Hocking County Ohio
Notable Natives and Residents
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Hocking County Ohio Notable Natives and Residents |
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The mother of the eccentric little girl from Shaker Heights in Victoria at Nine (1979) turns out to be the younger sister of Morris Bird III, the doomed boy hero of three of Robertson's earlier books, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (1965), The Sum and Total of Now (1966), and The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened (1970). Grandpa Bird tells the little girl of his own early days and courtship in Paradise Falls, Ohio-where, we learn in Miss Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe (1977), his sister-in-law Pauline, the 1942 high school homecoming queen (who appears in The Sum and Total of Now), made out with the town's future mayor, Lew Amberson. (Paradise Falls-written between the second and third of the Morris Bird books-“began as a 945-page flashback”; Robertson kept a copy of his huge 1968 novel of small town life on his desk “as a basic reference work.”) Lew's parents are the protagonists of Praise the Human Season (1976). And so on. The fictional town to which many of Robertson's characters traced their roots was modeled not on Chagrin Falls, to which he moved in 1967 after the novel was completed, but on Logan, a small town southeast of Columbus where he spent several boyhood summers with his mother's family after his father died. It is Robertson's Yoknapatawpha County, a kind of Calvinist Eden from which all his later books, and their doomed protagonists, flow. Paradise Falls, which runs to 1,000 pages, unfolds over 35 years-from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century. It was no surprise when Robertson was paid a hefty retainer by 20th Century Fox in the late 1970s to think up three of the four major plots around which a revival of TV's Peyton Place was to revolve. Born March 21, 1929, to Josephine Wuebben Robertson and Carl Trowbridge Robertson, an associate editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he lived until 1946 in the east side Cleveland neighborhood of Hough and attended East High School. After a stint in the army, and unsuccessful attempts to fit in at Harvard and Western Reserve University, he followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a reporter and columnist for the Plain Dealer (1950–55 and 1963–66), the Cleveland News (1957-59) and the Cleveland Press (1968-82). In the late '70s and early '80s he reviewed movies and plays on WKYC-TV and won a following as a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it is radio and TV talk show host. But it was his novels he lived for, scribbling a paragraph while waiting to go on the air or typing another page while dinner was cooking. Robertson's penchant for the sweep of history and human lives was already evident in his first three novels (1959-62), a Civil War trilogy. His next book, A Flag Full of Stars (1964), set during the 1948 election of Harry Truman, won the Putnam Award. Then, in 1966, came the first two of the Morris Bird books, for which he won the Cleveland Arts Prize. A battler who fought his way back from two heart attacks in 1974, a series of strokes, lung cancer, and the loss of both legs to diabetes, with the help of his wife, Sherri, Robertson liked to refer to the nine novels he'd published after 1974 (and several more still in manuscript) as his “posthumous” books. He was inducted into the Press Club of Cleveland's Hall of Fame in 1992 and received the Society of Professional Journalist's Life Achievement Award in 1995. He died on his birthday in 1999. by Dennis Dooley This Genealogy Trails website is the 2008 © copyright property of Genealogy Trails and the original submitters. All rights are reserved. Nothing contained in this site may be commercially reproduced or utilized for any purpose, except for private use, without prior written authorization. |
