Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (25 page)

The kid in front of him yelled, “I’m going to ride it first!”

“No you’re not, nigger! I said it first!”

Right then our light turned red. We had no choice. I was going to have to deal with them. Unlike little kids, this pack didn’t stop running until they got to us, and it startled Della. She shuffled a little to the left, while I whirled around to the right side of her head, pointed to the boys and roared. “Don’t! Stop there!”

They all froze for a moment. Then, as if on cue, they sprang back into action. One leaped onto the cart, and the other two sprinted up to Della’s side. I jumped in front of those two with my fist up. “Get back!”

In the cart, Patricia stood on the brake petal, and with one of the wooden wheel chocks in her hand, she hissed in the kid’s face, “Just try it, you little bastard!”

He jumped back off the cart and whined, “Hey, all I want is to go for a ride.”

Patricia shook the piece of four-by-four at him. “Stay back! No one goes for a ride.”

The two boys in front of me shuffled back a little as one of them said, “How come we can’t go for a ride? How much you charge?”

The kid next to him burst into laughter and slugged him in the shoulder. “Dude, what are you talking about? You ain’t got no money.”

I said, “We don’t sell rides.”

The one who tried to climb in the cab said, “Then take us on a free ride.”

They all started laughing and dancing around on the sidewalk giving each other high-fives. This was getting tedious. How I wished that light would change.

“Come-on, dude. Take us for a ride.” The tallest one strutted up to the curb half a dozen feet in front of me. He had his left hand on his crotch, while he gestured like a rapper with his right one. “You ain’t doing nothing but standing here. We want to ride.”

Whenever I see a man grab himself in public like that, I feel like saying, “You hoping something will show up down there?” But I didn’t. I just stared at the traffic light.

“I’m talking to you.” His voice was angry. “What, you too good to talk to me?”

Right then the light changed. I didn’t have to tell Della to get up. She was ready to go. The kids started into the cross walk beside us. “Say man, where you going?”

“Don’t!” was all I said. But the word came out with such conviction, that it even startled me. All three of them immediately stopped in their tracks in the crosswalk. No one said a word. They just turned around and walked away.

“Hello, Della. Hey, you guys. Welcome to Columbus! It’s Annette.”

We were less than a block from Franklin Park, on the east side of the city, when Annette pulled up to a stop sign on a side street. She was driving an older white convertible Volkswagen Rabbit with the top down. From across the highway, her silver-haired-head and excited face were above the windshield, while she waved wildly and yelled, “Bud, pull into the park!”

Three days earlier––west of Columbus–we met Annette Kuss in Lafayette, Ohio. It was at the Red Brick Tavern where we had lunch with her and some of her friends from Springfield. Her friends had read about us in the newspaper, saw us on the road and invited us to lunch as we were walking past the tavern. She lived in the Columbus suburb of Bexley and knew nothing about us. But after she heard the story she invited us to stop and spend a night at her house when we walked through the city. “It’s on the east side of Franklin Park. You can put Della in the back yard.”

She paused, then said, “That is, if it’s all right with the town. I need to check with the mayor and make sure it’s okay.”

“You probably ought to check with your husband, too.”

“Steve?” She waved off the notion. “He’ll love it.”

When Annette got out of her car at the park entrance she was effervescent. “I talked to the mayor and he said it was fine if Della spends the night at my house.”

“How far is that from here?”

“I’d say a mile and a half or so. No more than that.”

It was a hot afternoon. The heat radiating up from the pavement was miserable. We needed to get off the road and into some shade for a while.

Annette said, “There should be a shady place in the park.”

Unlike downtown, the park was alive with activity and the parking lots packed. But eventually we found a shady spot and pulled into it. I had just opened Della’s water bucket, when I spotted a golf cart headed our way. It had a sign on it that read “Security Guard.”

Oh no, not again?

I couldn’t call this security guard “Pinky” because this one was black. He was short, his hair gray at the temples and he had a pleasant expression on his face when he asked, “What are you folks doing?”

I was still feeling the sting of the security guard the day before, so I was defensive when I replied, “We just stopped for a few minutes. I need to give our mule a drink and cool off in the shade. We won’t be here long. Is that okay?”

“Sure. But I can show you a lot better shade than this.”

I thanked Ernie, then told him, “This is fine. We just stopped for a few minutes.”

Annette sounded like she was bragging when she said, “They’re going to spend the night at my house in Bexley.”

After answering his questions about our journey, I gave Ernie one of our fliers and he drove off. A few minutes later he returned with a man and woman on the back of the cart. The woman said, “Ernie told us about you, and I read your flyer. I think this is wonderful! Could we buy you lunch?”

Barb Jenks Tiffan was director of the Franklin Park Conservatory. Besides buying us lunch at their café, she offered us a free tour of the conservatory. The original glass pavilion opened in 1895 and has been in operation ever since. In it were botanical gardens and rooms with habitat that ranged from desert to tropical. In the Pacific Island Water Garden, the air was alive with butterflies from Asia, Africa and South America. It was a treat that thrilled all the senses.

