Stark County, Ohio
By Maud Lavin
October 15, 2022
October 15, 2022
Maybe you’ve heard this first part before, or feared something like it in a dream.
At a round Formica table in the Oakwood High School cafeteria, my girlfriends, along with some guys including Pat P. and Greenie, are there. I’ve been to most of their houses. Some of them don’t invite me to their houses, but most do. It’s a big table. 10 or so chairs are pulled up. The year is 1968, but ’68 IN CAPS hasn’t really reached Oakwood, yet.
I get up to go to the bathroom, leaving my books and notebooks on the table, taking my purse with me so I can fix my make up. I spend some careful, 14-year-old time at the mirror checking. Not bad—I look ok. Haven’t embarrassed myself with runny mascara. I put on fresh lip gloss and go back out.
My table is laughing, I smile coming up. Pat P., he’s laughing hard. Then I get closer and I see it. My books. JEW written over and over on each book cover, on the covers of my notebooks, filling the covers, some letters huge--JEW JEW JEW. The word covers the covers. The girls are just sitting there. They didn’t stop the boys. The boys are still laughing. I look at the faces. I stare at my books. I don’t know when I start crying. I grab the books and I run.
There’s nowhere to go. The high school is sprawling, low, one story, modern, long hallways, land is cheap out here. It’s big. I run down a hallway to another bathroom, removed. I don’t want other kids to see me crying. I can’t call my parents. If they come that’ll make everything worse. It doesn’t occur to me to tell a teacher. That’s not what teachers are for. I can’t go to the principal—we kids don’t tell on each other. I’m so hurt, I can’t stop crying. I go at the book covers, I try to get the front of the notebooks off. I can’t get it all. Most of it I can. The brown paper wrappers on the books, those come off. But my notebooks are ruined. I have to go to class. I wash my face. I look terrible. I fix my mascara. Everyone can see I’ve been crying. I go to class.
I make it through the day. I go to my classes. The terrible times are when I run into one of my girlfriends in the hallways. They feel bad. Annie says she’s sorry. But the girls also make it worse. They can’t keep from defending the boys. “They didn’t mean it that way.” But they did. I know. They definitely meant it that way. That way as in--DIRTY JEW, KIKE, UGLY JEW. I’ve lived here all my life—I know exactly the way they meant it. And the girls also say the familiar things, “I don’t mind that you’re Jewish.” I feel worse. It’s when I see the people I thought were my friends that I start crying again, several times during that day.
Later I tell my parents. They want to come in the next day to talk with the principal. I ask them not to. I hate to think of that meeting, where the adults would act like it’s about them—but it’s not. My parents agree reluctantly, but they tell me I’m not allowed to go over to Pat P.’s house anymore and one other boy’s house. They say they don’t want me to get hurt. They’re afraid of what more the boys would do. I tell my girlfriends the next day about this new rule, it makes sense to them. I see we won’t talk more about it, but I won’t have to go over to those houses, and in this they’ll stand by me. All my tears seem to have done something, though. There’s no more writing JEW on my things.
Some students keep saying bothersome things to me about being Jewish, though—usually about how I look or I don’t look Jewish, and more often than not about how I’m the first Jewish person they’ve met. Ohio, then and now, is only about 1.3% Jewish, and there are even fewer of us in the sticks. That all continues, it’s been happening since grade school. They don’t know. I have to explain. I wish they’d shut up. I start to think beyond myself as well, to notice the different ways of being different at Oakwood. I wondered then and I wonder now, again, thinking back on the notebook day, how it was for Benjie Turpin.
If you were ever scared for yourself in high school, do you remember being scared for other kids, too?
Judge Turpin’s son
Here’s what I remembered, what I thought I knew, about Judge Turpin’s son Benjie who started Oakwood a year after I did. In fall 1969 he was the first Black kid to attend Oakwood High School. I was one of only four Jewish kids out of a student population of about 1000. Not easy. So, I took a special interest, feeling both hopeful and worried in how he’d fare. Oakwood was not an easy place to be different.
Oakwood had a good mix in terms of class, although was very homogenous in terms of race and religion— largely white and Christian. It was far enough outside Canton, which was itself not a big city. In 1969 Canton had a population of around 110,000 and now it has a population of about 71,000. In the late ‘60s it was surrounded by both small suburban pockets and large rural areas. To the north was Akron and to the north of that Cleveland, but there wasn’t the traffic between Canton and other northeast Ohio cities that there is now. We used to go up to Cleveland as a family once a year.
