Chillicothe in Story and Song
January 2010
INTRODUCTION
Chillicothe's contributions to Ohio and the United States instill a keen sense of pride among its residents, and this heritage is reflected throughout the community. Chillicothe also lends its name and character to fictional settings, due in part to its place in history but more probably to its distinctive name and presumed Midwestern innocence and integrity. As many entries in this collection suggest, Chillicothe can be seen as a special Everytown USA.
"Chillicothe in Story and Song" features fictional accounts from novels, short stories, motion pictures, songs, newspaper and magazine commentaries, print and animated cartoons, folk tales, television programs, fabricated news reports, and a Broadway play. Most of the authors clearly refer to Chillicothe, Ohio, and not to one of its counterparts in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, or Texas, but in other than historical novels it seldom is clear why their characters reside in, pass through, or mention Chillicothe.
Present-day Chillicothe, founded in 1796, was not the first town of that name in what is now Ohio. Several authors refer to an earlier Chillicothe, known also as Chillicothe Town and Old Chillicothe, on the Little Miami River near present-day Xenia in west-central Ohio. It was the largest of at least seven Shawnee villages named Chalahgawtha, meaning "village" or "gathering place." One of them was on the site of today's Chillicothe, and another was near present-day Frankfort.
Entries are arranged chronologically, except where some naturally belong together, such as those by the same author or about the original Chillicothe. Entries and commentaries added since the February 2009 edition are marked NEW! or EXPANDED. Persons who provided leads or assisted in obtaining needed documents are acknowledged with their permission in brackets.
The library has copies of the books, sheet music or CDs, cartoons, and VCRs or DVDs on display on the second floor at its main branch in Chillicothe, with copies of many of the books and videos also available in its permanent collection. A professionally produced version of this report is available on its website at <www.crcpl.org/Story-Song.htm>.
Accounts of this ongoing project graciously provided by Chillicothe High School Alumni Association, Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce, Chillicothe Gazette, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio University-Chillicothe, Ross-Chillicothe Convention & Visitors Bureau, and WOUB (Athens) generated many leads to possible new entries. We invite anyone with ideas for "Chillicothe in Story and Song" to send them to Tom Thomas at 257 Independence Drive, Chillicothe OH 45601, or at <lawscience@roadrunner.com>.
William "Billy" Ireland (1880-1935) was born and raised in Chillicothe and at age nineteen started his thirty-six-year career as editorial cartoonist for The Columbus Dispatch, rejecting offers over the years from "big city" papers because he wanted to be near his native Ross County, which he frequently visited and where he is buried in Grandview Cemetery. Other papers often reproduced his cartoons, but his real pride for nearly three decades was his full-page The Passing Show that appeared in color every Sunday. The more than 1,200 of them typically consisted of ten to twenty illustrated commentaries on happenings around the state, replies to readers' questions, travel notes, anecdotes about the human condition, and curiosities that amused him. Ross County frequently appeared on this page, including reports on autumn foliage and foxes with bobbed tails along Paint Creek, tributes to the troops at Camp Sherman, announcement of the Farmers' Fall Festival in Chillicothe, experiences of diverse characters in the fictional town of Tick Ridge, and the highly unlikely predictions of "Deb Parsons, the Chillicothe Prophet." He enjoyed featuring the Great Seal of Ohio as a backdrop in his cartoons and drawings, and his interest was instrumental in creating Great Seal State Park.
Ireland for years championed the improvement of Ohio's public roads. A Passing Show in 1923 depicted an inscribed tombstone that he suggested might be found in the Scioto Valley: "He was a hale and hearty man / Who trusted in the Lord, / But he drove to Chillicothe / In a nineteen seven Ford. / His nervous system wilted, / Too heavy was his load; / He rattled through the pearly gates / Upon a gravel road." Lucy Caswell's Billy Ireland (2007) handsomely reproduces over 100 each of his cartoons and Passing Shows, including the ones mentioned here.
James Thurber related in his "Boy from Chillicothe" article for The New Yorker in 1952, reprinted the same year in The Thurber Album, a story Ireland told him when Thurber also was at the Dispatch in the early 1920s. "[A farmer] drove over to a preacher's house in Chillicothe one day, with the mother of his five children and the kids themselves, running in age from six months to eleven years. 'Me and Elviry want to git married,' he said. The parson was surprised and said, 'These, I take it, are the children of a previous marriage.' The farmer shook his head. 'No, they ain't, Reverend,' he said. 'Y'see, me and Elviry's been plannin' to drive over here an' git hitched ever since I met her at the huskin' bee back in 1909, but the roads has been too bad.'"
Ireland in 1908 published Teck Haskins at Ohio State, an unusual booklet consisting of a two-page introduction to the fictional Teck, followed by seventy-six full-page cartoons portraying his experiences at the university. Teck was raised in Yellowbud, a community twelve miles north of Chillicothe, but he devoted far more attention to activities on the wharf along the Ohio & Erie Canal than to chores on the family farm, so his father sent him to OSU to take a course in its agriculture department. The cartoons start with his arrival on campus in the autumn of 1908, where he renewed his friendship with a student athlete from Chillicothe, joined Si Eta Alfalfa fraternity, called often at the women's dormitory, and became an ardent and vocal football fan who scouted opposing teams, gained sideline privileges, and traveled to all road games. He visited Yellowbud for the 1908 presidential election with plans to see friends in Chillicothe, and he delivered the Yellowbud election returns by canal boat to Chillicothe. When the football season ended, the university called Teck to task for neglecting his studies, and he reluctantly returned home. [Allan Pollchik]
Roy Pitzen wrote the lyrics and music to I'm Going Down to Chillicothe in 1917 as a tribute to the young men reporting for basic training at Camp Sherman. He ended its two verses with the chorus, "I'm going down to Chillicothe / I'm going down there right away/ I'll get myself a suit of khaki / And fight for the good old U.S.A. / And when we get into the trenches / We'll make the Kaiser's hair turn grey / Conscript or not I'll be Johnny on the spot / I'm going down to Chillicothe." [Tom Castor]
George S. Kaufman made a young hotel clerk from Chillicothe, Ohio, the title character in his Broadway play The Butter and Egg Man (1926), a comedy in three acts that premiered in 1925 for an impressive run of 243 performances. In titling his play, Kaufman popularized a little-known term that he explained solely by having a character tell another that it signifies "A millionaire! A millionaire! [Who's] going to put money in [my] show." Louise Berliner in her Texas Guinan: Queen of the Night Clubs (1993) wrote that a wealthy high-roller from the Midwest at one of Guinan's clubs in New York during the Prohibition identified himself only as a "big man in dairy produce." He became known as the butter and egg man, an expression that later came also to mean a local yokel in the big city likely to be fleeced by sharp operators.
The likeable and unpretentious Peter Jones lived in Chillicothe with his mother and grandfather, who died and left Peter some money but not enough to buy the hotel where he worked, so with his mother's blessing he set out for New York to invest his money in some sure-fire enterprise. He had helped with two shows in Chillicothe "during the hospital drive," one of which had earned over 100 dollars, so naturally enough he thought that show business would be his ticket to success.
Former vaudvillian Joe Lehman and his partner Jack McClure were producing a new dramatic play, but rehersals of Her Lesson were not promising, and they had trouble finding financial backers, so they were delighted to meet Peter and high-pressure him into paying 20,000 dollars for a forty-nine percent interest in the production. Lehman responded to Peter's saying he is from Chillicothe, Ohio, with "Great place! I never played it myself, but they all tell me." Kaufman didn't intend the sarcasm. George Tyler in his Whatever Goes Up-- (1934), which appears near the end of this project report, wrote of observing minstrel parades on Chillicothe streets and theater performances by "a steady stream of touring companies" when his hometown of Chillicothe wa a community of 10,000 in the early 1900s. Indeed, as Malcolm Goldstein noted in his George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (1979), "The choice of Chillicothe was not lacking in special meaning; it was there, in 1867, that George C. Tyler was born." Kaufman first collaborated with the celebrated theatrical producer in 1917, but Tyler was not involved in The Butter and Egg Man.
