The Ohio Years (’87-’92)

Sometime during the middle ’80s (with big hair, perms, and striped tube socks all the rage), the company my dad was working for decided to dismantle its advanced

technology department, leaving everyone in the department, including my dad, without a job.

Having entrepreneurism biologically baked into his bones (my grandpa was a successful entrepreneur in Utah), my dad heeded the genetic call and set out to build a business. He partnered with someone he had known, and they worked and worked and worked, but sadly, that particular venture wasn’t meant to be.

Having a wife and seven children to take care of, my dad made the difficult decision (which any entrepreneur at heart loathes) to temporarily hang his entrepreneurial base pairs back on the double helix and again take a job… with a boss. This time, the job was working as a research scientist, and the new location for our family would be Westerville, Ohio.

   Ohio would be a major change from Connecticut. We would go from a house in the woods with little critters crawling/flying/swimming everywhere, to the very definition of suburbia (In fact, if I’m remembering accurately, the neighborhood we moved into was rated the yuppiest [is that a word? 🙃] in the city of Westerville). We would go from a stream running through the woods on the side of the house, to a fenced-in back yard complete with a kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool; and I would go from catching frogs and snakes and salamanders, to playing baseball, soccer, and doing… homework. 😝 

My dad left first, moving to Ohio a handful of months ahead of the rest of the family in order to get settled in with his new job. My oldest sister, Leslie, had already left home and moved to the mountain west by that time (before I had actually formed any memories of her), so it was just my mom who set off for Ohio later with the remaining six of us kids–arriving in time for me to officially start the first day of kindergarten at Pointview Elementary School.

As a young child, both sports and academics came quite easily for me, so it wasn’t hard for me to be one of the first picked for the sports teams on the playground or for me to get good grades. I loved to learn, and I was a quick study in nearly every subject–except reading. I was a terrible reader/comprehender. I believe I was (am?) dyslexic, and I want to say I had to take a reading test just to get into second grade (Ms. Heck’s class. Loved her. She was the awesomest. 🙂).

Reading kicked my little rear (probably one reason I still don’t read as a hobby). Even in graduate school years later, my struggles with comprehension just about killed me with the shear amount of academic gobbledygook I had to pack into my brain. So, yeah… reading.

   Anyway… now math and science… well! those were another thing altogether. They were my specialty and my passion. In fact, toward the end of my Ohio years, one of the highlights of my young life was being able to leave my regular school (McVay Elementary) and take a weekly trip to Emerson Elementary where we got to be challenged with advanced (at least for a 4th grader 🙂) math, science, and logic puzzles–stuff designed for high schoolers. I have fond memories of that experience, and it just might have been the last time I truly loved learning as well (at least as a student in school), as education in the first school I was at in Utah (where we would move next) just, well… wasn’t very stimulating to the hungry mind and sort of turned me off to school, I think.

Oops! Sorry for the tangent! Rewinding back to kindergarten age… 🙂 I think it was right around Kindergarten that I got started playing soccer. I honestly don’t know how it happened, whether my parents just signed me up or whether I wanted to play, but soccer became my first love. I played from my early years when I might not have even been kicking the ball the right direction on the field, to my middle-teenage years when I had to choose between soccer and baseball for high school sports.

For me, life in Ohio pretty much revolved around school, sports, and cub scouts. As far as school went, I was in public school for kindergarten and part of first grade before my parents took me out of 1st grade early in the year and home schooled me for the rest of first grade and for part of second grade. It’s probably an error in memory, but I think I remember getting my first B in that class and being super upset/sad/mad? about it, and I want to say that had something to do with switching to home school? Probably not the reason, but that’s what’s in this little guy’s memory.🙃

I think it was about that time (second grade) that I started getting interested in baseball, which would end up being one of the main focuses of my life for the next 10 years or so.

Both baseball and soccer consumed me, but baseball thoroughly stole my heart inside and out. I ate, drank, and dreamed baseball. I collected baseball cards (I think my collecting might have gotten its kick start from Ms. Heck’s 2nd grade prize cart where she had packs of cards, among many other prizes,  that I could earn. 😁).

I listened to baseball games on the radio, watched games if I could on TV, and played as much as I could. Daryl Strawberry and Ken Griffey Jr. were my favorite players, and that’s probably why a right-handed kid like me ended up batting left handed–trying to copy my favorite players on TV.

I dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player… but I had to settle for little league. 🙃 When I started playing baseball, I was too old to play t-ball or coach pitch, so it was right into kid pitch (which resulted in some painful beaning moments, like getting beaned twice in the same game, in the same place on my ankle, by the same pitcher (my brain wants to say his name was Richie). Gotta love baseball stitch marks tattooed to your skin for a few days 😅.

   I have lots of memories in Ohio.

I remember that there were some neighbor kids who lived behind us who liked to play backyard baseball. I was a lot younger than they were, and I remember being the little boy behind the fence with just his head poking up over the top watching the other kids play, and I think, longing for them to invite me to play with them. I honestly don’t remember how long it was, how many times, days, weeks, months, whatever it was before what I’d hoped for happened, and they invited me over to play, but I was probably ecstatic when they finally did. 😁

Those neighbor boys nicknamed me “carmine lotion,” but I quickly earned a place of respect among them as, though I was a lot younger than they were, I was quite adept at baseball and easily kept up with them in our little games. Those were fun times.

I also remember my home state Cincinnati Reds winning the World Series in 1990. In fact, my brother Richard and I were listening to Game 4 on the radio when the last out of the four-game sweep over the powerhouse Oakland Athletics was called. My memory of the event might be faulty (I think I once found the audio record of the game as it was called, and I don’t remember whether it proved my memory right or not), but my little kid brain remembers hearing the following, verbatim: “And the pitch is hit in the air! Benzinger backing and calling! And the 1990 World Championship belongs to the Cincinnati Reds!”

That was an awesome day for a baseball-obsessed little dude. 😁 It’s not often as a child that you get to have your team win it all.

What else do I remember? …I think I remember one year beating the best soccer team in the league. 🙂  I think I remember them being super intimidating (funny to think of 10 year olds [or whatever they were] as intimidating), but I think we won that game. 🥳 

I remember making the baseball all-star team both years I played baseball in Ohio. I remember digging holes in our backyard (I had a thing for seeing how deeply I could dig), going swimming, hitting a home run, spending several minutes under water in a hot tub breathing from one of the air-bubble holes.

I remember trips to Dairy Mart (the local convenience store), to Hoover Dam (the Westerville, Ohio version). I remember Halloween candy mega hauls. I remember my first crush (Alana Burns in 2nd grade). I’ve always wondered what happened to all my grade-school-aged crushes. 🙃

(Probably because I’ve never had a long-term relationship with someone, so I live off of… memories. 😕)

I remember getting jealous of Alana Burns’ “boyfriend,” and I don’t quite know what overcame me, but one day while on recess, I pantsed him right in front of both a teacher and Alana! Ah… young jealousy. 😅 Perhaps not surprisingly, that one got me sent to the principal’s office.

Oh, what we little boys do for a girl’s love. 🙃

My nature to be an explorer didn’t wane while in Ohio: I just had to go farther to find places to explore. There was a creek that meandered by the end of the cul-de-sac that I passed as I walked to and from school every day. It became my main place of exploration, looking for minnows and leeches, etc, and playing in the tunnel that it went under the street. I did that a lot. And sometimes I just followed the creek to see where it went.

I was very much the same kid that I was in Connecticut–happy, shy, sensitive, kind, passionate, energetic, etc, but I did also start to get myself into some trouble.

I’m gonna zoom out for just a momentito of reflection here… For pretty much my whole life, I’ve looked at my life and just sort of thought of myself as being quite detached and unaffected by the troubles at home. The family tension and struggles we had in Connecticut continued in Ohio, but I think they got worse. I say “I think” because even though I was older, I still only have a handful of memories of the difficult things that happened.

But I do have a few… 😕

Anyway, it’s interesting… for many years (actually up until 2019) I never really saw myself as being fundamentally affected by the challenges we had as a family. I thought of myself as living my life without really being influenced by the troubles at home. I made my decisions. What happened with my family was irrelevant.

However, as I look back now, I can’t help but think that I might well have been significantly affected.

(Duh? 😅)

I think the fields of psychology and child development talk about children starting to act out when there is trouble at home. Whether my acting out is related or not, I don’t know, but I think it was about the time that the family situation was deteriorating into parental separation and divorce that I started to get into serious trouble.

For some reason, as a child, I believed money was super important. I have only guesses as to why I felt that way, but I do know that finances was a significant area of concern, stress, and strain with our family. I don’t know how much that affected or didn’t affect my attitudes and actions, but when I was seven years old, having learned at some point that people got money sent to them in the mail, I went around and stole all the mail out of the mailboxes of most of our neighbors at our end of the street in the hopes of finding money.