At Oakwood were sons and daughters of farmers, truck drivers, real estate brokers, bank branch middle managers, factory workers, upper-level business managers, illegal gambling operators, department store clerks, architects, and a judge. My father ran a family meat-packing business—a job he would leave for a series of lesser paying ones a year after the start of this story. They provided him independence from the extended family. My mother, who would later teach English literature, was then working as the primary parent of us four children. Benjie’s father, Judge Ira Turpin (1925-1989), at the time Benjie was a freshman in 1969, held the elected office of Common Pleas Court Judge. I didn’t know then what Benjie’s mother Genevieve did. I later learned she worked in the courts for different judges over the years.
I was a sophomore when Benjie was a freshman, so I didn’t know him well. I made it my business to see how he was being treated though. I was relieved to see in the main hallway where everyone gathered between classes, the place of jostling, hellos, cliques, flirting, and shunning, that Benjie often hung out with others and everything seemed friendly. This central hallway was a useful barometer. A lot happened there. It was the place where I learned to compliment girls on their clothes, but not ask them where they got them because some girls made their own. In grade school and in my 4-H club sewing-your-own had been a source of pride, in teenage years, though, clothes were supposed to come from the mall. That big hallway was also the place I first saw sperm. Joe C., a junior, had jerked off into a glass jar and brought it to show the midday crowd in the hallway, holding it up and yelling.
Back to Benjie. So good news was that he had friends. He was not alone. I remember seeing him with the F. twins, Rocco and John. The three of them seemed tight, rough housing together at times in the hallway. Then towards spring rumor had it that the Judge was not pleased with Benjie’s friends. Word had it that he was concerned that the F.s, who were a Mafia family, had told their twins to befriend Benjie—or maybe they hadn’t. In any case, gossip went, gossip worried, gossip thrilled, Benjie could get hurt at their house if the older F.s weren’t pleased with a decision the Judge brought down. At the end of the year, Benjie, or so I was told, transferred to McKinley High School downtown and away from the F.s’ influence. Not incidentally too, there were other Black kids at McKinley.
Years later, while writing this, I wondered if that rumor about the F.s being Mafia was true. Also, I started wondering if Benjie had in fact transferred and then come back a year later. When I Googled him I found mention in a local newspaper archive of him playing Oakwood sports in November 1972, when he was a senior, and I had already left. So, it couldn’t have been only about the F. twins I figured, because they were still at Oakwood when Benjie came back. Confusing. Something had been left unsaid in that gossip, maybe many things. Maybe the original rumor was anti-Italian prejudice and maybe the F.s weren’t even Mafia? Maybe Benjie’s transfer was about racism but then why had he come back?
I started researching some of the families who’d had kids at Oakwood. That led me to information about housing in the area at the time. The reason the high school was multi-class and multi-ethnic is that it drew from the exurbs outside Canton and its suburbs. At that postwar time of overtly discriminatory housing practices the area was a relatively unregulated one. In the parlance of the time it meant in addition to white Protestants that Jews, Catholics, and some Blacks could live there, too. Also, that far out there was land. Judge Turpin, who grew up poor in the inner city doing things like tap dancing with his older brother for white change at a downtown Canton restaurant after school, had served as a soldier in WWII, survived, and had gone to college and then law school at night after factory work. After working as a prosecutor, he was elected as a judge to the Common Pleas Court in 1972, then to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in 1983, where he served until 1989. Had he been white, he and his wife Genevieve at some point would have probably moved their family of five children into the uniformly upper-middle-class and upper-class Hills and Dales or Avondale neighborhoods. But at that time in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the children were young, no Blacks were allowed. So, the Turpins moved to the semi-rural street of Martindale in the Oakwood area.
Technically, Blacks were allowed to buy or rent housing almost anywhere by 1969, the year Benjie started Oakwood. The federal Fair Housing Act had become law in 1968. Though in practice, then and still, racist restrictions were upheld. Such practices as redlining by banks or word of mouth between certain white sellers and their white neighbors kept African Americans and a number of others out of all-white neighborhoods.
The part about why the Turpins had moved to Martindale Road, I knew then and I know now without having to look it up. I knew—had to—from an early age the names of the neighborhoods where no Jews or Blacks were allowed to live—Hills and Dales, Avondale, and Lake Cable. Even the exurb areas without neighborhood association regulations could have their own understandings, seller to buyer. And those spoken and unspoken rules went hand in hand with who would invite me over to their house in grade school and in later years, and who wouldn’t.