The three partners took the show to Syracuse for a tryout, but it fared no better than in rehersals. During a conference designed to fix the show's weaknesses, Lehman became irritated at Peter's comments, called him "nothing but a butter-and-egg man," suggested that he return "to your sap town," and fired Jane Weston, his secretary, for siding with Peter. She thought Peter commendably simple and sweet and better suited for the hotel business in Chillicothe than for the theatrical business in New York. Offended by Lehman's attacks on his character and ability, and emboldened by the fact he already had sent his mother a telegram declaring the show a big success, Peter impulsively purchased his two partners' shares for 10,000 dollars. To raise the money, he sold a forty-nine percent interest in the show for 15,000 dollars to Oscar Fritchie, the Syracuse hotel's assistant manager who knew even less than Peter about producing shows, but who fit Peter's need for a butter-and-egg man of his own.
Peter and Oscar evidently did something right because Her Lesson opened in New York to favorable reviews. A lawyer informed Peter the next day that the author of a short story on which the play was based wants two-thirds of the show's profits. This distressing news was countered by Lehman's wife telling Peter that the police wanted to close the show because it includs a brothel scene and that the publicity 'means yo'll be hanging them on the rafters." Lehman and McClure also heard that rumor and secured 100,000 dollars, hoping to use part of it to repurchase the production, but Peter, letting them believe the lawyer waiting in an anteroom was an eager investor, held out for the entire 100,000. Peter tells Oscar that Chillicothe is "a wonderful place--wonderful," that he and Jane are going to purchase a hotel there, and that "with your money too it could be made into one of the greatest hotels in the world--anywhere." The curtain falls as Peter excitedly outlines plans for the hotel and offers to sell Oscar a forty-nine percent interest. [Ken Breidenbaugh]
NEW! Jean Harlow at age 21 in her first movie with top billing, Three Wise Girls (1932), plays soda-fountain worker Cassie Barnes at the Chillicothe Drug Store, a name conspicuously displayed in block letters on its front windows, in an unnamed small town. Cassie follows her close friend Gladys Kane (Mae Clarke) to make her fortune in New York. Gladys, an unhappy mistress of a married man, warns Cassie about men who claim their wives won't grant them a divorce, but Cassie as a fashion model in a department store falls for tycoon Jerry Dexter (Walter Byron), and he gives her the same story when she learns he is married. The third woman in the title is Cassie's roommate in New York, played by comedian Marie Prevost, who helps keep the plot moving. Gladys poisons herself when her lover reconciles with his wife, and Cassie, heartbroken and disillusioned but still in love with Jerry, returns to serving customers behind the store windows with the prominent block letters. Jerry, now divorced, surprises Cassie by coming to the drugstore and proposing marriage, and her ready acceptance provides the film's happy ending.
If the store's name reflects the town's name, its location with respect to New York argues that it refers to the Chillicothe in Ohio, although there was no store by that name in town. Also, the screenwriters based the script on Blonde Baby (1931) by Wilson Collison, who was born in rural Ohio fifty miles from Chillicothe and worked as a drugstore clerk in Columbus before becoming a successful author. In his book, the unnamed drugstore is in fictional Blair, Ohio, and is mentioned only in passing. The movie was a box-office failure, and Harlow wasn't pleased with it, either. Copies rarely are available commercially
P. G. Wodehouse, the incomparable English humorist, in Laughing Gas (1936) recounts the experiences of twelve-year-old movie star Joey Cooley, who was kept on a strict diet in Hollywood while dreaming all the while of the fried chicken his mother used to cook for him in Chillicothe, Ohio, his hometown, "where hearts are pure and men are men" and he was taught "the difference between right and wrong." Wodehouse cites Chillicothe no fewer than eleven times in this short novel.
Wodehouse later in The Return of Jeeves (1954), published in England a year earlier as Ring for Jeeves, introduced readers to "Rosalinda Banks of the Chillicothe, Ohio, Bankses, with no assets beyond a lovely face, a superb figure and a mild talent for vers libre, [who had] come to Greenwich Village to seek her fortune and had found it first crack out of the box." Wodehouse scholar Norman Murphy could not suggest a specific reason why Wodehouse selected Chillicothe as Joey's and Rosalinda's hometown. (A Wodehouse Handbook, 2006)
The song Hooray for Hollywood premiered in Hollywood Hotel (1937) and has become a standard soundtrack as Hollywood's unofficial theme song at events such as the Academy Awards. Richard Whiting's music is catchy and 
memorable, but Johnny Mercer's lyrics are not what the title might suggest. Rather than a tribute to what made Hollywood great, the song is a spoof on the types of entertainment and entertainers the town attracts, as in "Come on and try your luck / You could be Donald Duck / Hooray for Hollywood!" His third verse tells us "They come from Chillicothes and Padukas [sic] / With their bazookas [several possible interpretations] / To see their names up in lights / All armed with photos / From local rotos / With their hair in curlers / And legs in tights / Hooray for Hollywood!" Rather than having any of the five Chillicothes in mind, Mercer probably needed a town's name of four syllables and hit upon the distinctive one he used as representative of communities likely to nurture star-struck candidates for Tinsel Town. [David Butcher]
Tatum Young for over half a century hires himself out as a seasonal agricultural worker in The Quiet Shore (1937), Walter Havighurst's novel about life on a large farm named Homestead near Sandusky, Ohio. Young first works at Homestead in the 1880s, but this talented and conscientious worker also is a roamer who eventually works at various jobs on farms in more than half the counties in Ohio, but never beyond its borders. He usually stays at each job for only a season, and he frequently returns to Homestead for another season's employment. Havighurst lists nine towns where Young spends his wages between the seasons, with Chillicothe named first, although it is not first alphabetically. He provides no details about Young's visits, but we can be confident that Chillicotheans appreciated his one-man economic stimulus packages.
Titles of the novels in Conrad Richter's The Awakening Land trilogy--The Trees (1940), The Fields (1940), and The Town (1950), the latter a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1951--refer to the changing landscape as settlers transformed the Ohio Valley in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The key characters are Sayward and Portius Wheeler and their children, she a daughter of pioneers who founded the settlement that in The Town became Americus, and he a Massachusetts lawyer who ventured west under suspicious circumstances. Portius was in the Northwest Territory capital of Chillicothe in The Fields when Sayward at home gave birth to the first of their ten children. Upon returning, he excitedly reported that "The convention has ratified the constitution!" and "I was present at Chillicothe and witnessed it" and "I heard the speeches and saw the document signed." "You now live in Ohio [and] that means a new county with our own seat of justice and government!" Portius in time became the county judge, and a son of theirs became Ohio governor in The Town, but by then Chillicothe no longer would have been the capital. NBC aired a three-part The Awakening Land mini-series in 1978 starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Hal Holbrook, which is not commercially available. [Ken Roberts]
Gary Cooper portrayed Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees (1942), an acclaimed depiction of his life from a schoolbo
y playing baseball in New York City back-lots to a baseball star becoming a legend with the New York Yankees. During a practice session when Gehrig was a standout on Columbia University's baseball team, a sportswriter told him the Yankees would like to talk with him. Gehrig unthinkingly responded, "The New York Yankees? You mean the New York Yankees?," to which the sportswriter replied "Not the Chillicothe Yankees," an amusing contrast between a dominant metropolitan team and an imaginary small-town one, regardless of which Chillicothe the scriptwriters might have had in mind. Gehrig later dropped out of Columbia and joined the Yankees to pay for his mother's medical care. He went on to set numerous records from 1923 until 1939, when he was stricken at age thirty-six with the incurable degenerative nerve disease known today in the United States as Lou Gehrig's Disease. The movie received eleven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress (Teresa Wright as his wife). [David Watkins]
Three young women in The Harvey Girls by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1942) head west by train in the 1890s to the rough frontier town of Sandrock to join Harvey Girls already employed at one of the Harvey House restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad. One of the three, Alma Seelye, had attended the Methodist Young Ladies' Seminary in Chillicothe, Ohio, for two years, where dancing was not allowed and she surreptitiously read dime novels. The restaurant's and employees' influence helped lead the town to prosperity, and Alma in due course becomes the governor's wife.
