Stop, Barry, this is too much." I am now in Cabell County, West Virginia, where I arrived today. Maybe another post tomorrow about that.

 

23 and me

I've had some interest in genealogy going back a while. I knew that my father's parents came from Belchatow (at least that's how we spell it) in Central Poland, and that their town was under the government of Russia when they came to America, although previously it was under Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and even Napolean for a few years.

I attended a Jewish genealogy convention in Washington in 2003. I met some cousins I had never heard about. A woman I met there with ancestry in Belchatow found her and my greatgrandfather's burial sites next to each other in New York City. I found that my father's family had been traced back to the early eighteenth century, when they first took last names. I also learned that my grandparents were not the first set of cousins to marry in that family, explaining our good looks and intelligence, but also our tendency to have bad hearts and immune system problems like asthma and psoriasis.

On my mother's side, I couldn't find much. I knew that my granfather's family was well-known in Europe, that great-grandpa was not born in Kamenetz in Ukraine, where he came from to New York. It's possible that their family had the rare privilege in Czarist Russia to live in St.Petersburg before the czar's assassination in 1881. I haven't verified that. And my grandmother's mother, the only great-grandparent I knew, although from "Russia," her papers from Ellis Island say "Austria-Hungary."

At Osher Life-Long Learning, or OLLI, where both Joe and I taught last quarter, a geneticist from WVU taught a class about DNA testing at what one might find. I signed up for the class and sent a vial of spit and some money to "23 and me" to find out more.

Jews in Baltimore in the 1950s and '60s had a peculiar status. We were restricted to certain neighborhoods, both wealthy (suburban Stevenson) and poor (Lower Park Heights Avenue in Baltimore City). I  went to junior high with kids from parts of Stevenson, and joined B'nai B'rith Youth at that time, where many of the kids lived in Lower Park Heights. Both were great places to grow up.  We lived in a new neighborhood in the early fifties, one that had excluded Jews until the builder of our house decided to advertise in The Baltimore Jewish Times.

We were clearly not African-Americans, who could not buy new houses in the suburbs or go anyplace outside of their neighborhoods. Still, we were excluded from the private neighborhood swim club near us.

I did have a sense that we were not exactly white people. I thought Pat Boone and Tab Hunter were handsome enough in the movies, but it was not until suave and gorgeous George Chakiris in West Side Story showed up (Greek from Ohio, playing a Puerto Rican) that I saw someone I might grow up to look like, except for the tall with long legs and a full head of hair part. My friends in seventh grade. Michael, Lenny and Alan, were all dark like me.

In Los Angeles and Miami, the two places I lived longest as an adult, I fit in better. I spoke good Spanish and could pass for Cuban. They were a majority in the city. In Los Angeles, I could be Mexican, Filipino, Armenian, or more correctly, Russian Jewish. The neighborhood where I lived with Joe from 2006-2010 was a homeland-in-exile for Russian Jews, many of them elderly and almost all of them of Jewish background. I saw them as different, but they spotted me, and I learned a few words of Russian to engage.

23 and me gives you a wealth of data, much of it just incomprehensible numbers, and lists of possible cousins with whom you share DNA. The first two of these, my closet relatives in this system, are my first cousins' sons, one on my mother's side and one on my father's. After that there is a lot of "Anonymous" and people whose names I don't recognize. A few have contacted me, but I can't find a connection by name.

They also can tell you your likely eye and hair color, which I already know, and if you are a carrier for a certain disease or condition, which might be helpful if is one is planning to reproduce.

They can tell you what ethnic group you are from. In my case, I am 97% Ashkenazic, or Jewish from Germany, Austria, Poland or Russia. Not shocking.

The most interesting thing was the haplogroups, data they can get from your parents' chromosomes. These show the branch of the family tree of our whole species that one is on. My father's haplogroup is most likely from Southern Europe, the Near East and North Africa. These people are typically  Bedouins, Ashkenazic Jews and Algerians. My mother's group is from the Near East, North Africa and Western Eurasia. These people include  Saudi Arabs, Yemeni Jews, and Bedouins.

So maybe we do go back to Bible times in Israel. And maybe the Arabs are not different from some of us at all. Perhaps my affinity to people from Iran is more genetic than I think it is.