But there was a lot I didn’t know as a kid too. I keep researching, think about doing interviews, too. I live in Chicago, but still stay in touch with some people in Canton. I try to find out if the F.’s really were Mafia and that turns out to be easy. There are court records and reporting to show that Rocco had been arrested in 1991 with his dad Patsy. Patsy pled guilty and was imprisoned for running an illegal, multi-state gambling operation from at least 1978-88. Rocco was let off with probation and a fine. Digging deeper is to go uglier on Patsy, but to find nothing more that’s criminal on Rocco or his twin—instead information about their involvement in the restaurant business. I think about reaching out to them, but decide not to, they’re not my focus.
It’s Benjie I’m mainly interested in. He’s not on social media, but through my Canton grapevine I find two people we have in common, a guy who played sports with Benjie and another guy. I hear that Benjie has gone to some Oakwood reunions and might still live in Ohio. I’m interested in contacting him. I think about how much more difficult it must have been for him than for me at Oakwood. I wonder what to ask him and what he'll say. It would be interesting to talk. If we decide not to talk about the different ways we were different that’d be fine, too. We wouldn’t have to talk about ourselves. There were a lot of silences when we were growing up, some of them damaging, but some useful. Sometimes allusions that I didn’t understand til later.
I remember growing up, piecing together things my parents told me or mentioned in my presence. Two years before I was born, my parents had in 1952 looked into buying some land on Lake Cable. That neighborhood association informed them they’d be allowed to buy land on the lakefront, but would not be offered the beach privileges that would normally go with it. That’s Midwestern for (I slowly realized) no Jews are allowed to swim in our lake. Instead, my parents bought land on the unpaved and sparsely populated Plain Center Road, about a mile and half from where the Judge was later to move. They bought directly from the S.’s who lived on the street and had in turn bought a farm there to divvy up for five-acre housing plots. No questions were asked about religion in that sale. My parents wanted to build a house in what they thought of then as country. Theirs would be a house with a lawn facing the street and behind a field left wild. Behind that field was a farm. On either side of their plot and across the street were fields too. The S.’s lived in an old red brick house kitty corner from my parents’ plot.
In the Oakwood area, there were also smaller, very inexpensive plots, either developed into a few housing allotments or more often bought individually. On some, stories went, people poured their own concrete basements and lived in the basements until they could afford to build upper stories. And there were many working, family-owned farms. On and next to Plain Center Road, when I was growing up, there remained two farms, one whose main crop was alfalfa, the other corn.
Ben
Ben Turpin is a surprisingly common name. There are Black Turpins and white Turpins, and no doubt some historical relations between the two. I find a middle initial in the listing of the five siblings in Benjie’s mother’s obituary. And from that an address in Columbus. A guy I see at the Oakwood reunions (I’ve only been to two) and who now lives north of Columbus checks some real estate directories for me. The address seems to be still viable. I write Benjie, who must be Ben or Benjamin by now, a snailmail letter:
“ . . . A voice from the past, from Oakwood. This is Maud—Maud Lavin—grew up on Plain Center Rd. We overlapped briefly at Oakwood.
I’m now in Chicago . . . .Writing a couple of essays on some of my personal experiences growing up in Canton. One is on Oakwood and ethnicities, religions, and races. My own experience there was mainly positive, but sometimes very difficult.
I wanted to ask you please if you’d talk or email with me briefly, so I could ask you a few questions about your experiences. Thank you for considering.”
I send my email addresses, and Ben—yes, no longer Benjie—emails with his phone number. I call, we talk.
No, the gossip was wrong. Ben didn’t transfer to McKinley. He had wanted to. He had had a racist coach, T., his sophomore year for varsity football. T., among other things, benched him the entire season for missing one August pre-season practice even though white players who did the same thing got only punishments like running extra laps, with no benching for games. T. was also Ben’s driver’s ed teacher his freshman year and gave him an undeserved D—which worked to deprive him of lettering in track that year. Things were worse for him than I’d thought.