Johnny Mercer wrote the song On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe, with music by Harry Warren, for the 1946 movie The Harvey Girls, described below, although it became a national hit a year earlier. It is a rollicking tribute to the railroad that opened much of the southwest to settlers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some verses were revised and some were added for the movie, as by having several passengers sing of their hometowns, including "Oh, I'm from Chillicothe--Ohio! / My middle name's Hi-a-wah-ee--Ohio! / I'm gonna git the gold in them thar hills / So I said good-bye-o, Ohio!" It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and has been recorded by Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Johnny Mercer, and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, among others. [Stan Planton]
The Harvey Girls (1946), a gala movie musical with an all-star cast based upon the Adams novel described above, 
stars Judy Garland as Susan Bradley, who travels west by train from "a little town in Ohio" to meet her mail-order husband-to-be in Sandrock. She is befriended by a group of women on the train who are headed there to staff a new Harvey's restaurant as Harvey Girls. One of them, Alma (Virginia O'Brien), offers Susan an "award-winning Chillicothe sandwich" based on her aunt's secret recipe. Susan graciously says she always wanted to try a Chillicothe sandwich, and happily observes that it tastes like chicken. Susan becomes a Harvey Girl when she and her intended husband agree they aren't right for each other. On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe, the song described above, sets the movie's theme. A key scene is the nearly nine-minute rendition by various townspeople, railroad employees, travelers, cowboys, and Harvey Girls. Virginia O'Brien as Alma sings the "Oh, I'm from Chillicothe--Ohio!" hometown verse accompanied by a male chorus. Alma never reveals her surname, but being from Chillicothe strongly suggests she is Alma Seelye of the Adams novel. The movie ends with Susan marrying Sandrock's reformed dance-hall owner with the Harvey Girls as bridesmaids.
Nelson Algren's short story, The Captain Has Bad Dreams in his collection The Neon Wilderness (1947), depicts an alleged marijuana dealer admitting simply to a Chicago police officer that he recently had been incarcerated in Chillicothe, Ohio.
When the Navy discharges Lt. David McDermott at age forty-five near Chicago in 1945, he has little money, no family, no plans, and a latent aspiration to become a painter or illustrator. Charles Allen Smart tells us in Sassafras Hill (1947) that McDermott once worked in New York City, but no berth is available on direct trains, so he goes to Cincinnati to connect with one from St. Louis. The wooded September landscapes of southern Ohio rekindle his thoughts of becoming a painter, and on the spur of the moment he leaves the train at a scheduled stop in Massieville. Readers learn that this town of about 20,000 has two paper mills, a Veterans Hospital with broad lawns and brick buildings, and a historical museum housed in a former residence, and that Great Serpent Mound and at least two wooded state parks are nearby. Everything in the novel about the town and surrounding terrain suggests that the fictional Massieville really is the Chillicothe founded by Nathaniel Massie. (Chillicothe Paper and Mead Paper were separate companies then.)
McDermott discovers that the town is old enough and far enough from larger cities to have a surprisingly subtle and civilized character of its own, and he frequently walks from his downtown hotel to paint scenes on the outskirts of town. After seeing photographs in the museum of stately houses in the county, he finds the one named Sassafras Hill built in 1802 and starts to paint it. When he runs out of water, he introduces himself to Ariane Brown, a widow aged about forty who lives in the family home with her mother and brother and three school-age children. Their conversations in due course lead to his being hired as handyman and house servant with a room over the stable and a schedule that allows adequate daylight hours for his painting. Their formal "Mrs. Brown" and "McDermott" mellows over several months to "Ariane" and "Mac" or "Davie," and by the end of the year they consider themselves informally engaged.
Encouraged by the sale of some cartoons to magazines, McDermott in late spring goes to New York to develop his artistic talents and earn enough money to move back to Massieville. He does well as a freelance artist producing cartoons and illustrations for ads and books, and he and Ariane exchange weekly letters. A friend in July offers to let Ariane use her cabin on Cape Cod, and she stops in New York to surprise McDermott. They leave the next morning for the Cape, where they marry, and they soon return to Sassafras Hill. (Smart moved to Chillicothe from New York in 1934 and in the best-selling R.F.D. (1938) described the real-life challenges and rewards of living on a farm near Chillicothe in the 1930s. Oak Hill, the residence completed in 1840, is on the present Dun Road in western Chillicothe.)
Ervin Drake, Jimmy Shirl, and Irving Fields declare in their song Chillicothe, Ohio (1947) that other towns in Ohio are just fine but "on that map there's a tiny dot / In my book it's the garden spot! / Chill-chill-chill-chill-chill-CHIL-LI-COTH-E O-O-hi-o," where a certain justice of the peace soon will send a couple "hon, hon, hon, hon-ey moonin'." The "Chill-chill-chill-chill-chill" phrasing appears two other times, once in rhyme with the singer's anticipated "thrill, thrill, thrill" at seeing the town again. The popularity of this song in the late 1940's and early 1950's might have brought Chillicothe to mind when other authors needed an unusual name. [Joy Gough, Tennent Hoey, Pat Medert, and Lloyd Savage]
In the action movie Battleground (1949), a chaplain portrayed by Leon Ames starts a service in the field for battle-worn American soldiers during World War II's Battle of the Bulge in Belgium by asking, "Any of you from Ohio?" After receiving several affirmative replies, he adds "I'm from Chillicothe." The film won two Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay, an honor no doubt prompted largely by including that line. [Dan Marsh, Jackie Story Hummel, and Nelson Coleman]
Rex Stout is best known for creating Nero Wolfe, that cerebral, corpulent, stay-at-home detective who loved fine food and rare orchids nearly as much as the eighty-seven intriguing mysteries he solved in novels and shorter works. He was equally well known for creating Archie Goodwin, the street-wise, 
energetic, and witty younger detective who teamed with Wolfe as his live-in employee in a New York City townhouse and followed Wolfe's instructions and applied his own talents to help solve seventy-two of those mysteries. More importantly, Goodwin also narrated them for readers in an unequaled style admired by literary critics. It seems altogether fitting that a person of such caliber was born and raised in Chillicothe, Ohio.
In the novella The Cop-Killer (1951), published with two others in Triple Jeopardy (1952), a married couple illegally in the United States consulted Goodwin about leaving New York immediately because they feared their status would be discovered. When they declared their love for this country, Goodwin replied, "Wait till you see Chillicothe, Ohio, where I was born. Then you will love it." After holding his own in confrontations with detectives in a district attorney's office, Archie tells us in The Final Deduction (1961) that "I walked three blocks to a place I knew about, called Mary Jane's, where someone makes chicken pie the way my Aunt Anna used to make it in Chillicothe, Ohio, with fluffy little dumplings."
Dale Van Every's The Captive Witch (1951) focused on an alliance between the British and the Shawnees to drive settlers from Kentucky. Elements of the Continental Army under George Rogers Clark, augmented by local Kentucky militia, implemented the strategy of confining the Shawnees to the area around the original Chillicothe on the Little Miami River. They succeeded in 1779 and 1780 to keep the Shawnees disorganized by burning their town, destroying their crops and appropriating their horses. Adam Frane had spent some eight years of his twenty-four years on the frontier, serving with Clark in the army until 1779 and then reporting directly to him in 1780 as he conducted solo reconnaisance missions at Chillicothe. The book's title refers to a young woman orphaned on the frontier in early childhood and raised by the Cherokees for fourteen years until Frane discovered her outside a Cherokee camp. A white preacher pronounced her a witch for espousing supernatural beliefs of the Cherokees, and she was captive to circumstances, not to anyone who restricted her freedom. The book ends with her emerging victorious with Frane from a love triange that included an older widow who had announced her upcoming marriage to Frane, but those intrigues needn't concern us here. [Marilu Sapashe]
James Thom's Long Knife (1979) also deals with George Rogers Clark's military actions to keep the Ohio Valley safe for the growing number of settlers in the late 1770s. Clark regretted that independent militias opted to attack the Shawnees in original Chillicothe to retaliate for raids and massacres, rather than join his forces and attack the British at Fort Detroit. After one militia blundered in its reckless attack against Chillicothe, Clark led a concerted offensive and soundly defeated the Shawnees when they abandoned old Chillicothe and defended their companion village Piqua, thirteen miles to the north.