Race is still an issue. I am perhaps overly sensitive to how I am treated, even by restaurant servers and hotel managers. I've heard from African- and Asian-Americans and from Middle Eastern people that they are looked at differently and with distrust here. It's happened to me, and I think how fortunate I am to not be African-American, and to be able to speak like an Appalachian person (my native Baltimore is not far from here, linguistically). I can pass for white, straight and local if I want my experiences to be easier.

This has become a longer and more complex rant than I intended. What I've gotten from 23 and me is a better sense of where I am from in the deep past. I am still, of course, American by birth and by choice, and Jewish for the time that that has existed, but I get now why I look as I do, and I guess i find comfort in that.

If you are on 23 and me, look me up. Maybe you are one of the thousands of cousins they listed for me.

Cicadas

The cicadas have been out in Morgantown, as part of their seventeen-year cycle. Or so I'm told. I wasn't here seventeen years ago. In suburban Baltimore, they came out in 1970, when I was in college. They were everywhere except our street, which was constructed in 1953, which must have torn up the cicadas' natural habitat.

In Suncrest, our neighborhood at the north end of Morgantown, people seem especially proud of their lawns. Our street, consisting of twelve homes in six semi-detached structures, has an association. Every Tuesday, a guy named Roger comes by and mows all our lawns. At the end of April, I heard someone else outside. He told me he was part of the lawn team and was spraying weed killer. I questioned him about what it was and he assured me it was not harmful, only we should keep our cat inside for an hour. I had my doubts.

Our street is quiet. Most of the cicadas came up from the ground and died.

Still, we can hear the cicadas from the empty lot behind the houses across the street from us. I was just reading that the cicadas eat tree sap, not enough to harm a mature tree. The maple in our yard is covered with cicadas who must have flown in.

There was a cicada festival last weekend at the Core Arboretum. They had dishes made with cicada, and studied them in detail. I watched one half-dead bug bravely climb our tree after I took him off our porch and placed him by the tree trunk. They don't bite or sting, and they seem tame enough if you pick them up. And while many find their song annoying, or deafening, depending on where you live. I find their sound soothing, a sign that nature still has some say in our urban world, and a warning about what happened to them where chemicals were sprayed.

I like living in a rare and unique time, both short-term, as the cicadas reportedly will be gone next month, and in the longer sense, in the times and places I've lived in sixty-seven years. I'd love to be here in seventeen years, although I will be eighty-three, and I don't know of any man in my family who lived to that age. I could pick up a cicada and say to it "I knew your parents."

Bernie, Hillary and Donald

During my unsuccessful campaign for Delegate to the West Virginia State Legislature, I met many young people who were working for or supporting Bernie Sanders. I admired their idealism, which reminded me of the Gene McCarthy people in 1968. I support Bernie Sanders for President, so we became friends.

I recently posted an article on Facebook from American Prospect by Harold Meyerson suggesting that the "Bernie Bros" step back and let Hillary Clinton work against Donald Trump. He is surprised that Sanders supporters say they won't vote for Clinton, thus handing the election to Trump. Meyerson says he is a Sanders supporter and believes in "Socialist Democracy," but that Sanders has no chance to win the nomination, and we must turn our attention to the general election.

I have friends, very close friends, in fact, who are Hillary Clinton fans, although I am not one of them. I respect their reasons for supporting Clinton. I know people who are Trump supporters. I have generally unfollowed them on Facebook, or avoid being around them. Still, the outpouring of support for Trump, particularly in West Virginia, is understandable. People like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney talking about how tax cuts for the very rich will help everyone, well, no one can fall for that anymore. And most people, even economic conservatives, are not as crazy or as personally unlikable as Ted Cruz. Trump is outgoing and has a message of hope. His comments about women, immigrants and Moslems has scared off support from just about anyone in the Jewish community. The cheers he got at AIPAC show how out of touch that organization is. Jewish clergy of every stripe have denounced Trump's stand on immigration.

