Middle Bass Island Grade School, Spring 1960

Ha!  Here we are, the total school population of Middle Bass Island Grade School, circa spring 1960.

From left:  Karen Kuemmel, Douglas Cartledge, Amy Cartledge, Mary Joanna Cartledge, and, in the foreground, Carolyn Riddle.

Karen and Douglas were in seventh grade; Amy was in sixth; I was in fifth. Carolyn has the grin of a child whose front teeth just came in, so she's either in first or second grade.  We were the core island scholars for several years. The only children younger than I were Carolyn and her siblings.

Regarding the building in the background, I rather think it's Walt and Izzy Swisher's home/store, although the style of the windows makes me wonder.  Perhaps it's Frank Roesch's house, which was also white with tall windows and buildings in the back.  Why were we there?  The answer is lost in memory, as is the answer to the question of how my mother, who was fastidious about the way her children dressed, let me out of the house with my petticoat showing. We aren't wearing the white gloves that were de rigeur for field trips.  However, you'll notice that bangs were a happening fashion statement that year.

Paperwork!: preserving family documents, step one

I began the morning paying bills and now, at 10:15 p. m., I have monstrous piles of family documents and artifacts bedecking the living room rug.

I'm beginning to get a handle on the huge project I've undertaken.  My father died at age 88; my mother is now 90 and has a good memory for important things. Thirty years ago, Mother told me that you must always label everything.  That scrumptious photo of the most darling munchkin in the world, meaning yours, is going to be augmented by hundreds more photos, plus scrumptious photos of siblings; plus perhaps scrumptious photos of cousins; and then you throw in grandchildren; and I don't know about your family  but in the right light with the right tilt of the chin I'm hard pressed to distinguish between Charlie and Devin, Carson and Jon; David and Douglas; Mikey and Jeff - pretty much any of the boys - and a photo of my father in his youth.

Family resemblance is a powerful and wonderful thing, but it won't be your friend when 30 years from now you try to identify who's who on a photo that holds no indication of the date when every single one of those darling boys has a smile on his face and a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

So as I was saying, Mother labeled everything, except for the things she didn't, most of which were duplicate photos that are labeled, which is good, if you can ever get the originals and duplicates within ten feet of each other.

Meanwhile, Mother also did serious genealogical research, traveling with Cousin Carolyn to do research in libraries, phoning relative to find out who remembered what stories and to clarify relationships she was unsure of and also asking for copies of important photos, especially of her mother (who died young) and father, who each belonged to enormous farm families; so photos of their siblings were also good to get her hands on.

Mother created a marvelous set of notebooks into which specific family units were divided.  But then things got tricky. The notebooks collected the faintest whiff of mold over the last 2.5 years in a closed-up house.  Additionally, Mother apparently rearranged items in her spare time, with less than useful results.


I took a class on preserving family heritage last year, and this spring I qualified as a Kentucky Historical Society Certified Community Scholar, which means my head is full of information.  Some tips for your own preservation activities:

Item One. Remove every photo from every album. Mother had transferred most everything out of albums with magnetic pages, but a few remained. I took the albums apart and gave each magnetic page its own folder. Every few months I rustle the folder and see if the glue has dried enough for the photos to fall off.

Item Two. Keep the photos together in some sort of coherent chronological order.

Item Three. Photocopy and/or scan the papers Mother put together from her research. Then wipe off the glass of the copying machine, put the papers into archival quality folders, and store everything scanned and photocopied on a thumb drive and one or two more back-up methods.  (The more back-up methods the better, because everything is going to fail somewhere down the line, and you want backup upon backup for every potential failure.

Oh, wait.  There's another Item One, which is to separate newspaper articles from the rest of the artifacts.  Newsprint and ink are like friendly drunks, notorious for falling apart and taking everything else down with them because of their acid content.

