May 23rd

I almost made it through my whole trip without any car trouble. But I got a flat tire today. I had just started to drive away from Kent State when a light and indicator came up on my dashboard. I pulled over to a gas station parking lot and sure enough the driver’s side rear tire was flat. I called AAA and fortunately spoke with a woman who had lived in Kent. She told me that there was a Firestone store about a mile away so I inched the car over there. I got 4 new tires (which seems to be required for all-wheel drive cars). With all my driving, I probably would’ve needed new tires not too long after I get back. So now I should be all set for my last 11 days. And I should have already publicly praised my trusty Impreza for making it this far unscathed, through dirt roads, mountain switchbacks and all kinds of weather.

My first two stops recognized Canton’s home town hero, our 25th president William McKinley and his wife Ida. They had two daughters but both died very young. McKinley had much better luck in politics – 10 years in the US House, two terms as governor of Ohio and then two presidential victories over Democrat William Jennings Bryan. But he was assassinated by an anarchist at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (though he probably would have survived with better and quicker medical care).

There is a large monument up on a hill where all 4 McKinleys are interred. The museum down below has some exhibits on him but more on life in the Canton area from the 1800’s to the present. My favorite section had posters which each consisted of a 1956 photo of a different street block in downtown Canton and a shot of the buildings in the same block today. I would love to see something like this in Boston.

In downtown Canton there is a First Ladies Museum, whose current exhibit is on the seven first ladies from Ohio, only one of whom, Mrs. Harding, could vote for her husband. Then I had a tour of the Mckinley’s home. The house was built by Ida’s grandfather and was greatly enlarged, as when William and Ida were not in Washington, they shared the house with her parents, her sister, brother-in-law and their seven children!

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Then I drove to Kent State. There is a visitor center on the National Guard shootings on May 4th 1970, killing 4 and injuring 9. Tensions were high over the weekend and that Monday morning, as students gathered on the Common by the Victory Bell to protest Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and the presence of the National Guard on campus. The armed guards got the students to vacate the Common for a parking lot and it appeared that the troops were leaving. Suddenly they turned and fired on the students.

After the stress of the flat tire, I was in the mood for a national park – the 19th of my trip with one left to go in Maine. Just as Mammoth was all about caves and Hot Springs the hotels with the natural springs baths, Cuyahoga Valley National Park is literally centered on its namesake river that runs through it and the canal that used to. After the Erie Canal was built to direct all of the products of the Midwest to New York City, the brand new state of Ohio got into the act by constructing the Ohio and Erie Canal from Cleveland on Lake Erie to Portsmouth on the Ohio River, so that the state’s manufactured goods and food could be shipped either through New York or to New Orleans via the Mississippi River. The canal had dozens of locks and many towns grew around the canal activity at these locks.

The coming of the railroad supplanted the canal and then a huge flood in 1913 sealed its fate. Since the national park was created in the 1960’s, the canals have been filled in and a 110 mile bike/hike trail (called the towpath) has been built. I saw a covered bridge, strolled on a boardwalk through a Beaver Marsh and hiked around some waterfalls. The park was jammed as it is real close to Cleveland and all its suburbs.

Today’s song is about the Cuyahoga River. It looks in fine health now but it famously caught fire in the late ’60’s, leading the whimsical Randy Newman to write the tune “Burn On” (big river).