Meyerson's article sparked a not-typical firestorm on my Facebook feed, between the Clinton lovers, those who will vote for her because they see Trump as the biggest threat to the country, and the Sanders people who said they will vote for the Green Party or sit out the presidential race. They claim to be revolutionaries who will not settle for the status quo.

The most influential factor in which side people were on was age. People my age were in the Hillary camp, or better-Hiilary-than Donald category. People under thirty were  the revolutionaries, willing to go down in flames for Bernie Sanders' cause.

I probably would have voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if the vote had been extended to nineteen year olds at that time. I started that year as a McCarthy supporter, but I became a Robert Kennedy supporter when he entered the race. Kennedy spoke at Johns Hopkins that spring, where I was a freshman. His assassination, never really fully investigated, and with an official story full of holes, left me with psychic scars that have not healed, and a deep distrust of our government. I also heard Spiro Agnew that year at Towson State. He was an ignorant bigoted clown. It was inconceivable to me that he could ever be vice-president.

When the Sanders people say that Clinton has engaged in dirty tricks, like flooding Sanders websites with porn so the sites would have to be taken down, or claim that she is beholden to big banks, or to Gulf State oligarchs and Saudi princes, I just shrug and say "So, what's new?" Back in 2008, I said (probably over breakfast with Joe) that we might get some sort of social justice from Obama, but we were never going to get economic justice. And in fact, Obama eventually came out in favor of gay rights, and has run an inclusive administration. He has tried to bring people together (a thankless and impossible task). Still, he appointed Timothy Geithner, of the International Monetary Fund, as Treasury Secretary, and allowed big banks to gain back, and even surpass the power they had before the 2008 crash.

I am with my peers. I will support Hillary Clinton for President, knowing all the negatives about her. At the Democratic Convention in Charleston next month, I will still support Bernie Sanders. My goal now will be to stop Trump. None of our choices for President are good. 

Maybe one day we will get economic fairness, probably not this year. I'll settle for maintaining the social progress we have made in the last eight years, because I don't have a choice.

Caution: Partisan Political Rant

I suppose I ran for office because I couldn't stand the lies, bigotry and stupidity we were getting from our elected officials in West Virginia. I was told I didn't "understand" West Virginia. During the campaign, I met a group of old (my age) hippies, brainy college professors, and the smarter class of college students and recent grads, most either from here or who have resided here for decades. Not knowing many people in town, not having the strength to go door-to-door, not advertising on the radio or in the newspaper, I still got twenty-five percent of the Democratic votes in our primary. The final tab was 3,971 for me. People, even those who warned me against running, now say I should consider running again in two years. I might.

Many people in West Virginia have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. West Virginians For Affordable Health Care points out that "more than two dozen hospitals saved $265 million" by treating people who now have health insurance. Before the ACA, the hospitals had to write this money off as a loss. And yet our Republican Junior Senator, Shelley Moore Capito, has voted a few dozen times to repeal the ACA.  Why? Our recent "non-partisan" election for a state Supreme Court justice was won by Beth Walker, with half a million dollars in ads from the Republican Governor's Association and Blue Cross/Blue Shield. For some reason, our nation's largest private healthcare provider supports Republicans. Los Angeles School District pays for my Medicare supplement and for Joe's insurance through Blue Cross. We don't have a choice, living outside of California, unless we lay out quite a bit of money for other insurance. I'm thinking about it.

Chris Regan, Vice Chair of West Virginia's Democratic Party, has a blog called "Home Yesterday" (www.homeyesterday.com) In an April 13 post, he wonders how Peabody Coal, following in the steps of other coal companies, has declared bankruptcy, gotten out of its pension and health care obligations, and given their CEO, who already makes ten million dollars annual salary, a bonus of several more million. He calls it "the looting of West Virginia."

Meanwhile, our state Attorney General, Patrick Morrisey, is fighting the Obama administration''s attempts to shield gender non-conforming and trans students from being forced to use a bathroom not appropriate to their appearance or identity. He and many so-called religious conservatives are up in arms, not about bathrooms, apparently, but the fact that there are trans students at schools.