On a side note, somebody at the preservation workshop last year had a newspaper printed in the 1700s, given to her by an elderly neighbor years earlier.  What should she do with it?  The answer:  find out whether the newspaper exists on microfilm, microfiche, or is any other way preserved.  If so, don't worry about. Newspapers, it seems, were a dime a dozen and -- here's a shocking idea -- their value was in the information they contained rather than in the paper on which the information was printed. Bummer, especially if you think you've been preserving something that might make you famous, or at least rich.

We don't have any of that stuff.  We are a plain people. We have lovely documentation, and lots of it, because my parents lived in the same house for sixty years and never threw a thing away. They weren't so much hoarders as cautious. If the water pump broke in the middle of the winter, you might just be able to get the one that worked poorly last year to work a little better this year -- at least, a little better than the one that isn't working.

On top of that genealogical notebooks and family photo notebooks, there are booklets from Tideswell, the town in Derbyshire, England, where my father grew up; and pamphlets published over the years by the ferry boats; and the odd wine bottle label; and a lovely letter my father received when he was naturalized, and an award presented to my mother for having voted fifty years straight. Then there are the various businesses my parents operated over the sixty years on the island; and information about other businesses; and Mr. Zippy on a postcard announcing that the zip code for Middle Bass was 43446.

I've found numerous photos of my mother that I don't remember ever seeing before; and a few new ones of my dad; and a darling photo of his sister, my aunt Mary, after whom I'm named, giggling the way only an eight-year-old girl can giggle.  I also found my parents' original wedding photo, which is a relief, because I haven't yet been able to locate Mother's wedding gown. I'm beginning to think a relative took it home for safe keeping, intending to deliver it to me once I weathered the uproar of my dad's death followed immediately by my breast cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, I'm sorting and scanning and trying to get rid of the mild scent of mold now in my house.

The Third of July

If there are any currant bushes on Middle Bass Island, the berries ripened today.  At least, they always ripened on July 3 when I was growing up.  I can remember the date, because it's my late sister's birthday; and it was also the day of the township's firework display, which took place on Put-in-Bay (another  island, just south of us).

July 3 was like Christmas Eve in that it took forever for night to arrive. We didn't just have to wait until dark; we had to work until really dark, and then we had to wait for the lights on Perry's Monument to be turned off. Then we'd pile into whatever jalopy was operational that year and Daddy would drive to the Main Dock, and we'd Ooh and Ahhh, the way everybody does, everywhere.


Since then, I've seen fireworks on New Year's Eve in Times Square (2001); on the Fourth of July from the roof of an eight-story building looking over the Hudson River in New York City (2003); and over the Ohio River following Thunder over Louisville, the annual precursor to the Kentucky Derby (2004).

Each of those fireworks displays was the largest ever in the history of the country, according to the news reports, but none of them compared to the fireworks on the island.  I've alwaysattributed it to the island's isolation, but today I've been reading interviews conducted in the 1980s with writers who are women, and a substantial piece of the conversations had to do with the role of place, in the sense of who grew up where, and Place, in the sense of an ongoing and tiresome conversation about how anybody who wanted to be successful as a writer had to live in New York City.  (Surprise!  The people doing the interviews lived in . . . wait for it . . . New York City.)

But I digress.  My point is that I was reading about the role place carries in our lives, and then I put the book down and started working on a new quilt.  The rhythms -- ripping, pressing, testing, sewing fabric - made room for meandering thoughts.  So I was thinking about the fireworks going off beside Perry's Monument (it's official name is Perry's International Peace and Victory Monument and it was built to commemorate the Battle of Lake Erie and to honor and attest to the peaceful border that has existed between the United States and Canada ever since the Treaty of Ghent was signed).  (Way to go, United States and Canada.)  I was also thinking about currants, cake and ice cream, birthday presents for Amy, and how the fireworks exploded doubly, in the sky and in reflection on the lake, and what a big deal they were.

Then it struck me that just as significant as the fireworks was the fact that we were down at the dock after dark.

We only ever were at the dock after dark on July 3.  Hell, we were hardly ever there in the light, unless we were catching the boat with Mother to go shopping in Port Clinton or to visit her relatives and friends in Detroit.  What was that, all together?  Four or five times a year?