You could spend a whole day at the conservatory and not see it all. But we only stayed two hours, we had Della to think of. We had moved her to the “better shade” that Ernie told us about. He had me tie her to a “No Parking” sign, where I hung her a bag of hay. While we were in the conservatory, Ernie and his partner, Gary, kept an eye on Della. Even so, two hours was a long time to be away from our girl. We knew she’d be excited to see us. Especially when we showed up with two Hagen Daz ice cream bars.

Bexley was
the
suburb of the well to-do on the west side of Columbus. Even the Governor’s Mansion was there. Annette and Steve lived in a stately old home, with ancient oak trees that shaded a lush green lawn. When I warned them about the damage Della could do to their yard, Steve said, “I plan to re-landscape the backyard anyway. She’s fine.”

The next morning, when we left Annette’s house, she accompanied us on her bicycle. She wanted to take our picture in front of the Governor’s Mansion. It was a gothic stone house, with a huge manicured lawn, majestic oak trees and beautiful flowerbeds. All of it was surrounded by an iron
and stone fence with massive gates and a stone drive that curved up to the front door.

After Annette snapped a few pictures in front of the house, we went around the corner and stopped in front of two iron gates. Inside those gates, behind the mansion, was a smaller house with a State Highway Patrol cruiser parked in front of it. Two uniformed officers were close at hand, keeping their eyes on us.

I had just turned toward Annette, so she could take a picture, when I heard a man’s voice behind me. “Say, what’s going on here?”

He wore Bermuda shorts, a t-shirt and ball cap. The man was about my height and around the same age as me. I figured he was a gardener. “We just stopped to take a couple of pictures.”

Both officers stepped up beside the man as Annette said, “It’s the Governor!”

I asked, “You’re the Governor?”

Bob Taft grinned as he put his hands on his hips and chuckled. “Last time I checked. So who are you? And what are you doing?”

After I gave him a brief rundown, the Governor said, “You walked here from Arkansas? My wife is from Arkansas.”

While I was telling him about our trip, a younger man walked up beside the Governor. He was Bob Taft’s nephew. The Governor told him, “Go up and get Hope. She’ll want to meet these people.”

Then he turned to me. “Have you got a few minutes? I want my wife to meet you.”

He motioned for the patrolmen to open the gate. I was leading Della up the driveway, when Ohio’s first lady came out the front door of the mansion wearing a pair of Burkenstocks, blue jeans and a frumpy shirt. At her side, was their daughter Anne. Hope Taft shook my hand as she said, “I know who you are.”

The Governor asked, “You do?”

“Yes. I read about them in the
Cincinnati Enquirer
a couple of weeks ago. Bob, have them come up to the front of the house. I want to get some pictures.”

With that, Ohio’s First Lady turned around and trotted back into the mansion. We had just stopped in front of the house, when she came out with a camera and a clipping of the article about us from the Cincinnati paper. She handed it to her daughter. “Here Anne, I cut this out for you while you were on your trip.”

The Governor had a hurt look on his face. “Why didn’t you show it to me?”

Hope shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

Then she put the camera up to her face and motioned for the Governor to move closer to me. “Get next to Bud, so I can get you both in this picture.”

We visited with the Tafts for better than an hour and a half. I gave the Governor and his family a tour of the cart. Then Mrs. Taft said, “Come in and let me show you around the mansion.”

“I need to tie Della up to something first.”

“Tie her to that tree.” Bob Taft pointed to one on the manicured lawn.

“She might paw up the grass.”

“We’ve got people to take care of that. Come on in.”

He was in the middle of his first term. Before he was governor, Bob Taft represented Ohio in the US Senate. He was an avid bicyclist, and had ridden all 1,000 miles of Ohio’s Rails-to-Trails.

During our visit, the Governor pulled out a state road map and we talked about our route. “You’ve got to go through Holmes County. It’s the largest concentration of Amish in the world.”

“In the world? You mean even more than Lancaster County, Pennsylvania?”

The Governor nodded. “The countryside is beautiful. Rolling hills with lots of farms–all of it tended to with horses. They’ll love you.”

He brought us ice water in old jelly glasses. And Hope kept asking Patricia if she needed to use the bathroom. “We have several.”

The governor, and the first lady, walked with us down their driveway toward the street. While we approached the gate, I could see that the patrolman was having a problem with the gate motor, so he manually tried
to open it. When we got there, both Bob and Hope grabbed hold of it and helped him push the gate open.

When we walked past him, Governor Taft saluted me. “If you come back through Columbus, and I’m still here, give me a call and let us know you’re coming.”

In our guest book Governor Taft wrote “Thanks for coming to Ohio!”

Showing Ohio Governor Bob Taft the cart
.