The Lineback To My Beginning

Book excerpt: Walt was born in Nelsonville, a small town in southeastern Ohio, whose population has been around 5,000 for the last hundred years. In this book he tells us about many extraordinary events that he survived from the age of three to eighteen while growing up in Nelsonville. Like the time he almost drowned in the creek below their home on 969 Pleasant View Avenue. Or taking rabies shots when their pet dogs got rabies from a pack of wild dogs that roamed the hills on the other side of the valley. Or surviving car wrecks when the cars were totaled and there were no seat belts then. He graduated from NHS in 1960 in a class of 56, so you knew everyone and everyone knew you and your business. You didn’t do anything without the whole town finding out very quickly what happened. So, when he broke the taillight in his Dad’s car, Dad knew about it before he got home. Or, when he drove that same car and took his girl friend all the way to Columbus to the Kahiki Supper Club for dinner one time, and, ruined his older brother’s white sport coat and Tanya’s new dress when an orange fountain exploded while they waited in the Kahiki’s crowded lobby, somehow people knew about the incident by the time they got back to Nelsonville. They quickly told a story to their friends first, then their parents, that some kid sprayed orange soda all over them at the high school dance that evening. And the best part of that adventure was, that the dinner was free if they didn’t take the free dry cleaning offer from the Kahiki. That is the way small towns were back then. Walt went on to work his way through Ohio University and eventually earned three degrees from there and a Master’s Degree from the University of Dayton in 1980. Walt’s adventures after finishing High School in 1960, like Ohio University, the party school, Western Electric in Columbus, and the Army and Vietnam, are in his next book, The Second Eighteen Plus.