Otherwise, we weren't allowed near the dock.  In the summer, Lonz Winery was generally crowded with raucous folks (many of them from Cleveland*) drunk on sparkling wine (the kind that would be called Champagne if the grapes and the product were both from the Champagne area of France).  Not only were they drunk on fake Champagne, but they were drunk on WARM fake Champagne, which meant they were either hollering or singing or throwing up.  Not a place for children.

Not a place for children in the off-season, either.  What were we going to do there other than pick cherries from the Bing cherry tree that stood near the cliff in front of the Lonz mansion (which we did, with Mother's company) or fall in the lake (which we didn't, because we were never near the water, which is to say the dock)? My folks were all about being somewhere where you could do something productive.  We never went anywhere to look; we went places to learn.  Which isn't a bad form of parenting, whether on a Lake Erie island or in New York City.

*P. S.  It has been said that my children and I are loud. I claim it's a habit developed from a childhood living with a parent who was deaf as a result of flying noisy airplanes in the war without ear protection.  You had to SPEAK UP and you had to e-nun-ci-ate; and it seems I passed that lesson on to my children.  A few months back, I was telling my compadre some island stories and mentioned how loud people from Cleveland seemed when I was growing up.  "Are we that loud?" I asked.  "Oh, no," was the answer.  "Nobody's as loud as people from Cleveland."

I mean no disrespect, you understand.  If people from Cleveland are, indeed, louder than the rest of the world, it's no doubt attributable to all of the reasons I've just named for our family's speech pattern, with the added element of living in a city, where you have to talk over cars and trains and buses and utter bitter cold and, oh, yeah, all of those people.

Happy Third of July.

Middle Bass Monday: island residents, 1963

Middle Bass residents, May 1963.  This list either shows the people invited to my graduation from Middle Bass Grade School or the list of people to whom I wrote thank you notes after graduation.

Mrs. Ashley (Clara) was lovely: pleasant and kind.  We'd visit on her front porch in the summer when we delivered her regular order of eggs (we raised Leghorn chickens at the time). She must have had a lilac bush, because the smell is connected to her front porch in my sensory data bank.

Bill Kristoff was a friend of Sonny Schneider.  I remember him showing us, with immense delight, his red MG, in front of Sonny's garage (next to Thelma's house).  (The car had his initials in small block letters on the dash.)  Later he was killed in a water accident.  He was on his or a friend's boat anchored off Catawba/Port Clinton. They were asleep when another boat, never identified, ran into or over them.  Both young men died.

I think it was the Pinneys who invited us down to see Bonanza on their color television set, the first one on the island.  Oh, what a sight. They offered us soft drinks, and our parents chastised us when we got home for having accepted.  It was taking unfair advantage of hospitality for three children to drink soda pop offerings of an elderly couple (if they were elderly; who knows what age they might have been?). We were to say "No, thank you" to soft drinks and request water if we should be thirsty,which we shouldn't be.  (We were, however, allowed to eat the popcorn.)

Who's missing?  Miss Carrie High, who lived across the road from what is now the Middle Bass Inn; who intended to live to be 100; and who fed ginger snaps to Amy and me when we went to visit.  Also, Emma and Andrew Beckstein (Bechstein?), a brother and sister who lived together in a white house on the north shore of the island.

Middle Bass Monday: Erie Island Mirror

Subscription list for Erie Island Mirror, 1950, and mailing documents.

 

Hazel Heise was the postmistress during my early childhood. She lived in the big white house across the street from the town hall. When she retired, Thelma Schneider became postmistress.

Middle Bass Monday: Amy May Cartledge

Amy Cartledge, 1962

Amy, my older sister, with our first cat, George.  Our father was running a taxi boat between Middle Bass and Put-in-Bay.  One evening, that cat, scrawny and with a dreadful wound on his neck, strolled up to the boat at Put-in-Bay.  Discussion certainly followed, but when we children got up the next morning, the cat was sitting up tall in a chair in the living room  Amy and I used to dress him in our doll clothes and feed him with our doll's bottles.  He'd put up with it until the milk ran out.