I spent two or three days going from mailbox to mailbox pulling the mail out and bringing it home. I even paid my best friend something like a dime to go get the mail out of at least one of the mailboxes (an act that, to my utter devastation, cost me my ability to play with my best friend ever again).

Upon finding bags of mail in my room (my brother closest in age turned me in, I think? my poor mother spent something like six hours sorting through all the mail, trying to match what I’d taken out of the envelopes with the discarded envelopes. Then we went around, my mother, my father, and I, to each of the neighbors as I tearfully apologized and returned the mail I’d stolen.

I stole a few other times in Ohio as well. I remember taking a handful of candy from the bulk bin at the grocery store and also a razor blade from the hardware store. The only other episode of stealing that I can remember was a doozy (spelling?). 😬

When I was 10 years old, someone close to me told me that people could make money selling hood ornaments (again… that money thing…). So… what did I do? For days, I went all over the nearby neighborhoods stealing hood ornaments off of cars. I stole… sooooo many. One of our poor neighbors was unlucky enough to have me try to take the flat hood ornament off of his Corvette… with a chisel.

😬😬😬

Lots of gouged paint later, and with one seriously disfigured corvette emblem in my hand, I snuck away. I don’t know how it all shook out, but my mom turned me (and the person who’d told me about the money-making scheme) in to the police, and I was informed that because of the sheer quantity of what I’d taken, I could be charged with grand theft auto (and not the video game!). The officer gave us a serious talking to but was also very good about it. The Corvette gentleman didn’t end up pressing charges, having the issue taken care of by his insurance, and I… I don’t think I stole again… not for a while, at least.

Ohio also brought with it a continuance of my curiosity of the female body. I remember hiding behind one of the big orange rocking chairs looking at those big Sears and JC Penney catalogs (underwear sections). I remember hiding under beds to try to catch my sister changing. I remember one of my sisters flashing her bra to me, and I remember the neighbor kid bringing over at least one picture that had been cut out of a Playboy magazine. He showed it while we were hidden in our crawl space in the basement. To this day, I still remember the model’s name. But that wasn’t hard, as she was at the time, and still is 30+ years later, a famous person.

At that point in time, my interest in the female body was still simply curiosity. It wouldn’t be until Utah, where we’d move in 1992, and around the time of puberty, that my interest in the female form morphed from simple curiosity to having a sexual component to it.

Moving on… 😅

In 1990, while on a trip visiting family in Seattle, Washington, when I was eight years old, my mom informed us that she and my dad were getting divorced. I still remember being in my grandparents basement by the big grand piano when the announcement was made.

I was devastated.

Even though things were pretty bad at home, and even though they’d been separated for a good while, I still didn’t want my parents to get divorced. I don’t remember for certain, but I think there were a lot of tears. Years later, however, I would come to be glad that they divorced. I realized that it was better for each of them and for all of us children.

My dad found his new special someone (Cindy) nearly immediately, and she was absolutely perfect for him. As of 2023, I think they’ve been happily married for more than 30 years now. It took my mom quite a bit longer, but she eventually found her Mr. Wright and remarried as well, living very happily with him until he passed away in late 2015).

After the divorce, my dad gave most of everything to my mom to help with taking care of us kids. He and my new stepmother Cindy lived in an apartment not all that far away, and I’d go to visit them periodically and enjoy activities with them. My mom took a job and worked to try to increase the income for our family. My brother Jared, at that point, had already left to be a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My sister Rebecca had also already left home as a middle teenager (like Leslie did), going to Utah to live with my mom’s brother’s family, and I… well… I just kept right on with the same–going to school, playing sports, and trying to earn every arrow point that could be earned in Cub Scouts.

And that was life.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

In 1992, my mom felt a call to go west. Go west, young lady! And after countless cleanings in preparation to “show the house” to prospective buyers, the middle chapter of my childhood drew to a close in Ohio as the house finally sold, and this little geographic prodigal (yours truly) returned to the land of his nativity via our 1989 Plymouth Grand Voyager, along with several other passengers–including our dog (Savannah), our cat (Sebastian), and my brother Richard’s cockatiel (Searcy).

*************

P.S. If you’d like to read more about my life, check out the The Murray, Utah Years, Pt. 1 (’92-’97).