I can remember when I was a kid, where I lived you could see all the way to Yearling Road from Robinwood Ave, nothing but fields and at one time Norton Field was a grass strip airport. I believe they only had one hanger and I think it was just a grass landing strip.I do recall as a kid a plane had crashed there one day that had passed very low over our house right off Robinwood Ave. (Webmaster's note: there is a picture of Norton Field here on the web site).

The picture you have with Wesler directing the band - I believe I was in that picture, boy do I feel old. I was the first base drummer in the marching band.

I wonder if anyone remembers when Whitehall had about three or four different names before it all was Whitehall ?? The area around Maplewood and Main St. was Cedarhurst; Yearling and Main area was Glencoe; and Walnut Creek and Main was called Hibernia. I remember my grandmother telling me about that. She said if you bought a bus ticket at the bus station downtown , the ticket would not say Whitehall, but it would say Hibernia, Ohio.

The 1950's:

    My parents moved to Whitehall from Columbus in 1952.  My memories include The Village of Whitehall becoming the City of Whitehall;  the newly opened Town & Country, the first shopping center constructed in the nation, being known as "The Miracle Mile;"  and the opening of Whitehall Yearling High School.

    I was in the middle of my fifth grade year when I transferred into the East Broad Street Elementary School, which was just west of the present day Jolly Pirate Donuts at Broad and Robinwood.  We lived in Parklawn Manor, and in sixth grade our neighborhood was reassigned to the East Main Street School.  That building still stands, slightly east of Wirthman Bros., Inc.   Railroad tracks used to border the schoolyard's west side.

    In the winter of 1954-1955, the entire eighth grade was transferred to the new and not yet completed high school building, so it could have a test run before actually housing high school classes.  The following autumn, the high school opened with only freshmen and sophomore classes.  Not until two years after that (1957-1958) was there a full complement of classes and the first graduating class.  The class of 1959 was the first to have attended a full four years at WYHS.

    When it opened, the high school had no name.  The school board decided to let the students vote on what to call it.  There were a number of nominations (dead presidents and such), but the student body was largely in favor of either Whitehall High or Yearling Road High.  The vote was so close that the board decided to combine the names.

    Ohio's high school athletic rules did not require WYHS to compete with full-size high schools while it had less than a complete student body of its own. But the Rams coaches and high school administrators decided that regular league competition would provide excellent training for their athletes.  The result was that, when the classes of 1958 and 1959 were in their respective senior years, they had such depth of varsity experience that they were virtually unbeatable.  Those were heady days for Whitehall sports fans of all ages.

    Incidentally, the student body also had democratic input into the naming of the Rams, the choosing of the ram horns football helmet design, and the naming of our mascot, Ramsey.

    Ramsey was donated by a farmer to be the school mascot.  He still lived at the farm, but attended every varsity home football game, escorted onto the field with the players, and occupying a spot at the east end of the bench.  At halftime, he accompanied the cheerleaders across the field to welcome the visitors.  Mike Glatte was Ramsey's official keeper at the games, but I usually accompanied him, sometimes watching Ramsey while Mike attended to other necessities.

    I remember when Whitehall began its police department.  The first police station was one of the small houses on Yearling Road.  The first police chief's name was Walker.  He came from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.  His second in command was Captain Weatherby, who became chief some years later.

    Firefighting services were provided by the Truro Township Fire Department, based on Yearling Road.  When Whitehall decided to have its own fire department, many of the Truro firefighters stayed with the city, while the township department relocated elsewhere.

    WYHS students in the 1950s didn't have today's choices.  We had to buy our class rings from Josten's and go to a Main Street  studio next to the Drexel Theatre in Bexley for our senior pictures.  The photos were black-and-white, but one or more enlargements could be hand-tinted for an extra charge.  Yearbooks came out in the spring, before school was out, so that we could have classmates autograph them.  This meant that spring sports, prom and graduation were omitted from publication until the following grad class's yearbook came out.

    In those days, there was only black-and-white TV, most of which was broadcast live.  There was no video tape--only film.

Music had recently evolved from dinner-plate-sized breakable single-play, two-sided records to unbreakable saucer-sized double-play records with center holes the diameter of silver dollars.  A "portable" record player had a handle and was small enough to carry from one power source to another, but still had to be plugged in.  The only battery powered music was radio, the smallest of which was the size of a hardbound collegiate dictionary until the advent of the first transistor radios.  These latter reduced the bulk to that of a paperback copy of Shogun.  Stereo sound did not yet exist, and high fidelity was rare.

    High school football and basketball were major draws, and were often followed by sockhops, dances so called because they took place in the school gym, where street shoes were not allowed.  Music was usually from a record player and sound quality was abysmal by today's standards.  On the other hand, conversation without shouting was possible and actually occurred.  And people left with their hearing still intact.

    After Friday games, everyone headed for their favorite drive-ins or pizza shops.  Massey's and Angie's had the corner on the pizza market, with the T.A.T. carryout at Broad Street and James Road running a distant third.  Favorite drive-ins were The Beverly and Emil's Steer Inn on Main Street, and The Burger Boy (later known as BBF) on Livingston Avenue.  Here we sat in our cars and ordered from lighted menus via two-way speakers.  Carhops brought us our orders and picked up our trays when we were ready to leave.

    Summer activities included the pool at Swimland on Hamilton Road by day, and at night the Miles' East Main Drive-In Theater, to which the price of admission bought two feature movies, some cartoons and an intermission for trips to the snack bar.

