The Rock Wall

Another of the “landmarks” from my childhood is gone.

This week we have the obituary of Marjorie Fields. Virtually all of my life, I heard Grandma Boultinghouse mention her and her husband, Raymond, as being her neighbors to the south. I either didn’t listen well or Grandma just called her Margie.

I later got to know her son, Kenny, through our mutual interest in guns. He’s more into reloading than I am, that is until I got a smokeless powder muzzleloader. With that, every shot is a “reload” weighing powder down to a tenth of a grain.

I actually spent more time talking to her daughter, Deanna, during the years she worked a FasTrip when I delivered newspaper there early Wednesday mornings.

Margorie was only 90 at her death, 9 years younger than Mom who would have turned 99 on Monday, June 24.

Our condolences to the family.

That made me recall Bob Johnson whose family used to live at the east end of Mom and Dad’s home place. The Johnsons had a little Chihuahua that would run out from under the wood stove and bite you. Then there was Everett Keil who lived just down the road south from the Johnsons. He was a brother to our neighbor, Mrs. Gertrude Plain, who was like a grandmother to us kids. And George and Clara Huff lived up the road a little further west. We still sometimes call it the Huff Hill. They moved to town and George became a no-nonsense municipal judge.

Steve Stebbins, Albert’s dad, lived on the Koontz place, within sight from our yard northeast of Mom and Dad’s house. Until a few years ago, there was still a bucket on a big Cedar tree there where Albert (Bob) played basketball.

Starting from the Koontz place there are old wagon trails down through the timber that I’ve been told will take you all the way to Tiffin.

You can check with Everett Smith to see if my memory is correct. He’s the Cedar Springs/Coal Hill area historian.

– Mary True has a piece of advice: Don’t move. She and Brad have technically finished moving from their house on North Main to one on Fields Blvd., but most of their treasures are still packed in boxes and they have to decide where to put them. Mayor Brad has also figured out that it is a greater distance to City Hall so he can sign documents.

– Justin Swager found the first of five Picnic armbands last Wednesday at the Centennial Wagon.

Davis and Kimball first put a clue on the Sun TV station, then the next day on the Sun facebook page. (There’s a button for the Sun TV station on the Sun web page and a link on the Sun facebook page.)

The first clue was: Far from being an ole iron horse, though it tends to trek the same of course, you won’t have to travel as far to find this one. It’s just a part of the game, so popular and fun.

– On the computer, I found something I thought was interesting: How Iconic American Landmarks Got Their Names.

Plenty of famous American landmarks’ names are self-explanatory- the Grand Canyon is a canyon that’s grand, after all. But some other landmarks have some pretty interesting stories behind their names.

The Statue of Liberty – You might be surprised to know that you’ve probably been getting the name of this famous monument wrong – sort of. The full name of this symbol of friendship between the Americans and the French was “Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World,” per sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. So really, “statue” was just an identifier, with “Liberty Enlightening the World” being the actual name of what it was depicting (“enlightening” with the torch, and all). Instead of dropping the “Statue” part to leave the “proper” title, people dropped “Enlightening the World,” so today, “the Statue of Liberty” is Lady Liberty’s recognized name.

Mount Rushmore – As American as apple pie, Mount Rushmore probably jumps to mind when you think about American icons. It’s obviously not named for any of the presidents on it, or for its sculptor, second-generation American Gutzon Borglum. You might just assume that that’s the name of the mountain that the carving is on, and it is – but the story of how it got that name is probably odder than anything you could’ve imagined. In 1884, long before carving had begun on the mountain, a New York attorney visited the area spot to verify some mining claims. The attorney’s name? Charles E. Rushmore. The lucky fellow asked a local guide what the mountain was called, and the guide reportedly said that it didn’t have one yet, so they’d call it Rushmore. We may never know whether the guide was actually serious, but Rushmore stuck as the mountain’s name. It remained when that mountain became the home of this famous monument.

The Golden Gate Bridge – One of the most recognizable American monuments, the Golden Gate Bridge towers over the San Francisco Bay Area in that iconic orangey-red color. But…if it’s orangey-red, why’s it called the Golden Gate? You hear that name and expect to see a gold bridge. Well, the “Golden Gate” name actually existed before the bridge did. The explorer John C. Frémont coined that name when he first saw the strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. It reminded him of Istanbul’s Golden Horn estuary, and he dubbed it “Chrysopylae,” or “Golden Gate,” because it was a “gate” to the Pacific. So the bridge is called the “Golden Gate Bridge” not because of its color, but because of its location over the Golden Gate Strait. KL