A Final Thought: 30 Years in Ohio
By Mitch Allen
I moved from Columbus, Georgia, to Northeast Ohio on December 1, 1991, to take a position with the Akron Beacon Journal. I assumed I’d pay my dues in the Rust Belt for a couple of years then be off to more exotic locales within our corporate chain of newspapers, like Miami or San Jose.
I did not know I would never leave.
Last week marked 30 years I have lived here, and because I arrived a few weeks short of my 30th birthday, that means I have lived in Northeast Ohio longer than I lived in East Alabama and West Georgia.
It was a culture shock at first. I didn’t know anything about snow and I’d never heard of pierogis or gnocchi or hummus, and when my administrative assistant asked how my wife and I were celebrating Swedish Day, I had to tell her we weren’t Swedish.
“No!” she replied. “I said Sweetest Day.”
One day I was overjoyed at seeing hushpuppies at a company function—only to discover they were fried sauerkraut balls.
In Georgia we didn’t have much ethnic diversity. You were either Black or White, and your surname was Williams, Johnson or Smith. I didn’t know anyone who was Greek or Polish or Italian or Lebanese. We did, however, live near Ft. Benning, so we had some limited diversity, mostly from countries where the U.S. had a military presence, which created in me a lifelong love of German rouladen and Korean bulgogi.
I knew only one Jewish family and two Catholic families. Everyone else was some kind of Protestant. My wife’s grandmother was Primitive Baptist; they did foot washings. I watched my wife’s grandfather get baptized via full immersion in a cow pond in a fire ant-infested pasture south of Montgomery with lightening striking all around us.
I love the diversity of Northeast Ohio. We truly are the proverbial melting pot. I now have friends and business associates whose families come from all over the globe, and unlike my ancestors—who arrived in the 1600s and 1700s—many have names I have had to learn to pronounce and spell; some contain no vowels at all while some have so many the name won’t fit on the back of a football jersey without reducing the font size.
I’ve been to Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations (on a different Sunday than “regular” Easter) where we ate lamb, smashed hardboiled eggs together, and greeted each other with a hearty Christos anesti. I’ve been to Passover celebrations where we sat at the Seder table, ate matzah, gave readings, and opened the door for Elijah to enter. I’ve been to AME church dinners where the preacher went on for so long I was afraid the turnip greens and cornbread I so coveted would grow cold. I’ve been to Catholic funeral masses and christenings utterly enveloped in incense and Latin. I’ve even learned to drink slivovitz and eat ćevapčići, a grilled minced meat popular in southeastern European countries like Croatia, where my next door neighbor’s family is from.
Here in Ohio, my grandsons are enjoying a diverse education. All three went to a Jewish preschool. The youngest is still there. The middle one is enrolled in kindergarten at a Catholic school, and the oldest is in first grade at a highly rated, majority-Black public school. Their friends are a compendium of religions and family origins.
I don’t think this would be the case if we still lived in Georgia. After all, I had 14 direct male ancestors who were ages 18 to 50 at the start of the Civil War. Eleven fought for the Confederacy; none for the Union. One died in the war, one was captured, three were wounded, and while my mother would occasionally stand for the Star Spangled Banner, she would always stand for Dixie.
I could never completely shake my Southern identity. Like the crooked Cuyahoga River, I flow both north and south. But I am now an Ohioan, and I remember the day I first realized it: It was 2003. I was serving on the board of a choral society and we had commissioned Hal Walker to write a song for our children’s choir to celebrate Ohio’s bicentennial. The song was called My State, Ohio, and its lyrics included the names of all 88 Ohio counties. Sitting in the audience (along with Governor Bob Taft) listening to it for the first time, I cried at the chorus because singing along in my head I felt the overwhelming truth of the words: my state, Ohio. Ohio had become my state.
Thank you, Northeast Ohio, for allowing me and my family to build a fabulous life here, and for giving me a more global perspective. From your blue herons and your chicken paprikash to the 37 different Cleveland Browns starting quarterbacks in these 30 years, I wouldn’t trade any of it for all the sunshine in Savannah.