    Traffic was much lighter than it is today, and no one worried about their kids riding bicycles on the streets.  Before we were of driving age, my friends and I rode our bikes to Gahanna, Jets (now Cooper) Stadium, Pataskala, Hebron, and Granville.  We also used to leave our bikes, unlocked, under the Main Street bridge and wander Big Walnut Creek all day, knowing the bikes would still be there whenever we returned.

    Today's DSCC was then known as the "Army General Depot."  We used to go to one of the east gates, on what is now North Yearling Road, to buy large, strong wooden shipping crates for 25 cents each.  It took two or three of us to get one home, where we would knock the ends out to connect them and make them into clubhouses.  The "depot" was a huge and mysterious maze of warehouses, about which rumors circulated about stashes of Nazi super-weapons and captured UFOs.  It was the first place I thought of when I saw the packing crate stored at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."  I told my wife, "I know where that is."

    Across Yearling Road from the high school was a store called "The Confectionery."  We went there before and after school and at lunchtime to buy candy and gum, and the miniature squirt guns and cap pistols that so many of us got in trouble with in class.  We also shot paper wads from rubber bands, placed thumbtacks on chairs and, because our day preceded the age of prepared foods and our mothers cooked with dried peas and beans, we shot pea-shooters and bean-shooters at school.

    It was funny: the boys took great pride in addressing our teachers as "Sir" and "Ma'am," but derived equal joy from organizing a school-wide book drop.  For the uninitiated, a book drop was when the sychronized school clocks arrived at a preordained time and every male student (the girls never entered into this) would drop his heaviest textbook flat onto the floor.  The school reverberated like a bomb blast.

    Except for the school cafeteria, theater, and other authorized school functions, we were not allowed to conduct any monetary transactions on campus.  But there was a demand.  Those of us who carried gum and lifesavers were always being put upon by those who didn't.  So an enterprising student named Jerry Freer began stocking his bookbag with goodies and selling them in the halls between classes, and in class when the teacher left the room.  He passed out cards that said "Have Gum, Will Travel."  But the demand was enormous, and Jerry was only one guy.  I too carried a bookbag, and soon became "Gum-Runners, Inc."  We bought in bulk and sold singly, enabling us to support our own sugar habits and lay some aside too.  It was farcical:  Jerry and I could hardly get to our classes for having to stop to do business enroute.  I usually sat toward the rear of the room to better conceal my retailing.  It was not uncommon to have a half dozen customers standing around my desk when the second bell rang, and these kids weren't even in my class.  But I don't think Jerry or I ever got busted for what we did.  I can't believe the teachers were unaware of us--perhaps they thought the whole thing was comical and boosted class morale.

    Austin Peel was WYHS's first principal.  Our head maintenance man was "Shorty" Karnes.  Everyone called him Shorty--even the kids shorter than he was.  I never knew his first name.  Favorite teachers were Mrs. Murray, English;  Mr. Poe, P.O.D. (Problems of Democracy--what today would be a Government or Political Science class);  Mr. Wallick, Biology;  Mr. Tykodi, Algebra and Geometry.

    Whitehall in the early 1950s was, in a sense, at the edge of civilization.  One could walk from the city's east limits directly into woods or meadows, teeming with wildlife.  Admittedly, wild animals were scarcer seen in those days, because they had so much more habitat in which to retreat and hide.  But their tracks, paths, nests and droppings bore them evidence.  The songbirds, too, were much more numerous, and the summer air was rife with their music.  The birds that are seen now flocking by the dozens then flocked in the hundreds, sometimes the thousands.

    We never had air quality advisories in the 1950s, and at night the surface light pollution was minimal.  Few neighborhoods had streetlights, and the use of lights for advertising was limited to a few small neons.  Traffic signals were fewer.  The night sky above Whitehall was ablaze with the Milky Way and all its surrounding glories.      

    Jet aircraft were still relatively new and experimental, their potential still unknown.  North American Aviation, on Fifth Avenue, built and tested jets.  Frequently jet planes could be seen racing silently across local skies, faster than sound and followed after by the boom of their sound chasing them--a boom which would shatter windows at ground level until mach-plus flying over populated areas was outlawed.

    Then came the satellites.  America had been bragging about our space program, even though our projected first launch into space was still years in the offing, when Russia silently launched its first "Sputnik."  When Sputniks I and II were circling the globe, they would announce their presence over U.S. cities, Whitehall included, by opening and closing remote-controlled residential garage doors which just happened to operate on their frequencies.

    Did you ever notice the small tower at the little building on the southeast corner of the airport, right where Fifth Avenue curves north to join Hamilton Road?  That was Port Columbus' original control tower, and was still its only control tower in the 1950s.  And the Leveque Lincoln Tower?--It was the only building in downtown Columbus that could be seen from Whitehall back then.  Interstate Highways I-70 and I-270?--They didn't exist.  East-West traffic followed the National Road, old US 40, Whitehall's Main Street.  When the first McDonalds opened on Hamilton Road, its sign boasted, "Over 4 million sold."

    And a final remembrance for those looking forward to Ohio's bicentennial in 2003:  In 1953, as the state prepared to celebrate it's sesquicentennial, someone got the idea to find and display the original document, signed by the president in 1803, which officially made Ohio a member of the union.  Well, they found the paper, and guess what?  Through some clerical error, the president had never actually signed it.  So the president in our 150th year of "statehood" had to sign a document declaring Ohio to have been a state, retroactive 150 years.  A short time later, a nationally televised quiz show asked a contestant which was the 48th state to join the union.  After the contestant answered correctly, the emcee told the audience that either of two answers would have been accepted:  Arizona (1912) or Ohio (1953).

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