What is the relationship between coal bankruptcies, the Affordable Health Care Act ( Obamacare) and trans people in the bathroom? This: Theft is against the Bible. A CEO, receiving millions of dollars for his work, who takes away pensions and health insurance from people who have worked- worked hard and at great risk in the case of coal miners- and gives himself and other executives millions more in bonuses, is a thief. He should be in prison. Where is the outrage among religious conservatives about this? And why are people not outraged that healthcare is considered a privilege for those who can afford it, and not a right for everyone? The ACA was a compromise to let everyone buy insurance.

The outrage is in the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The important difference is that Trump is a phony and Sanders is the real deal. The outrage is why the favorite of the Republican elite, Jeb Bush, couldn't get traction, and why Hillary Clinton, despite her traditional liberal credentials, is having such a hard time winning the Democratic nomination. Trump says he will put coal miners back to work (at lower pay and with no benefits, no doubt, if he can even do that). Sanders will try to limit executive compensation, find new work for miners and protect workers' benefits. The anti-Bernie people say "He can't do it." Maybe, but no one else will even try.

Here in West Virginia, there is no state budget for July 1. By law, the budget must be balanced. Governor Tomblin called the legislature back into session this week. As of Thursday morning, they have done nothing. Most of our Republicans have signed Grover Norquist's "No New Taxes" pledge.
Meanwhile, the coal moguls, including Bob Murray, who doesn't live in West Virginia, are demanding a cut in the coal severance tax. He and another coal mogul, the lately jailed Don Blankenship, are supporters of many of our Republican delegates. One might be tempted to say that our Congressperson David McKinley, is a whole owned subsidiary of the coal companies.

Meanwhile, the state is bleeding money and population. We will likely lose a congressman in the next census due to the state's declining population. Even in our temple, we will lose four families this summer. The state has a scholarship for in-state students, called "Promise." With no guarantee that these scholarships will be available in the fall, our smartest students are making plans to go elsewhere. Most will not be back.

My own life now is good. Joe and I have friends here. We are both popular teachers  at Life-Long Learning, all our students  over fifty and most past seventy.. Joe's current six-week class was oversubscribed and people had to get on a waiting list. We like it here. "Going back" is not an option. Still, should Tree of Life close, or get tired of Rabbi Joe, should we find ourselves victims of discrimination, we have the option of leaving. What happens a generation from now should not be our problem, but I, like Bernie Sanders, eight years my senior, want the world and West Virginia to be a more just, equitable and free place.  I'll be out working for Mike Manypenny for Congress and Doug Reynolds for Attorney General this year, attending West Virginia's Democratic Convention in Charleston in a few weeks as a Sanders vote, and supporting my fellow Democrats for Delegate and State Senator. I'm not done yet.

The Last of the Campaign

Bernie Sanders came to speak in Morgantown last week before the primary. At seventy-four, he had traveled several hundred miles to speak at three different events in West Virginia. This was the last, a campaign rally at Morgantown Event Center, a barn of a space at the south end of downtown. It was raining on and off, not raining when I left the house just after five. I walked to the PRT, the driverless cars that get West Virginia University students from one campus to another, and for those of us nearby, an opportunity to go downtown for fifty cents with no traffic or parking fees. I walked from our house less than a mile to Medical Center station, the last of five. In a few minutes, I was downtown and walked the last half mile or so to the Event Center. There was security with metal detectors at the entrance, and a line almost completely around the building. People of all ages were there, some with children, most dressed in the typically scruffy style of West Virginia, a few more dressed up. People were peaceful and in a good mood, even as the wait to get in extended well beyond the seven P.M. starting time, and rain showers poured down, on and off.

Bernie sounded tired at first, but once he was warmed up, he preached like the best of them. I can't quote him exactly, but his point was that there is plenty of money in the United States, enough to feed everyone, pay everyone a decent wage, provide a college education at public colleges to everyone, and make sure everyone has free healthcare. How to pay for it? Cut loopholes for corporations, tax overseas income, stop "inversions," tax higher income for Social Security. He said that six families have most of the country's wealth. He talked about African-Americans, residents from Latin America, equality for women and choice, climate change, and, yes, gay rights. He spoke for nearly an hour and a half. He had more energy than most of us, who were standing. I got a ride home with a friend in town.