T. wasn’t the first overt racist Ben had encountered since the Turpins moved into the area. The family had moved to Martindale Road during the middle of Ben’s 8th grade, so he went to Middlebranch Junior High to complete that grade. There he was walking in the hall on the way to class when a white bully stepped in front of him saying “Why you step on my shoes, boy?!” Ben tells it, “He turned and handed one of his cronies his books. A small crowd had assembled. I think everyone knew ahead of time he was going to beat down on the little Black kid, although my bet is that I was referred to as something else. I turned to hand my books to a kid that was standing behind me, and he threw up his hands letting me know he wasn’t going to do it. I dropped my books on the floor, turned around and commenced to kick his ass all the way down the hall. . . . A teacher pulled me off him. . . . It should be noted that on the way to the principal’s office, I was being held and he was walking freely.” Ben had learned boxing growing up, “I had to. I wasn’t the biggest guy and I wore glasses.” At Middlebranch, both Ben and the white kid were suspended for three days even though everyone knew the white guy had started it.
Ben describes himself as a loner then and in high school, but with some friends. After that fight in 8th grade, during the suspension days, Michele V. and Brian H. started a petition to get Ben back in school. “Brian was gay,” Ben recalls. “I was friends with both of them.” “Michele and I rode the bus together. We’re still friends to this day.” At Oakwood, Ben remembers, some of the sports kids were not very accepting. Although not big, Ben was a powerful athlete, a starter. And that meant, he explained, as a newcomer and someone who was Black, he was seen as replacing someone for a job.
It was at the end of Ben’s sophomore year that he was ready to transfer to McKinley High School, but his parents wouldn’t hear of it. His mother called Coach T. and told him, “Take your varsity and junior varsity and cram it.” She might have also made other calls. What is sure is that the racist coach left.
Ben stayed at Oakwood all four years. “I didn’t like high school,” he says flatly. “I was the trailblazer. The first Black kid and for two years the only Black kid at Oakwood. Later, there was my brother Nigel and some other Black families, but the kids were all younger.”
More of the gossip blew away. As it happened, Ben didn’t really get close to John and Rocco, the F. twins, until senior year. And they weren’t his closest friends. “Did your dad mind you were friends?” “No, he’d told me he’d put their uncles in jail when he was a prosecutor. He would never pick my friends for me, though. He was a great dad, patient. He listened.”
We went over how our families had come to live in the area. His parents had first tried to buy a house further down Martindale, but the seller told them flat out “No” because they were Black. This was 1969, the year after the Fair Housing Act became law. In the house the Turpins did buy the inside was run down, but the outside was attractive and it was set back in beautiful property behind a pond. His parents renovated the house. I remember their house, with the trees and the pond well, on the corner of Martindale and Plain Center, facing Martindale. I thought it was grand.
And we talked more about the other kids at Oakwood. Ben remembered sharply all the names of kids who had slighted him and the ones who’d been friendly. The ones he didn’t trust. The ones he tended to like. I didn’t know all the people he talked about, but some I remembered well. I’d gone away to a private boarding school in Massachusetts for my last two years of high school. My parents sent me away not because of the antisemitic bullying, but because sophomore year I’d stopped doing homework and only spent time after school talking on the phone. I still got all As without doing homework in the evenings. Oakwood was not a great school except for the math classes. For those, I must’ve done the homework during the school day. I remember liking Mr. Smith, the math teacher, and that he was strict. Biology was also pretty good. I must’ve done that homework, too, during the day. My lab partner in Biology was Ted “One-Ball” L. I did all the work and he explained sex and anatomy to me over dissecting frogs. It was a good deal. He was a year older than me, and never touched me, I guess considering me a youngster he’d talk through the ways of the world in exchange for getting me to do our joint lab reports.
Ben remembered Pat P, the person who’d written on my notebooks, although Ben hadn’t heard of that cafeteria incident. “He used the n-word. Not to me. But in my hearing. I gave him such a look. He was a big guy too. He stopped.” That was brave of Ben, that stare-down stop and the willingness, if necessary, to fight someone larger than him over it. I understood, and it was satisfying for me to hear— even fifty years later. Ben had it worse in a daily way than I did at Oakwood. We now call these micro-aggressions, but they weren’t micro, were they, to kids growing up in such an isolated place. Oakwood was the world as we knew it.
Today, I feel intensely grateful to have had this talk with Ben. To listen, be listened to. To delve into experiences and people as we never could have when he was 13 and I was 14. This is a conversation that couldn’t have been served up by social media or entered into at a reunion. I can’t imagine us having had it when we were younger, either, when Ohio in the 1960s was like other places in the 1950s, a study in silences.
My great gratitude to Ben Turpin. Also, thanks to Bruce Black, Mark Jeffery, Rob Vail, and Audrey Lavin and the rest of my natal family.
