and an East School in town. There was no North School or South School—I guess they just didn’t need two more schools! My teachers from the first to the fourth grade were all lovely women (all grade-school teachers in those days were women) and progressively more disciplinarian. My first- and second-grade teachers, I remember so well, seemed always to be hugging us and smiling at us—or with us. As we reached the fourth grade, my teacher, Miss Cook (who was also the principal), was kind, but very stern and strict. Then it was on to the Central School for grades five and six. This, too, was a happy time. My most memorable teacher was also the principal, Mr. Tomlinson. He was an energetic, strong man, much respected by all of us. In a quirk, which I have always remembered fondly, he was also a housepainter. Schoolteachers’ salaries in those days were presumably no better than they are today. Periodically, my mother would hire him to paint our house, either inside or out, and I always helped him. I should probably put help in quotes. He would probably have been quite content to have me watch and not dabble, but that’s not the way of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds!
Then on to junior high school—grades seven and eight. I’ve always thought of junior high school (now referred to as “middle school”—ah! our Anglican heritage!) as an interregnum—in between—yes, a “middle.” One is a bit too old to be young and a bit too young to be old. For me it was a time of discovery, most notably sports and girls. Speaking of girls, I had only one girlfriend during my high school years—a beautiful girl named Rosemarie. We had a lot of fun together, but one activity was far more fun for her than for me. She loved to roller skate and was very good at it. I didn’t like it and therefore wasn’t much good. But, I wanted to be with her as much as possible and tried to learn to roller skate. One night at the skating rink she was taking a rest just outside the iron bar that separated the seating area from the rink, and I was flailing around trying to look graceful. I decided to skate over to where she was sitting and take a rest. Then, tragedy struck. As I got about three or four feet from her and tried to stop, my legs flew up in the air and I fell flat on my back and proceeded to slide under the bar right past Rosemarie and into the wall behind the rink. I decided at that point that if our relationship depended on my prowess as a roller skater, we didn’t have much of a future.
As I’ve mentioned, Nelsonville was a small town. If you wanted to participate in a particular sport, you were welcome—you just did it! So, I played baseball, basketball, football, and ran track. I was not particularly good at any of these, but I was on every team. I was—and am—a great believer in team sports for every young boy and girl. The lessons learned last a lifetime. Three brief stories will tell you all you’ll ever want to know about my “illustrious” sporting career.
First, I almost drowned on the football field during a game. I repeat: I almost drowned on the football field. It happened this way. In the middle of the game there was a virtual cloudburst, a torrential rain that lasted for a half hour or so. Of course, football games don’t get cancelled for bad weather, so the game went on. Our quarterback called an end-around play in which I was the lead blocker. Ironically, the trouble started when I made a really good block. I hit this big, tall left end below the knees, and he fell like a tree. Unfortunately, most of him fell on my head and shoulders, pushing my nose into one of the many huge puddles of water that had formed on the field. I remember thinking, “What a stupid way to go—drowning on a football field!” I held my breath but it seemed that the big guy would never get up. He finally did. I came up sputtering and rubbing mud out of my eyes but otherwise intact.
The second of my great sports moments also came in a football game. Our regular quarterback got banged up a little and the coach took him out for a few plays. I was the substitute quarterback and not a very good one. The first play I called was a run-around end with me carrying the ball. As I made my turn to go around the end, I saw four huge guys from the other team waiting to annihilate me. So I kept running towards the sideline and must have also run backwards because in the next day’s newspaper was the following quote describing this play: “Substitute quarterback Mechem was tackled for a ten-yard loss while he was fading to pass.” I really didn’t realize how far and wide (and back!) I must have retreated that it looked like I was “fading” to pass. Thank God our regular quarterback re-entered the game soon.
The final story occurred in a basketball game. We had a pretty good team in my senior year, and we advanced to post-season play where we were scheduled to play one of the top teams in the state. The game was played on the Ohio University basketball court, a large facility quite unlike the one on which we played our home games in Nelsonville. We had a very small gym that actually doubled as the stage for the high school auditorium. Just imagine—the back part of the foul circle was only a few feet from the centerline! I was very nervous as the game began because we had never played a team this good. We kept up for a while but then began to fall back. Our coach told us in a timeout that anytime our center or forwards got a rebound, I was to “fast break” towards our basket, and they were to throw the ball to me. We had done this scores of times, and the timing for it was pretty well burnt into my brain. Well, the moment came, our center took the ball off the backboard, I broke for the basket, and he threw the ball to me. I caught the ball, took the two or three steps that I was used to taking in the Nelsonville gym, and then went up for what I thought would be an easy layup. There was only one problem. The court was dramatically longer than the one I was used to so that when I went up in the air for the easy layup I was about thirty feet from the basket. Obviously, a layup was not in the cards, but I was already in the air, and as I recall I simply threw the ball at the basket. It was really all I could do. I completely missed the basket, and I came down thoroughly embarrassed. One of my more humbling moments, especially because it was in front of a large crowd.
I could write yet another book (probably more than one) about the rest of my high school years. But, again, this is not my autobiography. Suffice it to say, my high school years were happy. At that time, the world (well, at least the United States) was a very happy place. The war was over, the depression had been wiped out in the tsunami of the war’s industrial might, reconstruction of much of the world had begun, and “terrorism” was a word and a practice that did not exist yet.
BEFORE MOVING ON to the next chapter in my life, let me mention two pieces of my early life that had significant impact many years later.
When I was a little boy growing up in Nelsonville, one of my most eagerly anticipated events was the yearly visit of Gooding’s Traveling Carnival. This was a carnival of the 1930–1940s era complete with rides (none of which would have passed OSHA muster), games (very few of which one could ever win), sideshows, and food of every kind. Because the carnival used land directly behind my dad’s shoe store and he only charged a small amount of rent, Dad always got a lot of free tickets, which he passed on to me. I went every night with my pals and loved it.
This deep-seated love of the carnival reasserted itself in a most unexpected way many years later. While I was CEO of Taft Broadcasting Company, one of our areas of expansion was the themed-amusement park business. We moved in that direction after acquiring the Hanna-Barbera Productions company in 1966. In thinking about ways to enhance the Hanna-Barbera image, it wasn’t much of a stretch to see what Disney had done in their parks to merchandise the popularity of their cartoon characters. Therefore, we decided to build a large theme park just north of Cincinnati, named Kings Island. As an aside, I might note that the park was a success from the beginning and is an even greater success today—some forty years after it was opened.
While I firmly believed in the soundness of the business venture, I have to admit that I was overjoyed at my opportunity to reassert my “carney love.” Marilyn, the kids, and I visited the construction site several times every week for two years and literally watched it emerge from the ground. As the park was nearing completion and the thrill rides were being tested, I made a point to ride on all of them as soon as the builders of the rides would let me. It is probably a bit of a stretch to say that I was a test pilot, but I certainly tried out the rides long before they were open to the public.
Not