 Amy was in the 1964 Ottawa County Fruit Queen pageant.  She was a junior at Put-in-Bay High School at the time and was Miss Ice Fishing Guide, 1963.

She was third runner up.  The dress she's wearing is satin in two shades of blue.  Evening gowns being in short supply on the island and with no time for a trip to the mainland for shopping, Amy wore a dress loaned to her by Thelma Schneider.

Amy was more than just a pretty face, though.  From an article by Juel Reed Cover in the Daily News (Port Clinton / Oak Harbor):
"Because of four wonderful teenagers, the sale of the MS gift tags in the Lake Erie Islands area is already higher than it has ever been before for the whole season . . .  Mrs. Fred Wilhelm makes the tags . . . This year the sale is being conducted by four young volunteers - Mary Eickler worked on North Bass, Amy Cartledge on Middle Bass, and Janis and Lee Wilhelm on Put-in-Bay.
" 'The thing I'd like to stress,' writes Mrs. Wilhelm,'is that these kids asked to do it.  Certainly they deserve a lot of credit.'" . . .
"She said the sale as of Nov. 10 was $44, which is already bigger than ever before."

In high school, Amy decided "Amy" was boring and changed the spelling of her name to Aimee.  (If you think that's an achievement, 15 years later she convinced her younger son that I was older than she. Eventually, she reached the same age as my brother Charlie, who's ten years younger than I.

 After high school, she attended Patricia Stevens Casting Agency in Toledo.  The gown she's wearing in the photo on the right was the pink lace prom dress Mother made for me in 1966.  I don't recall just exactly how Amy got her hands on it.

 Amy in 1981 with her two sons, David Thomas and (hidden by the blankets) Michael Douglas Reidling.

Amy, Mother, and I in 1985.

Amy Thomas Reidling

July 3, 1948 - March 8, 2003

Middle Bass Monday: The Main Dock, October Morning

Middle Bass Monday: The Main Dock, October Evening

 The amazingly large new dock house on Middle Bass.

 I remember those clouds from when I was a kid.  Lake Erie is really good at producing gray skies, night and day.

Middle Bass Monday: Erie Island Mirror

 

In December 1949 Belle and Doug Cartledge published the first issue of Erie Island Mirror which, their records show, was published monthly (with some exceptions) until September, 1951.  At the time, they had three children, aged 32 months, 17 months, and 3 months.  They also had animals, as revealed by the following item in the January 1951 issue of the Mirror:

"Next month we would like to say a few words about goats.  As you know we have two ourselves, but you may not know that we get around four to six quarts daily of wholesome milk from them.  Perhaps there are a few other facts about goats which you may find interesting.  See our next issue."

What's most interesting about that paragraph is that roughly two decades later they'd get a new goat, who soon became an island fixture, following people on daily walks to the post office, running up the stairs inside our barn to investigate / spy if she heard noises to the south of our property, and breaking into the house at every opportunity to clean the dining room table of the contents of the sugar bowl and anything else even moderately edible.

I can only guess that Milt's renewal arrived while Mother was in the middle of addressing this postcard.

My parents studied books on owning a small business and on marketing, which shows in their mailing products.

January 1951 Erie Island Mirror.

The issue had one page of Put-in-Bay news; two pages of Middle Bass news, three pages of advertisements, and a page titled "Festive Fruit Cake for The New Year."  The page features a photo of a two-layer frosted cake in the shape of a bell and the recipe, which calls for a "handy package of Layer Cake Mix."  Oh, the times they were a-changin', with women all over the country eschewing bake-from-scratch cakes in favor of those handy packages.

I'll scan the issue once I determine how to take it apart without damage. Meanwhile, here are the top news items:

"The coldest night recorded was Dec. 26 [, 1950].  Unofficially 15 below zero on Catawba, 5 below on Put in Bay, zero on Middle Bass, and [illegible] on North Bass."