In another historical novel set at the same time, James Thom, in his historical novel Panther in the Sky (1989), depicts the Shawnees' struggle to retain their homeland and preserve their customs in the face of advancing white settlement. Much of the action in Thom's narrative centers on the original Chillicothe and on the life of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, whose birth sign "Panther's Eye" provided the book's title. In his story, for example, Chillicothe in the years 1780 through 1784 was torched twice, first by the Shawnees to prevent its falling under white settlers' control, followed by their reconstruction and reoccupation of the town, and then by the settlers, followed by their reconstruction and permanent occupation as the Shawnees were forced westward. [Jim Smith]
A popular story can live through retelling over the years even if historically suspect as a blend of truth and romanticized lore. An example is the account of the famous Shawnee leader Tecumseh's proposal of marriage to Rebecca Galloway, the teen-aged daughter of a white settler and friend of Tecumseh's, in the original town called Chillicothe. They were in love, each had learned the other's language, and he had presented her many valuable gifts. She accepted his proposal on condition that he forsake his native ways and live as a white man, a condition he could not accept. They parted, never to see one another again. Allan Eckert, the creator of Chillicothe's outdoor drama Tecumseh, in his A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh (1992) presents evidence that "the supposed romance had no basis in fact and was a whole-cloth fabrication that evidently sprang from [Rebecca Galloway's] imagination in her later years."
Canadian singer, songwriter, and guitarist James Keelaghan described in haunting lyrics and music Rebecca's feelings upon their parting in Rebecca's Lament on his album Small Rebellions (1990). Tecumseh is not mentioned by name, and Rebecca's name appears only in the title, but the album's liner notes explain why she is mourning. Each of the four verses ends with the harsh mispronunciation of the village's name, which appears in the lyrics as "Chilicote." Consider, for example, how much more pleasing this splendid line would be if it ended with a correctly pronounced "Chillicothe": "The chill that went through me is the chilled wind that blows through the soft midnight stillness of [CHILL-a-koth (long 'o')] town." A fan reports that Keelaghan apologized for his earlier pronunciation when he included his song in a concert performance. [Joe Kiefer]
The second of Marguerite Allis's three novels about the Field family's experiences on the American frontier, To Keep Us Free (1953), opens in 1797 with Ashbel and Faith Field and their five children aboard a boat on the Ohio 
River between Pittsburgh and Marietta. Fellow passengers Thomas Worthington and Edward Tiffin think Field would be a resourceful and learned addition to their new community between Paint Creek and the Scioto River, and they suggest he would find Chillicothe convenient and profitable. Worthington says he has plans in his saddlebag for a mansion to be built on his land overlooking the town. Field explains that he had exchanged his Connecticut farm for a land grant in the state's Western Reserve and that he intends to locate his land in the wilderness abutting Lake Erie after settling his family in Marietta.
Field spends winters working as a law clerk in Marietta and summers surveying for the government and developing his property in the village that will become Cleveland. He detours to Chillicothe on one trip when he thinks a run-away nephew might be nearby. He seeks out Tiffin, who suggests they visit Worthington at his estate named Adena, and he accepts Worthington's invitation to spend the night in the temporary cabin being used until his mansion is built. Mrs. Worthington later tells Field that Adena means Paradise. Field is in Chillicothe for the constitutional convention in 1802, although he is not a delegate, as Worthington's guest at the completed mansion at Adena. The two men observe the sun rise above a mountain, and Worthington presciently asks, "What symbol could be more fitting for the seal of our new state?" Speculation on Ohio's future appears in area newspapers, including Chillicothe's Scioto Gazette. Field later visits Chillicothe to take the bar exam and soon thereafter permanently moves his family and law practice to Cleveland. (Tiffin [1766-1829] became Ohio's first governor and later a U.S. senator, and Worthington [1773-1829] served as one of its first two U.S. senators and its sixth governor.)
In Brave Pursuit (1954), her sequel to To Keep Us Free, described above, Marguerite Allis picked up the story in 1815 and focused on the life of the Fields' youngest child. They earlier had lost their only daughter in a firearms accident and one of their four sons in the War of 1812. Constitution "Connie" Fields was born in 1802 on the eve of the constitutional convention in Chillicothe and, in keeping with the occasion of her birth, she grows up to become an independent teenager. Ash Field as a Yale graduate had demanded that his sons attend school, but he believes that a woman should limit her interests to husband and household. Inflamed by his refusal to allow her to attend school, and by his arranging her marriage to a widower with ten children, Connie cuts her long hair, dons boys' clothes, and at age seventeen leaves the family home in Cleveland penniless and on foot for Athens, where her brother Mal teaches at Ohio University.
Living off the land, she reaches Zanesville, where she is astonished to see her brother Zeke. He is headed west by wagon to Chillicothe on unstated business, and they travel together as far as Lancaster. She learns in Athens that Ash Field had written to Mal, alerting him of Connie's likely arrival, and Mal insists that she return to Cleveland. Instead, Connie travels to Cincinnati, where with good fortune she finds her third brother Jed working in a boatyard. Connie becomes a domestic servant for his family, but he tolerates her attending school. While she is there, Jed receives a letter from their father announcing her disinheritance if she doesn't return immediately, but this doesn't deter her from pursuing her goals.
She responds to a newspaper notice from an unnamed congressman in Chillicothe seeking "a young lady of education and refinement" as governess for his daughters. Duncan McArthur replies by suggesting an interview when he visits Cincinnati. That meeting goes well, Connie is dazzled by the opportunity, and they depart the next morning on a five-day coach trip to Chillicothe. Connie takes up residence in Fruit Hill, the McArthurs' mansion on their estate west of Chillicothe and adjacent to Thomas Worthington's Adena. The girl's father expects a formal education for them, but their mother prefers an education in the arts, which she deems consistent with the family's place in Chillicothe society. Regardless of the challenge, Connie loves the girls and the comfort of Fruit Hill, and she enjoys visiting downtown, where the streets are lined with stately houses with "pillared porticoes or wide verandas overlooking sunny gardens gorgeous with bloom."
She often overhears fragments of dinner conversation with Duncan McArthur's business guests, including accounts of McArthur's and Worthington's political support for the "big ditch" between Cleveland and Portsmouth by way of Chillicothe. A gentleman from Cleveland one evening in 1825, when Connie had been at Fruit Hill for about a year, reports progress on what would become the Ohio & Erie Canal. He notes with sadness that many notable settlers would not be alive to witness its opening, including Ash Field, whom he said had been incapacitated by a stroke several months earlier. With the McArthurs' blessings, Connie returns to Cleveland after six years' absence in the hope of regaining her father's love and forgiveness. Although her father's condition precludes certainty, Connie and her mother think she succeeds, but his will disinherits her.
Connie inquires in a letter to Duncan McArthur whether her return to Fruit Hill would be welcomed, but his wife replies that her position has been filled "by an older woman skilled in the art of embroidery." The novel ends with Connie and her mother moving to Cincinnati, where Connie becomes engaged to a childhood acquaintance she had grown to love during her recent stay in Cleveland and, with his wholehearted encouragement, prepares to attend college. (Duncan McArthur [1772-1839] served in the house and in the senate of the Ohio General Assembly and in the U.S. House of Representatives and as the eleventh governor of Ohio. His estate included parts of present-day Brewer Heights. Fruit Hill was destroyed by fire in 1928.)
