I’m always up for a good donut. And when I saw that this place offered breakfast sandwiches with honey-dipped donuts as bread …
The sandwich was weird, but good. If I ever make it back, I might try the cheeseburger on donut sandwich. The thing I most enjoyed about the place was the decor. The walls were covered with photos and magazine covers all having something to do with donuts. Genius.
We stopped by to tour the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum on the campus of Ohio State University.
Ireland was a local cartoonist who drew “The Passing Show” for The Columbus Dispatch from 1908 to 1935. That’s his drawing board in the photo of the lobby above.
There’s a library too. We didn’t go in, but I did stop to appreciate the cartoons worked into the “stained glass” window.
Not long ago, they had a special exhibit on Calvin and Hobbes. I wish I could have seen that one. The special exhibits this time didn’t hold a lot of interest for me.
There was one room, however, that I found fascinating.
Here, in no particular order, is what we saw there.
1840 — A spoof of the Van Buren administration’s efforts to end the Second Seminole War in Florida. The War Department was criticized by Congress and the public for cruelty, waste and incompetence, and for using Cuban bloodhounds to hunt for Seminoles.
Blondie, by Chic Young, May 2, 1956 and Brenda Starr, by Dale Messick, June 2, 1977
Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, October 17, 1993
Chester Gould’s drawing board and taberet. Gould created, wrote and drew Dick Tracy on this drawing board from 1931 until his retirement in 1977. The black, charred area on the right edge of the drawing board is where Gould lit kitchen matches by striking them. He would then hold the flame from the match underneath the large, black ink areas of his strips to speed up the drying process.
From “A Requiem for Skulls” in Detective Comics #528 by Gene Colan, July 1983
An anonymous artist embroidered more than 100 comic strip characters on this piece.
Family Circus, by Bil Keane, September 16, 1964.
The First of May 1865 or General Moving Day in Richmond Va. President Jefferson Davis is shown here with the bricks of the Southern States tumbling from his back. His cabinet is evacuating Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy in April 1865. A freed slave is shown thumbing his nose at the exiting dignitaries and the C.S.A. Treasury box, labeled ‘waste paper’ is being urinated on by a dog.
Mother Goose and Grimm, by Mike Peters, June 13, 1993
Power Pack, by June Brigman, September 2, 1984. Once upon a time, I owned this comic.
The Legend of Wonder Woman, by Trina Robbins, May 1986
Clifton Mill is beautiful, I’ll admit that. But there’s something about it that kinda annoyed me. I think it was trying a little too hard to be quaint. It’s one of the largest grist mills still in existence, built in 1869.
We at lunch in the dining room after a 20-minute wait in the gift shop. My cheeseburger, after I removed two wilted and browned pieces of lettuce, was acceptable but not great.
I think the thing that bugged me the most was the Christmas lights. The mill is known far and wide for its Christmas light display and, apparently, they never take the lights down. There were strings of plastic Christmas lights draped across almost every exterior surface. If you zoom in on the second photo, you can see them everywhere.
We enjoyed Glen Helen so much that we decided to take another walk at Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, about two miles away. The scenery here was more dramatic, with cliffs and waterfalls and rapids where the Little Miami River cuts through the hills. We stayed about an hour, wandered slowly and enjoyed the view and the weather. By the time we left, the trails were getting somewhat crowded.
Blue Hole, below the rapids. Painter Robert Scott Duncanson painted a rather dramaticized view of this scene in 1851,
The light was brilliant and made each bud on every tree glow. I tried to capture it with my camera, but this is only a vague idea of what it was like.
Legend has it that a friend of Daniel Boone’s jumped across the narrow section of the gorge while escaping from Indians. He didn’t quite make it, but was able to grab a tree growing out of the wall and pull himself up.
The plan for the morning was to tour the shops in Yellow Springs, Ohio. But it was a Sunday and the shops didn’t open until noon. And on our drive through the town, none of the shops looked worth visiting. So what to do with the morning? I mentioned that there were a couple parks nearby where we could walk, and my wife said that sounded like fun. It was an awesome day, about 60° and sunny and crisp.
We went to Glen Helen first and for the first half of our time there we had it to ourselves. You can barely see a bridge across the creek in this photo. A Northern Parula was singing in the bushes on the far side.
After happening upon this waterfall, we climbed up the hill behind it and found Yellow Springs from which the town gets its name.
We saw several types of wildflowers, including these pinkish-purple ones that were in bloom on trees everywhere in Ohio and Indiana.
It isn’t a place I’d drive very far to see, but on this particular morning, it made for a very pleasant walk.