"On Friday, BILL MILLER and BILL MARKET drove to Port Clinton in a Model T tourer.  (BILL MILLER has since been called to service in the Coast Guards and is stationed in California.)"

"We helped LESLIE BRETZ unload a bulldozer blade off the plane the other day.  We understand that this is an accessory for his Ford tractor, to use for scraping and also to plough snow off the roads.  It is anticipated that now it won't snow again all winter."

The mentions of the temperatures and of Bill Miller remind me that Miller's Ferry began running regular trips to Put-in-Bay last week and was contemplating adding trips to Middle Bass this week. That 15 below zero and 5 below zero were hardly atypical when I was a child on the island.  Boats running in February?  No.

Anybody hanging on to the illusion that global warming was invented by scientists (because . . . why? Are scientists notoriously wild and crazy guys who like playing practical jokes on the rest of the world?) can catch a ride on Miller's and spend the trip contemplating what open water on Lake Erie in February portends for the rest of the world in the coming decades.

Battle of Lake Erie

From my mother's postcard collection.  "Burial scene, Sept. 12, 1813, of the officers slain at the battle of Lake Erie, Sept. 10, 1813, Put-in-Bay, O."

Middle Bass Grade School, circa 1972

Middle Bass Grade School painted the color God intended.

Charlie Cartledge is in the foreground.  Circa 1972.

Mr. Punch and friends

Belle and Doug Cartledge (he's wearing his puppeteer hat), with Mr. Punch looking over my mother's shoulder, 1981.

Belle's Dolls, the early years

One of the first dolls Mother made.

Back then, Belle's Dolls was not yet established and the series of First Ladies and Presidents that Mother sculpted and for which Daddy cast molds weren't even a dream.

They'd made puppets when I was little, carved and dressed them, but this was an Island Pottery doll.  The photo was taken on the picnic table in front of my folks' house on Fox Road.

Cartledges, circa 1979

Front row:  Amy's David scratching his head, my Jennifer nearly invisible in front of my mother,  my brother's older daughter Sharon, and my Tara.
Back row:  Doug Cartledge, Mary Jo Cartledge, Amy Cartledge Thomas Reidling who looks taller than I am but was three inches shorter (it's the heels!), Belle Cartledge, Douglas and Charlie.

 A mystery photo! I think we're standing at the base of Lonz's hill, and that the building visible to the right is what was the Shop at the Dock. Amy's Michael Douglas hasn't arrived yet, so that makes it the late 70s.  It's possible this is the trip when my good friend Mary Flowers went along, and she would have taken the photo.

I'm smiling at the girls, my dad is smiling at my mother, and Amy is smiling for the camera.  And thus it always was, with one minor blip.  Amy was Miss Ice Fishing Guide Queen in 1963 or 1964, and I went on to win the crown the following year.

Making Music, 1967 ^

July 10, 1967.  Doug Cartledge on violin, Lesley Wilson on 5-string banjo, Elmer Wilson on guitar.

Elmer Wilson and some friends rented a school bus on what was Albert Gmelch's property on the north shore.  If you drove straight up the main road, not turning at the pear trees, and continued down the dirt / gravel road, you'd pass Carrie High's house (now Bob White's) on the right and Albert's (now the Middle Bass Inn) on the left before driving into the lake. Between the houses and the water was a silver school bus, which is where the Wilson family vacationed.

Originally, I think Elmer and John rented the bus merely for fishing trips.  Amy and I got to go out with them sometimes; we were experts at baiting hooks with worms but were both unnerved by the enormous sheephead Amy caught that lay on the floor of the boat groaning.  Elmer worked at a glass factory and got four weeks vacation a year, so he'd come up often during the summer.  Then the whole family started coming, which is when the major music / singalong sessions in Elmer's kitchen began.