Morton Thompson in Not as a Stranger (1954) traces the life of Lucas Marsh from a childhood of dreaming about becoming a doctor to a successful career as physician and surgeon in small-town America. During his first year in medical school, Lucas received a letter from his father, Job Marsh, in an envelope postmarked Chillicothe, Ohio, explaining that he was managing a harness store there after experiencing financial unpleasantness in the town where they had lived, when in fact he was 
a temporary clerk filling in for an ill employee. Job owned a harness store when Lucas was born, but his vision of owning a chain of them was thwarted by his greed and duplicity, arrival of the automobile, and finally the Great Depression. Lucas learned that Job had gone bankrupt after spending all the money in a college fund his mother had set aside for him before her death, borrowing heavily from townspeople, and forging Lucas's signature to sell property his mother left him. Lucas married an operating room nurse, Kristina Hedvigsena, whose savings were sufficient to pay his overdue tuition, and she continued to work until he graduated in 1930. A second letter postmarked Chillicothe informed Lucas that Job now owned the harness store, and that is the last we hear of Chillicothe. An impoverished Job years later called on Lucas and Kristina in the town where they were working and asked for money. He left for the train station with fifty dollars, and that is the last we hear of Job.
Readers are not told in what state Lucas was born or studied medicine or practiced his profession, and the nearly twenty other towns named in the novel also are fictitious and not in any named state, yet we are told that the real town of Chillicothe is in Ohio. Perhaps that was to suggest that Job moved across a state line in avoiding angry creditors or to distinguish that Chillicothe from the four in other states. But why name Chillicothe at all? Perhaps the author wanted a fanciful name that matched Job's fanciful imagination. Then why not a fanciful imaginary name? Screenwriters assigned Job a miniscule role in the 1955 movie of the same title and thus didn't mention Chillicothe, which probably explains why so few VCRs and no DVDs were produced, despite a first-rate cast led by Olivia de Havilland and Robert Mitchum. [Lesley Howson Stavola]
Science-fiction author Robert Heinlein imagined in Methuselah's Children (1958) that some participants in a centuries-long project on human longevity were over 200 years old with expectations of living much longer. This success generated animosity among other humans, who wrongly believed that secret procedures extended those lives more than selective breeding did. For the participants and their progeny to escape this increasing hostility, one of their leaders, Lazarus Long, traded his personal spacecraft for a much larger one named City of Chillicothe that could transport them to safety elsewhere in the galaxy. He guided his loaded ship to an orbiting giant starship, which he high-jacked, and then sent that ship's crew to Earth in City of Chillicothe. Passengers in the pirated ship spent nearly seventy-five years in a futile search for safe and secure refuge before most of them agreed to return to Earth, where they discovered that other humans had succeeded in greatly extending their lifetimes through periodic injections of artificial blood. [Randy Runyon]
Melly Scott documented Poke-Bonnet Kate, A folk yarn from Ross County, Ohio for the Ohio Valley Folk Research Project (Ross County Historical Society, 1961). In it, Ezra and his brother Sam are raised in the Krider's Creek community, where Ezra becomes infatuated with local beauty Jenny, but her protective mother Kate shakes her fist and glares at any boy who approaches the house until he slinks away. Ezra moves to Chillicothe, where he marries and has children, but Jenny frequently is on his mind. During a conversation with Sam on a visit to Krider's Creek, he learns that Jenny's parents and brother had died, that her mother was buried in the family home's front yard, and that Jenny lives there alone. Ezra visits the house that evening and enjoys a long conversation with Jenny, whom time and toil had transformed into a stooped and rough-skinned woman. As he walks away from the house just before midnight, he sees a flash of light in the woods, which he attributes to imagination, but then sees another flash accompanied by an apparition of Kate with her poke-bonnet surrounding a face covered with grave mold. It silently shakes a fist at him, and he runs all the way to Sam's place. (Perhaps the apparition was attending to business elsewhere and couldn't accost Ezra when he approached the house, or perhaps it wanted Ezra to see the aged Jenny, or perhaps this is just a ghost story and not a logic exercise.) Chris Woodyard included Poke Bonnet Kate in her book Spooky Ohio: 13 Traditional Tales (1995).
While interviewing Chad Gates (Elvis Presley) for a job as tour guide in Honolulu, the company president in Blue Hawaii (1961) tests him by asking, "Now then, I am a tourist from Chillicothe, Ohio, and I want to see some night-blooming blossoms: where would you take me?" Chad's correct answer impresses the president and secures him the job, but he later starts his own tourist business. [Karen Lancaster]
In the romantic musical Viva Las Vegas (1964), casino swimming-pool manager Rusty Martin (Ann-Margret) tells race-car driver Lucky Jackson (Elvis Presley) that she was born in Las Vegas but has lived in Dubuque (Iowa); Chillicothe, Ohio; and Helena, Arkansas. Jackson repeats "Chillicothe, Ohio" and says he never has been there. Noted screen writer Sally Benson offers no clue to why she selected those cities. [Karen Lancaster, Don Marsh, and Anonymous]
On his first day in New York City to begin life as a street hustler, a confident but soon-to-be disenchanted Joe Buck from Texas was swindled by "Ratso" Rizzo and found himself alone in a grimy hotel room with an apparently deranged evangelist. James Leo Herlihy in Midnight Cowboy (1966) wrote that the Bible-quoting Mr. O'Daniel's voice "had some old-fashioned element in it--a riverboat orator's elongated vowels, a medicine man's persuasion--but mostly he sounded like a plain person from Chillicothe or some such place." (The one in Texas?) The dismissive reference to Chillicothe didn't survive the transition from paper to celluloid in the 1969 movie of the same title. Excluding that line from the movie probably contributed to its Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director. [Henry Herrnstein]
MAD Magazine in October 1966 sorrowfully reported the demise of Donald Duck, thirty-six, when two hunters mistook him for a wild canvasback. The short obituary noted that "Duck was born in a marsh near Chillicothe, Ohio," and became an orphan at the age of five when his parents strayed too close to a pillow factory. It acknowledged his eccentric nature and savage bursts of temper but emphasized his clever wit, "all of which was unintelligible." The notice listed survivors as his uncle Scrooge and three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. It ended solemnly by observing, "In accordance with the wishes of the family, Duck's body will be sautéed over a low flame at 300 degrees." [Henry Herrnstein and Allan Pollchik]
The protagonist in Walker Percy's The Last Gentlemen (1966) tries to get his bearings after driving into a town in Alabama, "but there was only an old tin arrow pointing north to Chillicothe Business College, Chillicothe, Ohio, 892 miles." Percy provides no explanation for the sign's existence or for the exaggerated distance.
Fess Parker starred in the television adventure series Daniel Boone, whose 165 episodes NBC aired over six seasons from September, 1964 through May, 1970. Much of the action cenered on Boonesborough, a settlement and fort that Daniel Boone (1734-1820) founded in 1775 about fifteen miles southeast of present-day Lexington, Kentucky. Nearly 
every 50-minute episode was a morality play whose producers weren't overly concerned with cultural, geographical or historical accuracy.
In The Fifth Man (episode Fifty-one, February, 1966), the Governor of Virginia during the American Revolutionary War reminded Boone that "Fort Cumberland is strategically located on the Chillicothe River" 165 miles from Boonesborough, told him British troops are marching there from Detroit, and ordered him as a Captain in the Virginia Militia to prevent the British from taking the fort. Boone suggested that a small party of men try to destroy a key footbridge across the river before the British cross it and minues later told his men, "It's a long trip up the Chillicothe River" to the bridge. A scriptwriter wishing to grace a river he created couldn't do better than by calling it the "Chillicothe". The episode's title refers to a disgraced former army officer who guided Boone's party to the bridge and stayed to help destroy it just as the British arrived. With his self-respect restored, he returned to the army, cleared his name and regained his commission. [We note for the record that the real Daniel Boone disliked coonskin caps. He wore a cloth hat.]