At a round Formica table in the Oakwood High School cafeteria, my girlfriends, along with some guys including Pat P. and Greenie, are there. I’ve been to most of their houses. Some of them don’t invite me to their houses, but most do. It’s a big table. 10 or so chairs are pulled up. The year is 1968, but ’68 IN CAPS hasn’t really reached Oakwood, yet.
I get up to go to the bathroom, leaving my books and notebooks on the table, taking my purse with me so I can fix my make up. I spend some careful, 14-year-old time at the mirror checking. Not bad—I look ok. Haven’t embarrassed myself with runny mascara. I put on fresh lip gloss and go back out.
My table is laughing, I smile coming up. Pat P., he’s laughing hard. Then I get closer and I see it. My books. JEW written over and over on each book cover, on the covers of my notebooks, filling the covers, some letters huge--JEW JEW JEW. The word covers the covers. The girls are just sitting there. They didn’t stop the boys. The boys are still laughing. I look at the faces. I stare at my books. I don’t know when I start crying. I grab the books and I run.
There’s nowhere to go. The high school is sprawling, low, one story, modern, long hallways, land is cheap out here. It’s big. I run down a hallway to another bathroom, removed. I don’t want other kids to see me crying. I can’t call my parents. If they come that’ll make everything worse. It doesn’t occur to me to tell a teacher. That’s not what teachers are for. I can’t go to the principal—we kids don’t tell on each other. I’m so hurt, I can’t stop crying. I go at the book covers, I try to get the front of the notebooks off. I can’t get it all. Most of it I can. The brown paper wrappers on the books, those come off. But my notebooks are ruined. I have to go to class. I wash my face. I look terrible. I fix my mascara. Everyone can see I’ve been crying. I go to class.
I make it through the day. I go to my classes. The terrible times are when I run into one of my girlfriends in the hallways. They feel bad. Annie says she’s sorry. But the girls also make it worse. They can’t keep from defending the boys. “They didn’t mean it that way.” But they did. I know. They definitely meant it that way. That way as in--DIRTY JEW, KIKE, UGLY JEW. I’ve lived here all my life—I know exactly the way they meant it. And the girls also say the familiar things, “I don’t mind that you’re Jewish.” I feel worse. It’s when I see the people I thought were my friends that I start crying again, several times during that day.
Later I tell my parents. They want to come in the next day to talk with the principal. I ask them not to. I hate to think of that meeting, where the adults would act like it’s about them—but it’s not. My parents agree reluctantly, but they tell me I’m not allowed to go over to Pat P.’s house anymore and one other boy’s house. They say they don’t want me to get hurt. They’re afraid of what more the boys would do. I tell my girlfriends the next day about this new rule, it makes sense to them. I see we won’t talk more about it, but I won’t have to go over to those houses, and in this they’ll stand by me. All my tears seem to have done something, though. There’s no more writing JEW on my things.
Some students keep saying bothersome things to me about being Jewish, though—usually about how I look or I don’t look Jewish, and more often than not about how I’m the first Jewish person they’ve met. Ohio, then and now, is only about 1.3% Jewish, and there are even fewer of us in the sticks. That all continues, it’s been happening since grade school. They don’t know. I have to explain. I wish they’d shut up. I start to think beyond myself as well, to notice the different ways of being different at Oakwood. I wondered then and I wonder now, again, thinking back on the notebook day, how it was for Benjie Turpin.
If you were ever scared for yourself in high school, do you remember being scared for other kids, too?
Judge Turpin’s son
Here’s what I remembered, what I thought I knew, about Judge Turpin’s son Benjie who started Oakwood a year after I did. In fall 1969 he was the first Black kid to attend Oakwood High School. I was one of only four Jewish kids out of a student population of about 1000. Not easy. So, I took a special interest, feeling both hopeful and worried in how he’d fare. Oakwood was not an easy place to be different.
Oakwood had a good mix in terms of class, although was very homogenous in terms of race and religion— largely white and Christian. It was far enough outside Canton, which was itself not a big city. In 1969 Canton had a population of around 110,000 and now it has a population of about 71,000. In the late ‘60s it was surrounded by both small suburban pockets and large rural areas. To the north was Akron and to the north of that Cleveland, but there wasn’t the traffic between Canton and other northeast Ohio cities that there is now. We used to go up to Cleveland as a family once a year.
