1949-1954 Scott, Ohio, Life in Black and White/100 days 20 pounds 20 points

Middle of December...where has the year gone? Older brother Mike turns 63 today...another in a long line of December Birthdays/Milestones in the Houseworth/DeVore/Waldron/Feeley families...oldest son Sam turns 28 on Thursday the 17th, and Patricia and I celebrate 33 years on Friday....
I did a one game Junior High contest at Lima Temple Christian last night, then headed back to Celina in time for our Monday Dartball league game at St Johns with Bethany Church. With Sam home for the first time this season, we took 2 or 3 to improve our record to a still miserable 7 wins 11 loses, still good for the basement in the South Division....Sam lead the way going 5 for 11 with a couple RBIs. He needs 25 at bats to be eligible for the post season tournament, so with next week and Martin Luther King Day, he should be able to do that....I finished at 4 for 9 with just 1 RBI to bump my average up a little, from .411 to .415....Next week ends the first half of the regular season, with the second half to begin January 4th of the New Year.

Diet Update_____

I went to the dietitian at the St. Marys Hospital 100 days ago today....my goal was to stop any increase in blood sugar count, drop some weight, and lower the blood pressure. Will find out about the blood sugar when I go back to Doc Bergman next month, but the other 2 goals are working out well....

Down to 188 pounds this morning...20 full pounds since Labor Day. It's been a slow but somewhat steady ride...lose 2 gain 1, lose 3 gain 1, etc....my original goal was to be 180 by the start of baseball season...with the workouts from basketball officiating, it looks like that goal will be met with plenty to spare. Even the Holidays, thus far, have not seen any bump up in weight.

Likewise the Blood Pressure is down....from the 150/80 range it now reads on the home monitor between 125-130/70 on average with a resting heart rate of 62 or so....no bad for an old fart, who turns 61 in March.

My Life in Black and White_____

Yesterday I looked back at an afternoon 50 some years ago, where me and my neighbor buddy Teddy Blackburn came across a White Wild Boar in the wilds just outside of Venice, Florida, back in 1958....it got me to thinking, despite the pains in the ass of the family moving on several occasions, and having to adjust, I was pretty lucky.....and I have many old photographs of the different places we have lived...most are in black and white or sepia, with a Kodak Color photo thrown in when we were lucky enough to have a roll of color film in the camera....I always have liked the sepia and black and white photographs best....just like on old Bogart Movie, always better in black and white.

Scott, Ohio 1949-1950____

Born in Van Wert, Ohio, on March 16, 1949, I was quickly whisked away to Great Granddad's house in the little town of Scott, Ohio...Scott was located on the border of Van Wert and Paulding Counties in the old Black Swamp region of Northwest Ohio. Great Granddad's house was located on the Paulding side, just a block away from his daughter, my Grandmother, Wilda Waldron Houseworth. That was my first house, although the memories are few, I do remember the old place...it still stands today.

I can remember looking out the large living room window at snow flakes coming down, not sure which winter that was, but I was probably 2 or 3 at the time....I also remember our neighbors to the north across the street has Geese...and they would lay eggs, big eggs....I'm pretty sure we would get eggs from them on occasion, but will have to check with my 85 year old mother, her memory is better than mine at those things.

Scott had a population at that time of about 300...still does today, but the difference being back in 1950 the population was mostly small close knit families who learned to survive the Great Depression and World War II together...My Grandmother was the patriarch of the Waldon Houseworth Clan, or maybe it was Great-Great Granddad William Waldron...but he died when I was just 2, so Grandma Houseworth was on the throne as far as I remember.....

















Scott had in 1950 a couple of gas stations, the large Scott Exchange Elevator{which still is there today, despite burning down a couple of times}, a grocery story, fire house, post office, and restaurant...which is still there today as well. Seems to me that despite the size of Scott, or lack of size, there was always plenty for us to do....especially when we came home for summer vacations, after moving to Venice, Florida in 1954

On the days in the summer of the mid 1950s, when we would return to Scott, a group of us kids, Al Foust, my cousins the Polings, and several others would walk the cornfields or the railroad tracks north to Haviland, about 2 miles from Scott....that would be our big adventure. Or we would play wiffle ball in the streets...no danger there, if 10 cars would go down Grant Street per day, it would have been considered a heavy travel day....

Those were the days of innocents in small town America in the Heartland....sometimes I doubt if they still exist, if they do, surely not in the same numbers or innocence as back then.

From what I see these days, post Depression and post World War II in the vast Midwest was a great place to grow up.....but we were to be uprooted by the Dad's "Wanderlust", and we would head south to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico and remain there for the remainder of the decade, into the 1960s.

More on that later.......

Photos-Me and dad's 12 gauge shotgun along with the Red Fox he dispatched...standing outside Granddad Waldon's house in the winter of 1951-52/The Scott Elevator as it looked around 1910...it has burnt down at least twice since then, but still is going strong in the same location 100 years later/In the Fall of 1951...Mom says I was shading my eyes from the sun, not waving...?/One of the family women and her husband tooling down Main Street in Scott, in the 1920s in Motorcycle and sidecar/Me and Mom in late 1949/Al Foust(left) and me in the summer of 1957 with a batch of Frogs taken from Uncle John Houseworth's Pond on the south edge of Scott/And in the summer of 1954 brother Mike(left) and me with a couple of fish that dad had probably caught...sure was fun getting dirty, bet mom loved washing those clothes by hand....hummm!