There was no Sunday school this week at Tree of Life because of Mother's Day (started in West Virginia, just south of here, near Grafton). I convinced Joe to ditch his schedule of nothing but work and go with me to Butler County, Pennsylvania, my county to visit in May. I have not yet made it to Butler County, Ohio, April's county. This is a heavily Republican county just north of Pittsburgh. The city of Butler is on Connoquenessing Creek. lined with abandoned factories and mills. The town is pretty, with a neighborhood of grand late 19th and early 20th century homes just north of downtown. Jeeps were built in Butler at the start of World War II, in an area being redeveloped for shopping, including a K-Mart. It looked to me like a town that time has passed, and I can see why people would be angry. I wish people there would vote for Bernie Sanders, but I imagine the county will go heavily for Donald Trump.

My cousin Georgeann came from New York Monday, flying in to Pittsburgh. She missed the bus from downtown Pittsburgh, so Joe and I  drove to Pittsburgh to fetch her, and had a lovely dinner in the Cultural District in downtown Pittsburgh.

I spent Election Day showing Georgeann Morgantown. It was raining, so we headed to the mall, where I bought new shoes with her help. She kept asking if I was nervous. I guess I wasn't. The election was out of my control. We saw Evan Hansen, one of the candidates in my race, twice on street corners with other people, waving his signs around in the drizzly weather. We stopped by our local polling place, where a young man with a "Trump" sign was standing on the edge of the parking lot, which was full. We picked up Joe and had dinner at Ali Baba, a fine Middle Eastern restaurant at Morgantown airport. It was not crowded on a Tuesday night. We watched a plane come in, which doesn't happen often.

Polls closed at 7:30, and after 8 we drove to the county courthouse. No one was there. Votes were counted at Mountaineer Mall, the mostly-empty mall south of town, where OLLI has classes. I didn't know to go there, so we headed to the Bernie volunteer party at the Ramada Inn's bar, south of Morgantown. We all watched the results. Bernie Sanders took every county in West Virginia. I was happy with that. The results in my race were less good. I came in last of eight candidates, one hundred fifty votes below the next closest candidate. Still, I had over 3,900 votes, so it wasn't a total loss. We left about ten, and I was up until 12:30, looking at election commentary on Facebook and Twitter.

People are upset that Jim Justice, a coal mine owner and the wealthiest man in the state, won the Democratic primary for Governor, Beth Walker, a right-winger in the Scalia mode, supported by the coal industry and with millions spent in her behalf by the Republican party in her "non-partisan" race, was elected to the state supreme court. Even some of the candidates who won in our district are considered party hacks, meaning there might not be any important change in West Virginia politics.

I'm glad I ran, happy to meet many new people of what passes for a leftist political bent in this country today. I got my message out about how it is not acceptable to demonize LGBT people; I stood up for teachers, WVU employees and unions generally. Although the paper says I got 3.2% of the vote, my sister Robin pointed out how that number is incorrect, because people could vote for five people in my race. I figure the correct number is 26%, nearly 4,000 of 15,000 voters.

Will I do this again? I'm living in the present for now. We'll see what the future brings.

Waiting in the rain to see Bernie Sanders

In the hall

Bernie Sanders

Saxonburg, PA at the home of John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. A replica is next to the house.

Butler, PA. 1895 monument to Union soldiers in the Civil War.

Photo by Benyamin Cohen with my sign in front of his house.

Photo by Georgeann on Election Day.

With Joe at the Bernie Sanders party after the election

Watching Bernie win

The Radio Interview

I always wondered what I would do if asked to work for Fox, or asked to do an interview on Fox News. I  thought I wouldn't do it. Then I got a call from Sunshine Wiles, one of the hosts of the morning talk show on our local Fox affiliate radio station, WAJR, owned by the same people who own our local newspaper, The Dominion-Post.

What people told me is "You have to do it . Everyone listens to them." So I agreed to do it, and we set up Monday, May 2 at 9:30 for a ten-minute interview, no phone calls. I could have called in the interview, but I really wanted to see the hosts, Sunshine Wiles and Kyle Wiggs, in person, in the studio. They interviewed two other candidates that morning before me: John Lucas and Barbara Evans Fleischauer, the only Democratic incumbent.