At Oakwood were sons and daughters of farmers, truck drivers, real estate brokers, bank branch middle managers, factory workers, upper-level business managers, illegal gambling operators, department store clerks, architects, and a judge. My father ran a family meat-packing business—a job he would leave for a series of lesser paying ones a year after the start of this story. They provided him independence from the extended family. My mother, who would later teach English literature, was then working as the primary parent of us four children. Benjie’s father, Judge Ira Turpin (1925-1989), at the time Benjie was a freshman in 1969, held the elected office of Common Pleas Court Judge. I didn’t know then what Benjie’s mother Genevieve did. I later learned she worked in the courts for different judges over the years.
I was a sophomore when Benjie was a freshman, so I didn’t know him well. I made it my business to see how he was being treated though. I was relieved to see in the main hallway where everyone gathered between classes, the place of jostling, hellos, cliques, flirting, and shunning, that Benjie often hung out with others and everything seemed friendly. This central hallway was a useful barometer. A lot happened there. It was the place where I learned to compliment girls on their clothes, but not ask them where they got them because some girls made their own. In grade school and in my 4-H club sewing-your-own had been a source of pride, in teenage years, though, clothes were supposed to come from the mall. That big hallway was also the place I first saw sperm. Joe C., a junior, had jerked off into a glass jar and brought it to show the midday crowd in the hallway, holding it up and yelling.
Back to Benjie. So good news was that he had friends. He was not alone. I remember seeing him with the F. twins, Rocco and John. The three of them seemed tight, rough housing together at times in the hallway. Then towards spring rumor had it that the Judge was not pleased with Benjie’s friends. Word had it that he was concerned that the F.s, who were a Mafia family, had told their twins to befriend Benjie—or maybe they hadn’t. In any case, gossip went, gossip worried, gossip thrilled, Benjie could get hurt at their house if the older F.s weren’t pleased with a decision the Judge brought down. At the end of the year, Benjie, or so I was told, transferred to McKinley High School downtown and away from the F.s’ influence. Not incidentally too, there were other Black kids at McKinley.
Years later, while writing this, I wondered if that rumor about the F.s being Mafia was true. Also, I started wondering if Benjie had in fact transferred and then come back a year later. When I Googled him I found mention in a local newspaper archive of him playing Oakwood sports in November 1972, when he was a senior, and I had already left. So, it couldn’t have been only about the F. twins I figured, because they were still at Oakwood when Benjie came back. Confusing. Something had been left unsaid in that gossip, maybe many things. Maybe the original rumor was anti-Italian prejudice and maybe the F.s weren’t even Mafia? Maybe Benjie’s transfer was about racism but then why had he come back?
I started researching some of the families who’d had kids at Oakwood. That led me to information about housing in the area at the time. The reason the high school was multi-class and multi-ethnic is that it drew from the exurbs outside Canton and its suburbs. At that postwar time of overtly discriminatory housing practices the area was a relatively unregulated one. In the parlance of the time it meant in addition to white Protestants that Jews, Catholics, and some Blacks could live there, too. Also, that far out there was land. Judge Turpin, who grew up poor in the inner city doing things like tap dancing with his older brother for white change at a downtown Canton restaurant after school, had served as a soldier in WWII, survived, and had gone to college and then law school at night after factory work. After working as a prosecutor, he was elected as a judge to the Common Pleas Court in 1972, then to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in 1983, where he served until 1989. Had he been white, he and his wife Genevieve at some point would have probably moved their family of five children into the uniformly upper-middle-class and upper-class Hills and Dales or Avondale neighborhoods. But at that time in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the children were young, no Blacks were allowed. So, the Turpins moved to the semi-rural street of Martindale in the Oakwood area.
Technically, Blacks were allowed to buy or rent housing almost anywhere by 1969, the year Benjie started Oakwood. The federal Fair Housing Act had become law in 1968. Though in practice, then and still, racist restrictions were upheld. Such practices as redlining by banks or word of mouth between certain white sellers and their white neighbors kept African Americans and a number of others out of all-white neighborhoods.
The part about why the Turpins had moved to Martindale Road, I knew then and I know now without having to look it up. I knew—had to—from an early age the names of the neighborhoods where no Jews or Blacks were allowed to live—Hills and Dales, Avondale, and Lake Cable. Even the exurb areas without neighborhood association regulations could have their own understandings, seller to buyer. And those spoken and unspoken rules went hand in hand with who would invite me over to their house in grade school and in later years, and who wouldn’t.