Hanna-Barbera's animated cartoon series Wacky Races aired on television between September 1968 and September 
1970, introducing Saturday morning audiences to the villainous Dick Dasterly, the vivacious Penelope Pitstop, and nine other individuals or teams who race their vehicles across various parts of the United States. Two of the thirty-four episodes aired in each half-hour program, but we are interested here only in "Hot Race at Chillicothe"(episode 16, November, 1968). The racers are not averse to taking shortcuts, impersonating a police officer, or playing dirty tricks to impede others, and a stop at a Little League ballpark affords opportunities for more pratfalls before the racers "zip their zany way toward the finish line in Chillicothe, Ohio," with the Army Surplus Special coming in first, just a few yards ahead of Penelope Pitstop. [Anonymous]
A 1971 cartoon by Joseph Farris in the former Look magazine shows a disappointed man, who has consulted a bearded sage high on a mountain peak, complaining, "I travel all the way from Chillicothe, Ohio, and your only advice is 'Keep your options open'?"
NEW! In Thobqueh's Tale, a story by Jack Matthews collected in his Tales of the Ohio Land (1978), a young preacher named Elias travels north on horseback to Chillicothe with Roberts, a guide who assures him that "I could have worn a footpath along the Scioto bottoms all by myself, I've come to Chillicothe so many times." They are visited that evening by the title character, an aged, eccentric, and friendly Shawnee known to Roberts and many other settlers. Thobqueh was born during a solar eclipse, which he was told in a dream imbued him with supernatural powers ("strong medicine"). He followed instructions given in that dream and reversed his tribe’s population decline by making a small model of a man and burying it in the ground. Thobqueh came to believe that he, Thobqueh, is the creator of other races, including the white settlers’. He departs the next morning, and the travelers heading north later see columns of smoke rising above Chillicothe. After sharing rum and venison pie at a Chillicothe tavern, Roberts moves on to other business, leaving Elias to meet his congregation and reflect on his experience with the enigmatic Thobqueh.
Helen Santmyer's ". . . And Ladies of the Club" (1982) chronicles life in fictional Waynesboro in southwestern Ohio from the founding of the Waynesboro's Woman's Club in 1868 until the memorial service for its last surviving charter member in 1932. She presents detailed accounts in its 1,176 pages of how the club and its members responded to and 
promoted social changes. Chillicothe Street as the main thoroughfare ran from the east end through downtown, where it defined one side of Court House Square. Women preferred to walk on the side of Chillicothe Street with the town's "good stores" rather than the side with barber shops, small groceries, and a beer parlor. This street was busy with horse-drawn buggies and wagons before arrival of the automobile and was a standard route for political parades and demonstrations. It was the first street in town to be paved with bricks, and it shared the roadway with a trolley line that connected Waynesboro with other small towns. Santmyer refers to but doesn't name Chillicothe in a somber reference to the influenza epidemic of 1918, when in "Waynesboro the railroad station platform was piled high with crated caskets waiting trans-shipment to Camp Sherman." (The fictional Waynesboro represents Santmyer's hometown of Xenia. She later wrote in her nonfictional Ohio Town [1962] that the older houses on Main Street in Xenia probably were built when it still was called Chillicothe Street, "a wide spot in the trail from Chillicothe west.") [Anna Stout]
Hermit is one of fifty brief tales by Scott Sanders in Wilderness Plots (1983) about people and events in the Ohio Valley from about 1780 to 1860. A shaggy and apparently ferocious hermit lived in a cave overlooking the Scioto River eleven miles south of Chillicothe and never answered shouted greetings from river travelers. He was the subject of many rumors, including speculation that he had been raised by wolves, and most people doubted he could speak. As a group of ministers headed to Chillicothe by river passed the hermit's cave one day, he "suddenly leapt to his feet and screamed at them in a fierce unintelligible language." The ministers agreed among themselves not to tell anyone in Chillicothe about their experience in fear that residents might try to goad the hermit into other outbursts, perhaps to their detriment.
Collin Raye left little doubt which of the five Chillicothes he had in mind while writing "To the Border and Beyond" as performed on his CD Extremes (1994). A "purebred hill country kicker [who] loved to drink his liquor" held up the Chillicothe Flyer [stagecoach?] and probably headed for the border with Texas Rangers on his trail.
[Stan Planton and Rick Butturini]
In her comedic novel Moo (1995) about academic life on Moo Univerity's rural campus in the American Midwest, Jane Smiley has a research scientist refer to a possible career move as being "sent down to the minors, but only to, say, Omaha, not to, say, Chillicothe." Let's credit another Chillicothe with this one.
The movie Chillicothe, written and directed by Todd Edwards (2001), concerns the travails of young male college graduates in pondering the meaning of life in this uncertain world. The action centers on Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Chillicothe is mentioned only once in passing as the site of a chance meeting of a man and a woman, and its name is seen once later on a highway sign in a young man's imaginary reenactment of that meeting. Some accounts of the movie suggest it was set in Oklahoma, which would make Chillicothe, Texas, the likely town in the title.
A movie filmed in Chillicothe without identifying the town would not be included in this collection, just as a novel would not be included merely because its author wrote it while in Chillicothe. However, a scene filmed here might depict Chillicothe as a setting for some of the action, even though its name is not mentioned or seen. In A Little Inside, an independently produced movie copyrighted in 2000 and released in 2002, a professional baseball player for the Columbus Clippers (Ed Mills, portrayed by Benjamin King) balances his career aspirations with the responsibilities and pleasures of a single father raising his young daughter, Abby (Hallie Kate Eisenberg). The dialogue never mentions Chillicothe, and the name is never seen.
Still, the camera reveals that it captured the action at two Chillicothe sites, a baseball stadium and a restaurant. VA Memorial Stadium served as home field for the Chillicothe Paints, a professional baseball team. Several crowd scenes and some of the action during ball games were filmed there, as when the Clippers supposedly were playing the Charlotte Knights in North Carolina. Some of the stadium's design features identify it, as does the view from the stadium past center field. John Wend of the Chillicothe Paints' organization was on hand during filming at the VA stadium, and he confirmed in a conversation (24 March 08) that many of the ball players in the film were active players on the Paints' roster. Two brief scenes record Ed's visit to a restaurant, which viewers familiar with the interior of Dock on Water immediately will recognize, although its name is not seen or mentioned. The film's credits recognize the cooperation of the Chillicothe Paints and the Dock on Water Restaurant. [Anonymous and Stan Planton]
Roxie Dockery, the twelve-year-old narrator of C. L. Davis's delightful children's book The Christmas Barn (2001), lived with her parents and five siblings in a log house nearly twenty miles from the nearest post office in the North Carolina mountains. A snow storm isolated them just before Christmas in 1930, and it toppled a 
large pine tree that damaged the house so badly that the family moved into the barn. Mail for local residents was delivered one day a month to a church five miles from their home. December's delivery included a letter from her mother's sister who hadn't written since leaving the mountains six years earlier. She wrote that she and her husband "have settled near the town of Chillicothe, in Ohio, [which is] a good size town with a lot of people [and] there are enough families here that haven't been wiped out by the Depression to keep the store going [where I work selling] dresses and hats and such." [Debbie Dowler]
The first episode of the three-year serialized HBO movie Deadwood in 2004 introduces two merchants newly arrived in that lawless, booming, gold-mining camp in Dakota Territory in 1876. A young man they pay to safeguard their merchandise at night volunteers that he is from Louisville, Kentucky, and merchant Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) replies that he is from Ontario, Canada. His business partner Sol Star (John Hawkes) says he was "born in Austria and grew up in Chillicothe, Ohio," before moving west and meeting Seth Bullock in Montana Territory. [Dan Marsh and Doris Rapp]
NEW! Kamil El-Din and colleagues at the website "unconfirmed sources.com" have published hundreds of short political satires, imaginary news reports, and parodies of current events and political intrigue (each about 150 to 600 words) since January 2004. Chillicothe, Ohio, is featured in five of them and mentioned in twenty others through 2009. The authors often describe Chillicothe as beautiful, charming, fine, historic, and picturesque, all worthy compliments without a hint of satire or parody.