Lots of people used retired school buses for vacationing at Albert's.  None of them had bathrooms, although some of the houses further down the line west of Albert's house surely did.  Otherwise, Albert's outhouse was the communal toilet; and if you wanted to bathe you could have yourself a sponge bath or take a bar of soap along into the lake.

Yeah.  Bathing in the lake, back when Lake Erie was a pool of water, arsenic, Lake Erie water snakes, flammable materials, and dead fish floating to shore.  Good times.

When I say music-making, I mean playing and singing until two in the morning.  Elmer would sometimes have his daughter Penny play guitar, and he'd pick up on the ukulele.  The adults, especially the musicians, had shots of whiskey between sessions.  We kids would walk down to our house sometimes, watching our shadows grow in the moonlight and the quartz glittering on the road. When the monument was turned off, there was true natural darkness, dependent on the phase of the moon, and the stars!-- if you never lived far away from the electrified world, you've never seen the true depth, breadth, and number of stars.

Birthday greetings

Congratulations to Cinammon on her recent college graduation!

Lonz Winery interior, 1950

Lonz Winery, Regatta 1950.  From left:  Richard Roesch, Albert Gmelch, Doug and Belle Cartledge

Island Swapping | Article Archives | Cleveland Magazine - Your guide to the best of Cleveland

Island Swapping | Article Archives | Cleveland Magazine - Your guide to the best of Cleveland

July 2004 article about North Bass that heavily references the State of Ohio's plans for Middle Bass.

Document Preservation

It's been raining all day, so my living room smells like wet dog.

My kitchen smells like the damp newspapers, photographs, baby books, albums, genealogies, diplomas, wedding announcements, thank you cards, etc. that I've brought from my mother's house to begin putting in order.

I began researching document preservation six weeks ago and was immediately overwhelmed by the size of the task. The one thing of which I'm certain is that it's going to be a long haul.

The immediate task? Stop the deterioration.

How do you do that?

First step is to segregate the newspapers from every other item. Newspapers have a higher acid content than other paper grades and will not only self-destruct rapidly but will share their high acid content with everything they touch.

Second step is to kill the crawly things. I haven't seen any silverfish, but there was one slimy little critter with an angular back I noticed darting between two photographs yesterday.

Ick. Double ick, because if I'm serious about preservation, I really can't simply toss the piles of stuff into a room, set off a bug bomb, and head out the door with the dogs. You just know that anything toxic enough to kill bugs is going to damage paper.

So there's that. And then comes the third step, which is to thoroughly dry out each and every piece. Not so dry that they crumble, you understand, but dry enough that the growth of mold is halted.

The other third step is to remove any framed photographs from their frames.

Of course, these aren't truly consecutive steps. In a perfect world, they would all be completed simultaneously.

Generally speaking, I'm to handle each piece of paper separately, because friction causes further deterioration. (No clutching a bunch of photos in one hand and hauling them to a table with more light to study them.) I'm to use both hands, on the outside edges, unless the piece is 8 x 10 or larger, in which case I'm to use my third hand to support the back side. The use of cotton gloves is strongly encouraged but not going to happen. Acid-free storage products are essential for storage once everything is clean and dry and not twitching.

Years ago I heard that Bounty paper towels are acid-free. I contacted the company to confirm the rumor, and they said it's true, so I'm using Bounty sheets between each item as I go, both for protection and to absorb the damp.

I've heard there are several local companies good at stabilizing ephemera. (Louisville is a river city with periodic heavy rains, tornadoes, floods, etc.; so it's not surprising.) I'm waiting for recommendations. I'm also going to call Cousin Carolyn (my mother's cousin, who is about my age) for advice. Carolyn and my mother worked together on family genealogy for decades, and I suspect she knows quite a bit about preservation. I'm also posting about the art and life of Middle Bass Island; pop on over to the other blog for a look if you're curious.

Current Events

CSG seventh-graders take trip to Stone Laboratory


The article doesn't indicate how or why the Columbus School for Girls got to Middle Bass, or what they did if/while they were there; but it's a thorough recounting of what must have been a splendid adventure at the Monument and on Gibraltar.