But there was a lot I didn’t know as a kid too. I keep researching, think about doing interviews, too. I live in Chicago, but still stay in touch with some people in Canton. I try to find out if the F.’s really were Mafia and that turns out to be easy. There are court records and reporting to show that Rocco had been arrested in 1991 with his dad Patsy. Patsy pled guilty and was imprisoned for running an illegal, multi-state gambling operation from at least 1978-88. Rocco was let off with probation and a fine. Digging deeper is to go uglier on Patsy, but to find nothing more that’s criminal on Rocco or his twin—instead information about their involvement in the restaurant business. I think about reaching out to them, but decide not to, they’re not my focus.
It’s Benjie I’m mainly interested in. He’s not on social media, but through my Canton grapevine I find two people we have in common, a guy who played sports with Benjie and another guy. I hear that Benjie has gone to some Oakwood reunions and might still live in Ohio. I’m interested in contacting him. I think about how much more difficult it must have been for him than for me at Oakwood. I wonder what to ask him and what he'll say. It would be interesting to talk. If we decide not to talk about the different ways we were different that’d be fine, too. We wouldn’t have to talk about ourselves. There were a lot of silences when we were growing up, some of them damaging, but some useful. Sometimes allusions that I didn’t understand til later.
I remember growing up, piecing together things my parents told me or mentioned in my presence. Two years before I was born, my parents had in 1952 looked into buying some land on Lake Cable. That neighborhood association informed them they’d be allowed to buy land on the lakefront, but would not be offered the beach privileges that would normally go with it. That’s Midwestern for (I slowly realized) no Jews are allowed to swim in our lake. Instead, my parents bought land on the unpaved and sparsely populated Plain Center Road, about a mile and half from where the Judge was later to move. They bought directly from the S.’s who lived on the street and had in turn bought a farm there to divvy up for five-acre housing plots. No questions were asked about religion in that sale. My parents wanted to build a house in what they thought of then as country. Theirs would be a house with a lawn facing the street and behind a field left wild. Behind that field was a farm. On either side of their plot and across the street were fields too. The S.’s lived in an old red brick house kitty corner from my parents’ plot.
In the Oakwood area, there were also smaller, very inexpensive plots, either developed into a few housing allotments or more often bought individually. On some, stories went, people poured their own concrete basements and lived in the basements until they could afford to build upper stories. And there were many working, family-owned farms. On and next to Plain Center Road, when I was growing up, there remained two farms, one whose main crop was alfalfa, the other corn.
Ben
Ben Turpin is a surprisingly common name. There are Black Turpins and white Turpins, and no doubt some historical relations between the two. I find a middle initial in the listing of the five siblings in Benjie’s mother’s obituary. And from that an address in Columbus. A guy I see at the Oakwood reunions (I’ve only been to two) and who now lives north of Columbus checks some real estate directories for me. The address seems to be still viable. I write Benjie, who must be Ben or Benjamin by now, a snailmail letter:
“ . . . A voice from the past, from Oakwood. This is Maud—Maud Lavin—grew up on Plain Center Rd. We overlapped briefly at Oakwood.
I’m now in Chicago . . . .Writing a couple of essays on some of my personal experiences growing up in Canton. One is on Oakwood and ethnicities, religions, and races. My own experience there was mainly positive, but sometimes very difficult.
I wanted to ask you please if you’d talk or email with me briefly, so I could ask you a few questions about your experiences. Thank you for considering.”
I send my email addresses, and Ben—yes, no longer Benjie—emails with his phone number. I call, we talk.
No, the gossip was wrong. Ben didn’t transfer to McKinley. He had wanted to. He had had a racist coach, T., his sophomore year for varsity football. T., among other things, benched him the entire season for missing one August pre-season practice even though white players who did the same thing got only punishments like running extra laps, with no benching for games. T. was also Ben’s driver’s ed teacher his freshman year and gave him an undeserved D—which worked to deprive him of lettering in track that year. Things were worse for him than I’d thought.
T. wasn’t the first overt racist Ben had encountered since the Turpins moved into the area. The family had moved to Martindale Road during the middle of Ben’s 8th grade, so he went to Middlebranch Junior High to complete that grade. There he was walking in the hall on the way to class when a white bully stepped in front of him saying “Why you step on my shoes, boy?!” Ben tells it, “He turned and handed one of his cronies his books. A small crowd had assembled. I think everyone knew ahead of time he was going to beat down on the little Black kid, although my bet is that I was referred to as something else. I turned to hand my books to a kid that was standing behind me, and he threw up his hands letting me know he wasn’t going to do it. I dropped my books on the floor, turned around and commenced to kick his ass all the way down the hall. . . . A teacher pulled me off him. . . . It should be noted that on the way to the principal’s office, I was being held and he was walking freely.” Ben had learned boxing growing up, “I had to. I wasn’t the biggest guy and I wore glasses.” At Middlebranch, both Ben and the white kid were suspended for three days even though everyone knew the white guy had started it.