It announced in January 2005 that "U.S. Marines Prepare to Liberate Falluja's Sister City: Chillicothe, Ohio" (item 588), explaining that Chillicothe once had been linked with Falluja, Iraq, through a Sister Cities program, which was sufficient reason for the Pentagon to announce plans for ridding Chillicothe of insurgents. The site a month later revealed that Chillicothe had developed seven nuclear weapons in its program of nuclear deterrence to enhance the town's safety (905), followed by an account of the FBI's investigation into this revelation (1180). It also reported that Chillicothe had changed its policies and agreed to give up its weapons and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1186). Item 1016 described how Chillicothe was leveled to provide needed space for a mega-church's parking lot, liking the community's destruction to that of Falluja.
The other items include reactions of Chillicothe residents to natural and predicted disasters in southern Ohio (942 & 1577), congressional legislative antics (967, 984 & 1108), presidential nominations and confirmation hearings (983, 1226 & 1227), prevalence of off-color jokes (1013), corruption in the governor's office (1140), presidential and gubernatorial campaigns (1324, 3726 & 3727), outsourcing of a secret CIA facility (1368), bias in television news coverage (2301), quality of imported electronic products (2617) and automobiles (4044), and unanticipated effects of high oil prices (3315). In other items, a Chillicothean replaced a disgraced television evangelist (1151), and long-term resident Joseph "Joe" Sixpack offered some thoughts on an uncertain national economy (3703). [Anonymous & Stan Planton]
When his wife abruptly left him, forty-year-old Starbuck in Frederick Krider's The Hurdy Gurdy Man (2006) hit the skids with a predisposition for "slipping on cosmic banana peels." The high-school English teacher's downfall became all the more precipitous when in a drunken rage he used a rifle to silence a civil defense siren whose shrillness during routinetests always evoked his wrath. News services carried an account of his arrest, and he found himself a reluctant folk hero of many across the land who thought civil defense sirens symbolized all that is wrong with mankind. Laszlo, one of his admirers and a former hippie 
and revolutionary wanted by the FBI, went on a cross-country campaign of shooting similar sirens before visiting Starbuck to bestow on him the nickname "The Hurdy Gurdy Man," a song written and published in 1968 by Scottish songwriter Donovan, who like Starbuck and Laszlo used only a surname.
Krider sets his novel in Anderson, Ohio, in the summer and autumn of 1989, but he lets other local residents know that Anderson really is Chillicothe by revealing that the town of 24,000 is south of Columbus and 90 miles northeast of Cincinnati, home to a paper mill on the south side with a tall red and white smokestack, an Elks lodge with a replica of the Statue of Liberty on Second Street, a church at the intersection of Main and Brownell streets, a popular city park with a stone bridge across a lake, and with a VA hospital and wooded hillside behind it and Mound City and the Scioto River beside it just north of town, and with Amish farms and North Fork creek nearby. A series of events with repercussions both comedic and distressing led Starbuck to believe he was "one more mad man just trying to live in a world gone mad." He eventually lost his teaching position, but Krider assures us that Starbuck became "a different man, one hopefully better able to swing the bat at those cosmic curveballs when they are pitched his way." But we never learn if he finished his book of original poems titled How Much Is That Doggerel in the Window? [Mike Ater]
Saundra Crum Akers in Tempest Rider (2007) relates that Dayton school-teacher Slate Morgan abandoned his abusive wife Darla without notice, moved into a ramshackle house trailer in Pike County, Ohio, started teaching school in 
thevillage of Peebles, and planned to continue hiding from his wife while he filed for divorce. He was befriended by fellow-teacher Silvia (Silver) Black, who was being stalked and harassed by her cousin Bo, who mistakenly thought she was having an affair with Slate. Bo recruited Darla into a campaign to separate Silver and Slate. As a break from their troubles, another cousin drove Silver and Slate to Bainbridge for a Saturday evening of local music at Paint Valley Jamboree. In describing the theater's décor, Akers notes a sign on the stage announcing that the evening's performance is "sponsored by Cooper Glass Company in Chillicothe," fifteen miles to the east.
Readers meet the title character in Saundra Akers' The Smelly Man (2007) as he burglarizes Faith Roberts' house near the village of Bainbridge, Ohio. Locals call Zip Collins "smelly man" because of his acute sense of smell. While in Faith's house, Zip reads some pages of her dairy, an act that leads to their becoming friends and to his giving up the criminal life and concentrating on the legitimate aspects of his job at a salvage yard. When a murdered man's body is found in the local landfill, Zip suspects that his unscrupulous employers hid it under trash in the dump truck he uses to deliver wastes there. The action extends to the county seat and population center. The murdered man used to go to Chillicothe on unspecified business. Zip shops for groceries in Chillicothe; his son spends ten days in jail there for wildlife violations, the jail where he had been incarcerated before, as had Zip's dad; his mother takes genealogy classes at the library in Chillicothe; Zip's deceased brother once worked at the paper mill; and when Zip is injured at work, medics take him to the hospital in Chillicothe. Faith also shops in Chillicothe for groceries and for a Christmas gift; her closest neighbor used to cook in a restaurant there; and her son and family live in Chillicothe. Faith enjoys exploring Chillicothe's residential streets where the houses offer many fine examples of diverse architectural styles.
Corey Grace's status as a decorated veteran of the Gulf War played a key role in his election from U.S. Senator from Ohio at age thirty. Thirteen years later, he is a presidential candidate in The Race (2007), best-selling author Richard North Patterson's chronology of political distortion, deceit and duplicity. Grace is a Republican frequently at odds with his party on scientific, human rights and environmental issues, and many political observers think the "candidate of candor" is too independent to receive his party's presidential nomination. In considering whether to run for the Senate years earlier, he kept asking himself what purpose his election could serve. While fielding questions during an appearance leading up to the primaries, a woman in Chillicothe emphatically informed him that his purpose would be "to run our government according to a literal interpretation of the Bible" and "to save America from sin." Grace believes that Americans deserve more than "narcotic babble punctuated by demagoguery" and that selecting a president should be "more than a marketing exercise."
Several months before the presidential election, the party's convention is deadlocked among three candidates -- Grace, a fiery evangelical minister and an unprincipled U.S. Senator -- and three governors with their own political aspirations who control the votes of their state delegations. The back-room maneuvering that follows is convoluted in the extreme, and readers in the end can remind themselves that good guys don't always finish last, but they don't always win. Grace is from the fictional Lake City, evidently near Cleveland, which like Toledo is mentioned in passing. Chillicothe is the only other Ohio town in the novel, but the author does not suggest why. [Cheryl Stone]
The eighteen loosely connected stories in Donald Ray Pollack's Knockemstiff (2008) describe a range of sordid activities perpetrated, witnessed, or experienced by residents of that unincorporated area in Ross County about twelve miles southwest of Chillicothe. Knockemstiff is a real place, as are the nearly twenty other communities cited in the book, with one exception: Chillicothe is known as the fictional Meade, which often is mentioned as the unnamed nearby town where characters live or visit. These references, together with the ones specifically naming Meade, reveal its true identity, although Chillicothe never is named.
Doubters need only look at the book's frontispiece, a map of where much of the book's action takes place, which shows Meade as the town at the intersection of US 23 and US 50. Or they could read the author's "Acknowledgments," where he remembers "all my old friends and co-workers at the paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio." The paper mill is mentioned in seven of the stories. In response to a question at a book signing in Chillicothe (Book World, 22 March 08), Pollack said he referred to Chillicothe as Meade to acknowledge the Mead Paper Company's longtime contributions to the town's economy, and to its role in his family's employment history, including the thirty-two years he worked at the paper mill, now owned and operated by Glatfelter.