We were a bit late getting started. I was there early due to a leftover L.A. paranoia about being held up in traffic forever. That could happen here, too, even though Morgantown is tiny in comparison to Los Angeles.

I thought the interview went well. My voice sounded awful, as if I had asthma and acid reflux both destroying my vocal chords. Still, I felt confident about talking off the top of my head. The hosts asked good questions, and gave me time to answer. They were surprised that I would end up in West Virginia after living in so many other more interesting places. It said that I came here because Joe had a job here, and I said that I'm happy here. What I thought but didn't say, is that I was too old, poor and married to stay in L.A. We couldn't have bought a house there, we don't care about bars at this point in our lives, and the rapid gentrification of our old neighborhood in West Hollywood, including tearing down the Trader Joe's on our corner for million-dollar condos, was going to help make Los Angeles unliveable. We both miss our friendships of many years in San Francisco and L.A., I miss the film festivals and the good theaters. I've stopped going to movies at all, because when I read about a movie I like, it's not playing in Morgantown. I keep busy here, but we don't have the network of people and places we had. It was my choice to come here with Joe, and as I said in the interview, I insisted he apply for the job here. I don't regret moving.

I talked about diversity. There is a new Hindu temple in town, a mosque and a synagogue. It's not like the rest of West Virginia. I went so far as to say "People here should understand that everyone in Morgantown is not a straight, white Christian." That might have been over the top.

They interviewed three other Democratic candidates for legislature in our district Tuesday, and the last two Wednesday. I only listened to Barbara and John Lucas. I'm starting to appreciate Donald Trump, saying outrageous things to get attention and having his ratings go up. Last election, four of the five Democrats lost. I felt that people didn't vote for them because they were too cautious, afraid to stand up to the Obama-hating Republicans (which at that point included the United Mine Workers) and embrace liberal values like choice, LGBT rights and guns.

I'm clearly the odd man out, the one with the least experience and lacking any kind of organization. Stiill, I have my fans.

Last week, I told someone in my writing group about what happened in the senior center (see previous blog post). Someone else in the group overheard it, and, enraged, wrote me a note about how awful I was to say that. The gist of it was that he has been polite to me (against his real feelings, apparently) and knows enough people in town, being a descendant of one of the founders of the town in the 1700s and knowing everyone, to cause me real trouble.

I sent back a note apologizing for my rudeness and explaining that my ancestors were not in the United States before 1886, and that my European relatives were all murdered, which is why that guy's stupid comment got under my skin.

What I saw from the note writer is how white privilege works even against other (more-or-less) white people, and why my fellow candidates will talk about being an 11th generation West Virginian. Not important to me, but I guess it is to someone. I'm less important because my ancestry is not here, and if it  were, and they were slaves, we would still be less important than the White people here.

I got a note also from a prominent person in town, Jewish, but never seen at temple, who read last week's post and said that he has heard similar anti-Semitic remarks, and is still considered an outsider after more than forty years in Morgantown. Baltimore was a little like that, but in Los Angeles, someone called me "an old-timer" after three years there.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but attendance at my OLLI class Tuesday ( The Top 40 Hits of 1961) was down from twenty-four to fifteen.  Maybe they heard me on the radio.

I missed an event yeaterday for the State Auditor Democratic candidate who is the best of the three running. There was a shiva minyan for the mother of a congregant who died out of town, and I met Joe there and accompanied him to his class after. Being busy doesn't excuse one from observing mitzvot or supporting your spouse in his work.

 Tonight, I'm going to see Bernie Sanders here in Morgantown. The city has done nothing about parking, transit or or traffic for this event. The site only holds three thousand people. I'm betting many more come, despite this being finals week at WVU, with many students already gone. It will probably rain all day. Should be fun.

To hear the podcast of my interview, go to wajr.com, go to podcasts all the way down, morning talk May 2. My interview starts at 27:40, or, for comparison, you could listen to the other two candidates.

It wasn't a bad experience for me. I thought Sunshine (her real name, "it was the seventies", she explained) and Kyle were nice to me. They had good questions, and although it looked like it was easy, I know there was a lot of work for them to prepare. Maybe I'll even start listening to their show.