Ben describes himself as a loner then and in high school, but with some friends. After that fight in 8th grade, during the suspension days, Michele V. and Brian H. started a petition to get Ben back in school. “Brian was gay,” Ben recalls. “I was friends with both of them.” “Michele and I rode the bus together. We’re still friends to this day.” At Oakwood, Ben remembers, some of the sports kids were not very accepting. Although not big, Ben was a powerful athlete, a starter. And that meant, he explained, as a newcomer and someone who was Black, he was seen as replacing someone for a job.
It was at the end of Ben’s sophomore year that he was ready to transfer to McKinley High School, but his parents wouldn’t hear of it. His mother called Coach T. and told him, “Take your varsity and junior varsity and cram it.” She might have also made other calls. What is sure is that the racist coach left.
Ben stayed at Oakwood all four years. “I didn’t like high school,” he says flatly. “I was the trailblazer. The first Black kid and for two years the only Black kid at Oakwood. Later, there was my brother Nigel and some other Black families, but the kids were all younger.”
More of the gossip blew away. As it happened, Ben didn’t really get close to John and Rocco, the F. twins, until senior year. And they weren’t his closest friends. “Did your dad mind you were friends?” “No, he’d told me he’d put their uncles in jail when he was a prosecutor. He would never pick my friends for me, though. He was a great dad, patient. He listened.”
We went over how our families had come to live in the area. His parents had first tried to buy a house further down Martindale, but the seller told them flat out “No” because they were Black. This was 1969, the year after the Fair Housing Act became law. In the house the Turpins did buy the inside was run down, but the outside was attractive and it was set back in beautiful property behind a pond. His parents renovated the house. I remember their house, with the trees and the pond well, on the corner of Martindale and Plain Center, facing Martindale. I thought it was grand.
And we talked more about the other kids at Oakwood. Ben remembered sharply all the names of kids who had slighted him and the ones who’d been friendly. The ones he didn’t trust. The ones he tended to like. I didn’t know all the people he talked about, but some I remembered well. I’d gone away to a private boarding school in Massachusetts for my last two years of high school. My parents sent me away not because of the antisemitic bullying, but because sophomore year I’d stopped doing homework and only spent time after school talking on the phone. I still got all As without doing homework in the evenings. Oakwood was not a great school except for the math classes. For those, I must’ve done the homework during the school day. I remember liking Mr. Smith, the math teacher, and that he was strict. Biology was also pretty good. I must’ve done that homework, too, during the day. My lab partner in Biology was Ted “One-Ball” L. I did all the work and he explained sex and anatomy to me over dissecting frogs. It was a good deal. He was a year older than me, and never touched me, I guess considering me a youngster he’d talk through the ways of the world in exchange for getting me to do our joint lab reports.
Ben remembered Pat P, the person who’d written on my notebooks, although Ben hadn’t heard of that cafeteria incident. “He used the n-word. Not to me. But in my hearing. I gave him such a look. He was a big guy too. He stopped.” That was brave of Ben, that stare-down stop and the willingness, if necessary, to fight someone larger than him over it. I understood, and it was satisfying for me to hear— even fifty years later. Ben had it worse in a daily way than I did at Oakwood. We now call these micro-aggressions, but they weren’t micro, were they, to kids growing up in such an isolated place. Oakwood was the world as we knew it.
Today, I feel intensely grateful to have had this talk with Ben. To listen, be listened to. To delve into experiences and people as we never could have when he was 13 and I was 14. This is a conversation that couldn’t have been served up by social media or entered into at a reunion. I can’t imagine us having had it when we were younger, either, when Ohio in the 1960s was like other places in the 1950s, a study in silences.
My great gratitude to Ben Turpin. Also, thanks to Bruce Black, Mark Jeffery, Rob Vail, and Audrey Lavin and the rest of my natal family.
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Maud Lavin lives in Chicago where she runs the READINGS series at Printers Row Wine. She has published recently in Red Ogre Review, Rejection Letters, Roi Faineant, and Funny Pearls. One of her books, Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols, co-edited with Ling Yang and Jing Jamie Zhao, was nominated for a Lambda, and an earlier one, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, on the Berlin Dada artist Hannah Höch, was named a New York Times Notable Book. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a person with disabilities. Twitter @maud_lavin.
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