Vote for Joe

Catching up on the last several months (continued)… Over the Christmas holidays, I did a story on two wood carvers. One, a local man named Dale Way, who, after long days as a handyman, would work in the evenings carving a big wooden Nativity scene he put in his front yard. It took him the better part of a winter to complete it. It took Jerry Taufler 20 years to complete his wooden sculpture. We met him in Le Mars, Iowa while we were out campaigning in 2000. He was a postal carrier in Le Mars. At night, after eating dinner and spending some time with his kids, he’d go out to a wood shop in the back of his modest home. There he’d spend a few hours carving a life-size rendition of “The Last Supper.” He intended to donate it to the Trinity Heights Shrine in Sioux, City, Iowa. Shortly before it was completed, a man offered Jerry, the carver/postal carrier, $1 million for it. Jerry said no. He told me he said to the man: “My reward is somewhere else.” Pretty amazing response… I recently did an article about a rare (at least these days) 1957 Nash Metropolitan. (See photo.) A local man had recently bought it from someone in Pennsylvania. He said when he was driving it back to Ohio, people were driving by him on the freeway taking pictures, he couldn’t stop in a gas station without people coming up, and so on. Yeah, on one level, I’m sure it was the look of the car. But on another level, perhaps, and quite unconsciously, the car reminded them of a time in America when the pace of life was slower, simpler, and more wholesome. Our campaign promotes a return to some of that… I was reading a story in a recent edition of National Geographic titled: A World on the Move. It was saying that with seas rising, crops withering, wars erupting… “humankind seeks shelter in another place.” It’s essential, in our campaign’s opinion, that we do not turn our First World backs, or tighten our First World borders for that matter, on these refugees in dire straits. And our foreign policy position’s ethos demonstrates this.

While traveling across Ohio recently, I stopped at the Red Tomato (That’s right. Dan Quayle couldn’t spell tomato right (Or was that potato?), but I can — thanks to spell check.) in Mt. Eaton. The gentleman in the blue shirt (standing) owned this 1950 Chevrolet. Mint! After admiring it a bit, I talked to him about my candidacy and passed on a campaign card. I talk, in our campaign, about it being somewhat retro. That is, we would like to see the country, in a number of aspects, go back to the 1950s, when things were slower, more wholesome, and so on. I also wrote a column about homelessness recently. A USA Today article noted that a recent poll indicated a whopping 45% of Los Angeles residents believe homelessness is the biggest problem facing the city. Homeless tent encampments, for instance, now seem virtually everywhere there — including even at some city parking lots. “We all agree that no one wants people living in a parking lot,” said Eric Tars, legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “But the way to end the homeless encampments is to make them unnecessary, not illegal.” Our family intentionally moved to a hardscrabble part of Cleveland, Ohio for five years doing outreach to the poor and researching the systemic causes of metropolitan poverty and homelessness. For a look at some of what we found, see…

With fall in full swing now, I’m trying to get in as many outside jobs as possible before winter — while continuing to hone my populist image (“Joe the Painter’). LOL. This was a shed I was painting in rural Bluffton recently… In recent weeks, I have done yet more newspaper interviews, sat in on council meetings, and so on… For instance, I interviewed a woman from Ada, Ohio, who is originally from there, but had lived in other parts of the country before returning to Ada. She said there’s just something about being around “…people you’ve known your whole life.” She said she can best describe it as comfortable and rooted. We would do well, I believe, to value this a whole lot more than we currently do in our increasingly transitory American society… I also did a story on a local, non-denominational Christian church. A “core principle” of the church? “Prayer is powerful.” And so are “works.” The church helps fund international missions work, as it helps fund local community work. In fact, it is churches like these that are, often, the metaphoric “glue” that holds these small town communities together… Note: I have also just become a grandfather for the first time. Our Sarah and her husband Gabe have had a little baby girl, Eliza Day. The “Day” is after well-known Catholic Worker Dorothy Day. We volunteered a good deal with Catholic Worker groups around the country over the years. Anyway… Sarah asked me what I’d like to be called by Eliza Day: I said: “Grandude.” Sarah asked if I had a second choice.

Bluffton has become an RTA experiment in this region. A bus out of Lima (pop. 40,000) is coming here five times a day, making a loop through the village (pop. 4,000), then heading back to the downtown station in Lima. I contacted the RTA Director of Operations who said ridership was steadily increasing throughout the first three months of this. With climate change accelerating, we, so many of us, need to (metaphorically, and literally) “Hop on the bus, Gus.” …Just did a story on one of the local high schools here that put in a new $766,000 artificial turf field. It will, in large part, be paid by a local tax levy. But you have to wonder, also in large part, whether that money would be much better (spiritually) spent on helping Third World farmers grow crops in food insecure countries. The artificial turf, when grass has worked so well for, like, forever, seems a bit First World spoiled. Our foreign policy would line up with the latter. And speaking of food insecurity, I also did a story on a local church that hired a food truck and went into a low income trailer park recently to pass out free meals. A spokesperson for the church told me that these generally low income people were, many of them, struggling even more in the midst of the pandemic. And this was the church’s way of bringing the Gospel message to life, he said.

I should have written on the card: “I need a ride to the White House.” Too late, I’m now a couple hundred miles from Mt. Eaton, Ohio. Mt. Eaton is Amish country. And we have spent a lot of time studying the Amish culture as we’ve traveled. Far from nostalgically “antiquated,” The Amish/Mennonites may have a much saner take on society — and how God wants us to live within the context of society…. I covered a village council meeting tonight that focused on an upcoming village festival; a pit bull biting a one-year-old; fire hydrant replacement at a nearby university; and the other activities of the local Public Works crew. This is democracy at a grassroots level. Our campaign talks about shifting much more power to local government where they are intimately familiar with their needs, their issues.