A Bluffton anthology for the ages

BLUFFTON — Dozens of short stories and essays about Bluffton and its people are featured in a new book by Fred Steiner, lifelong resident and Bluffton Icon editor. "Bluffton Anthology: A Creek Runs Through It," includes Steiner's writing as well as short stories and essays by a dozen other Blufftonians. It's favorable writing about Bluffton, but not schmaltzy, said Steiner, 71. "It was not a point to make Bluffton look like a shining town on a hill," he said. "Just Bluffton: Here's the way I saw it and see it." Besides containing columns by Steiner and others about Bluffton, the 190 pages include stories and essays about Bluffton in the 1950s, '60s and afterward, based on interviews. Steiner chose to focus more on the 1950s because that's when he was growing up. But he did not undertake the project to indulge himself or his generation, he said. "It wasn't the good old days. This isn't that walk down memory lane to say how great things were," Steiner said. "In my mind, I'm writing to people 50 years from now. That's what I'm doing, because I would have loved to have read a book about Bluffton in the 1920s, and there isn't any. I'm thinking about that person 50 years and beyond, saying, 'I wonder, what was Bluffton like back in the '50s and even (2010s).'" Steiner interviewed a Bluffton elementary school teacher from the period and a general practice physician who dispensed his own medicine and whose office was in his home. Two brothers who lived on a farm near Bluffton in the 1950s discussed with Steiner what family farms were like then before their decline. Steiner's older brother, Rudi, discusses being a teenager in the 1950s, when listening to AM stations on a transistor radio was high tech and cool, and sock hops were big social events. Before there was a Bluffton Community Pool, people swam in a quarry beside the site of the current pool, one contributor writes in the book. "One of the rights of passage for teenagers was passing the 'quarry swimming test' … swimming out to the ropes and back," Steiner said. Any book about a community worth its salt contains claims to bragging rights. Bluffton Anthology has a humdinger. Hip-gyrating Elvis Presley, touring in Ohio on the frenzy of his new hits, "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel" and "Love Me Tender," was sighted on the morning of Nov. 24, 1956, at Bucher's SOHIO station at the corner of North Main and Jefferson. Presley had performed two days earlier, on Thanksgiving, in Toledo, and performed afternoon and evening shows the following Saturday in Troy. The former U.S. 25 extended north-south between Toledo and Troy and was once Main Street in Bluffton. That Saturday, Bluffton residents saw two "funeral-size limousines with Tennessee plates" at the gas station. The first car parked in front of the gas station along Jefferson Street. The second car, a "big blue limousine with a roof rack, pulled in front of the gas station." One eyewitness said "a young man with black hair got out of the back seat of the blue limo and tightened the straps holding the tarp covering the luggage on the roof rack." The eyewitness immediately recognized the man as Elvis Presley. The excited resident rushed off to Richard Smith's underground barbershop to tell the Saturday morning crowd what he had just witnessed. Bluffton Anthology does not take itself too seriously, though. It includes details that it could just as well have left out. "Other witnesses began to come forward who also saw the two Tennessee cars. One person who confirmed seeing the cars leaving town was also a witness to a UFO landing in Henry Huber's pasture at Bentley and Bixel roads in 1953," the book states. Other Bluffton Anthology notables: • A Little League teammate of Ben Roethlisberger, who grew up in the Cory-Rawson and Bluffton area, once beat Roethlisberger in a basketball game of horse long before Big Ben was quarterbacking the Pittsburgh Steelers. • A man who participated in the U.S.'s overthrow of Panamanian authoritarian Manuel Noriega in 1989. • A resident who sat on the bench during the famed Ohio State-Michigan Snow Bowl in 1950 at Ohio Stadium. • A Bluffton High School basketball star who inspired the school's adoption of the pirate as its mascot. • The 1965 Palm Sunday tornado, what Steiner called the "event of the century" for Bluffton. Steiner also pays tribute to Charles Hilty, the former editor of The Bluffton News, who died from COVID-19. Steiner was editor of The Bluffton News from 1978 to 2008 before creating Bluffton Icon and Ada Icon. Hilty inspired Steiner to become a "small-town journalist." "He was the guy that was telling me about this and that" from his era, 1940s-1960s, Steiner said. Hilty, a friend of Steiner's family when he was young, was "kind of like a brother." Hilty's influence spilled into Bluffton Anthology. "He would be the 400-pound gorilla in this book," Steiner said. "He's all over the place in the book." "Bluffton Anthology: A Creek Runs Through It" is on sale at stores in Bluffton. Copies also may be obtained by contacting Steiner by emailing info@blufftonicon.com