NEW! Ohio poet Jack Burgess included two free-verse epitaphs that refer to Chillicothe in his collection of twenty-two poems, It's Always Gettysburg (2008). November22: The Last Yankee cites typical towns whose residents mourn the death of John F. Kennedy: "Meanwhile, in the streets of Dallas, / in all the Detroit's, Dubuque's and Chillicothe's [sic], / everyone stands silent, holding their breath, / brushing tears, until the television / tells us he's dead." In Early Spring, All Over the Earth, a tribute to a man "who loved life and his fellow human beings," Burgess notes spring's arrival in "all [the planet's] exotic places, like Samarkand, Rothenberg, Des Moines, and Chillicothe."
EXPANDED Pearl R. Nye was born on a family boat docked in Chillicothe on the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1872. He became a canal boat captain and wrote and collected songs of the times. His Chillicothe opens with 
"In Chillicothe where I was born" and continues for forty lines to describe his life on the canal and activities on the waterfront, emphasizing that "Chillicothe was a great canal town, / Yes, she drew everything for miles around." The lyrics appear in various historical publications, including John Grabb's authoritative The Canal--Its Rise and Fall in Ross County (1985). Several verses of "Chillicothe" and of two other songs by Nye that briefly mention Chillicothe, The Old Canal ("Chillicothe, ah so grand") and Canal Towns ("Chillicothe is a lively place"), are included in Folk-Song Sampler (Lyrics) of People, Places and Events of Ross County, compiled by Lloyd Savage for the Ross County Bicentennial Commission (1998) [Lloyd Savage and Joy Gough]
Country singer and songwriter Johnny Paycheck (born Donald Lytle), in a concert while confined in the Chillicothe Correctional Institute (CCI) in 1989 for wounding a man with a firearm, sang Chillicothe, You Got a Hold on Me, which included that title line followed by "There's a lot of places I'd rather be." It appears that songwriter Billy Don Burns wrote it for Paycheck's one CCI performance, and it never was recorded or published, but Paycheck's fans keep the lyrics alive. [Rick Butturini]
NEW! Ohio celebrates Statehood Day on March 1 to commemorate the first meeting of its General Assembly, in the capital city of Chillicothe in 1803. In 1984, the Chillicothe Kiwanis Club celebrated the day by announcing that Chillicothe, with lyrics and music by J. D. Jewell, had won its Chillicothe Song Contest. Jewell copyrighted and privately published the song as sheet music in 1986, unofficially declaring it "The Official City Song." The twenty-six-line Chillicothe starts with the sun rising over Mt. Logan to shine on the Scioto River and the "garden spot of O-hi-o" and concludes with the assurance that "I'll always have this longing for my Chillicothe home." Lloyd Savage, a Kiwanian and the Chillicothe High School music director at the time, noted in a July 2009 conversation that club members sang the song on at least two occasions, probably Statehood Days, and that he had written two arrangements of it. Unfortunately, neither Kiwanis Club records nor Ross County Historical Society files includes an account of the contest, and nothing about it appears in February or March issues of Chillicothe Gazette.
COMMENTARIES
Authors of the Federal Writers' Project of Ohio in its guide Chillicothe and Ross County (1938) observed that Chillicothe is "proud of its beginnings and of its progress in the new American scene" and that "[t]he word Chillicothe is a part of the American language [and] has come to have definite meaning, particularly to persons who have never been in Chillicothe." What meaning, they didn't say, but they added that Chillicothe "is a funny word and has been used as a sure-fire laugh in some of the plays produced by George Tyler, a Chillicothe boy." What plays, they didn't say, and neither did Tyler (next entry).
George Tyler (1867-1946) in his memoir of decades in the theater business, Whatever Goes Up-- (1934), said that the Chillicothe of his boyhood "was the finest little place in the world [but] not even well enough known yet for the wise-cracker to have got busy with its good old Indian name the same way they used to get funny about [other towns' names]," which might suggest that the wise-crackers used it to their advantage later. He confessed to thinking in later years that "Chillicothe sounded too small and a little comic," so when asked while working out West where he was raised "I always said Cincinnati."
NEW! Why Chillicothe?
Comments in the introduction and with several entries in this report note the frustrating uncertainty about why some authors associated their characters with Chillicothe. Let’s engage in some literary speculation about two of them, P. G. Wodehouse (page XX) and Rex Stout (page XX). Wodehouse in Laughing Gas (1936) recounted the experiences of child movie star Joey Cooley, who in Hollywood dreams of the fried chicken his mother used to cook for him in Chillicothe, Ohio, his hometown, which Wodehouse cited eleven times in that short novel. In Ring for Jeeves (1953), Wodehouse introduced readers to Rosalinda Banks from Chillicothe, Ohio, who finds her fortune in Greenwich Village.
Wodehouse scholar Norman Murphy in his A Wodehouse Handbook (2006) could not suggest a specific reason why Wodehouse selected Chillicothe as the hometown of Joey and Rosalinda, other than perhaps to further a private joke or to contrast Chillicothe to the bustling life of Hollywood and New York. Any small town could satisfy the second possibility. If a private joke, could it have been shared with Rex Stout, who created Chillicothe native Archie Goodwin? Stout's biographer, John McAleer, knew Stout well and in Rex Stout: A Biography (1977) related that Stout's maternal great- great-grandfather in 1805 purchased 1,200 acres of the original tract on which Nathaniel Massie founded Chillicothe in 1796, that his mother's family in the 1890s had known Chillicothe well for ninety years, and that Stout had been in Chillicothe at least once as a child. McAleer quoted Stout as saying that "Chillicothe is a funny word, without being silly."
These two authors thought highly of each other's literary achievements. (Wodehouse, for instance, wrote the introduction to McAleer's book.) It would seem reasonable to assume that Stout referred to Chillicothe first because of his family's connection to the area, but Stout didn't mention the town until fifteen years after Wodehouse published Laughing Gas. Archie Goodwin tells readers in Over My Dead Body (1939) that he is from Ohio, but he doesn’t reveal until The Cop Killer in 1951 that he was born in Chillicothe. We might speculate that Stout's use of Chillicothe was triggered, consciously or subconsciously, by Wodehouse's repeated reference in Laughing Gas to the town Stout already knew. If so, what prompted Wodehouse to use Chillicothe in the first place?
One possibility is Wodehouse's friend George S. Kaufman, whose highly successful Broadway comedy, The Butter and Egg Man (1926), premiered in 1925. As described above (page XX), the title character is a young hotel clerk from Chillicothe, Ohio, who profitably invests in a play in New York and returns to Chillicothe to purchase the hotel. Malcolm Goldstein noted in his George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (1979) that Kaufman chose Chillicothe because it was the hometown of George C. Tyler, the celebrated theatrical producer (page XX) with whom Kaufman first collaborated in 1919, although Tyler was not involved in The Butter and Egg Man. It seems safe to think that Wodehouse as a literary critic, Broadway lyricist, and friend of Kaufman would have seen the play or read the script sometime in the decade between its opening and his publication of Laughing Gas. Wodehouse many years later adapted The Butter and Egg Man for his novel Barmy in Wonderland (1952), the royalties for which he split evenly with Kaufman.
Or perhaps Wodehouse just passed through Chillicothe on one of his six cross-country train trips to or from Hollywood in 1929 through 1937. But he didn't have to be in Chillicothe, of course, or even to have heard of it. All he needed was a map of the Midwest to discover Chillicothe, Dubuque, Kokomo, Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Kalamazoo, and other unusual names.
A version of this commentary appeared as Why Chillicothe? in Plum Lines, the quarterly journal of the Wodehouse Society (Fall 2009), concluding with the observation that “those of us here in Joey’s and Rosalinda’s hometown would be delighted to hear from readers who might point us toward the answer.” None did.
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