Steven Skelley

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Connor, Bryson and Archer! I miss you guys so much. I hope you find these messages some day. I want you to know that I love you. I never left you. I was no longer allowed to visit you. I hope these messages help you know your Pawpaw and your family better. All my love forever, Pawpaw What I Did This Summer or Falling Off A Cliff      I had gone to Nelson Kennedy Ledges Park with some friends and one of their dads for a day of hiking. Historians believe that glaciers deposited the huge boulders here. Some are three stories tall. Others are stacked so hikers can squeeze under them or walk on top of them. I ended up on a ledge separate from the friend’s dad who called to us to come to him. I took a few steps and jumped across the cliff. I made it to the other side but landed on some wet green slippery moss on the rock. I slipped and started to fall backwards off the cliff.    I reached out with my hand to grab a rock but it rip

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Connor, Bryson and Archer! I miss you guys so much. I hope you find these messages some day. I want you to know that I love you. I never left you. I was no longer allowed to visit you. I hope these messages help you know your Pawpaw and your family better. All my love forever, Pawpaw Almost Drowning One Winter Day    One day I went for a walk in the winter woods behind our house. I was in elementary school. I crossed the railroad bridge and was walking down the frozen creek as I had done many times before. Suddenly, I heard a horrible sound. It sounded like a rifle shot and it echoed through the trees. It was not a rifle shot. It was the sound of a huge crack appearing in the ice under my feet.    I just had a second or two to realize what was happening when the ice snapped and I fell into the freezing stream. It was flowing so hard, I started to be pulled under the ice. If I had gone under, I would not have been able to get back

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Connor, Bryson and Archer! I miss you guys so much. I hope you find these messages some day. I want you to know that I love you. I never left you. I was no longer allowed to visit you. I hope these messages help you know your Pawpaw and your family better. All my love forever, Pawpaw Rats! I’ve Been Beaten By Rats!      The houses we grew up in were all pretty lousy but we made the best of each one. We had a roof over our heads, a way to stay out of the rain, snow and freezing Ohio winters. The basement flooded regularly and there were huge rats in the basement and in our walls. Sometimes they came into the kitchen and living room. I tried to shoot them with my BB guns. It was gross. It’s hard to sleep when you can hear a rat gnawing on the walls and I wondered if they might crawl into my bed at night. It never actually happened but I thought about it a lot. This is not a good thing to be thinking about when you are trying to rel

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Connor, Bryson and Archer! I miss you guys so much. I hope you find these messages some day. I want you to know that I love you. I never left you. I was no longer allowed to visit you. I hope these messages help you know your Pawpaw and your family better. All my lover forever, Pawpaw Playing On The Trolley Ruins  Above The Railroad Tracks      Once upon a time in my hometown which was just big enough for two traffic lights downtown, there was a trolley that brought people from the big city of Canton about nine miles away. By the time that my family moved to Louisville, the trolley was just a distant memory and giant cement ruins were all that was left standing.    These giant cement structures stood more than two stories high. In the early 1900s, the trolley track had connected the two structures and the trolleys crossed over two railroad tracks twenty-five feet below. Strangely, no government authority thought to fence off the t

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Connor, Bryson and Archer! I miss you guys so much. I hope you find these messages some day. I want you to know that I love you. I never left you. I was no longer allowed to visit you. I hope these messages help you know your Pawpaw and your family better. All my love forever, Pawpaw My Sixth Grade Week In The Woods    Sixth grade was a high point of my elementary school experience.   Why?   Because sixth grade was the year that one week of in-class instruction was replaced with a week at Camp Tippecanoe. It is pronounced Tip A Canoe. Someone had a sense of humor, it seems.    Camp Tippecanoe is an amazing campground of 1100 acres on Clendening Lake with miles of hiking trails and plenty of rolling hills. After being bused to Camp Tippecanoe for the most magical week of school ever, we were split into small groups and assigned to the log cabins where we would be sleeping. The showers and toilet facilities were in another building.

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor, and Archer! Seeing The Future      When I was a child and until I was married, I sometimes had visions of future events. It was never anything life-changing or history-making. It was just minor events of no importance that I ever determined.    I asked my Mom about it and she told me that she and her Mother, my Grandma McWilliams, also had these visions. (Years later, when I was a father myself, your Mom came to me and asked me about them because she was having the visions herself.)    This is how it would happen: I would be doing normal things and going about my normal day when I would feel chills across my body. My skin would get goose-bumps. Suddenly, I would begin to see a full-color movie in my mind. I would see events happening as if I was seeing it through my eyes. But – it was something that had not happened yet.    For instance, one day I got that special chill feeling and had a vision of myself runn

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor, and Archer! Playing Against The Number  One Player In The World      In the very early 1970s, I began seeing professional tennis on television. I watched The Battle of the Sexes where female pro Billie Jean King demolished retired male pro Bobby Riggs. I enjoyed the play of tennis brat Jimmy Connors and I loved the calm and ultra cool Bjorn Borg. We had a couple of tennis rackets in our basement so I took one to the park and began hitting tennis balls against a wall. Other times, I would go down to the grocery store after it closed and hit against their wall.    Some of my friends began playing tennis too. I won my first tennis trophy when I was eleven or twelve. Of all the kids that played tennis in my school class, I was the best. One day when I was hitting against the wall at a park, the High School tennis coach approached me and invited me to join the High School team when I was old enough. I did play on the

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS 60 Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor and Archer! Head Over Heels or An Unexpected Bicycle Lesson      I played a number of sports in my childhood. For my birthday, I had received a ten speed European style bicycle from KMart of Gold Circle. I had a baseball game one day so I dressed in my uniform, tied my glove and spikes together and threw them over my handlebars. I began pedaling confidently toward the baseball field at the elementary school a mile away.         As I crossed over the railroad tracks on Main Street in my hometown, my spikes and glove slipped down too low and my glove inexplicably slid between my front wheel spokes. When the glove spun to the front axle / fork (or whatever it is called) and the front wheel stopped turning immediately.    Unfortunately, I was going fairly fast and the back wheel was still spinning forward. Suddenly, my back wheel was flying over my head! Both tires were in the air and my head was the closest t

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS 59 Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor and Archer! Memories of My Mom     My mother’s name was Sherill May McWilliams Skelley. I called her Mom. Mom was very beautiful as a teen and twenty-something. She looked like an old-fashioned movie star, I always thought. I saw photos of her as a teen wearing a sleeveless fitted dress blouse, Capri pants and sunglasses. She was young, fit, thin and beautiful.    When I close my eyes and try to picture her as an adult, I remember her wearing pant suits with coordinated slacks and tops. Mom liked to dye her hair red or light reddish brown. She wore red finger nail polish and lipstick. She reminded me a little of young beautiful Lucille Ball.    If I close my eyes, I can picture her right now, about 35 years old on a summer day, wearing a scarf on her head and sunglasses on her eyes, looking like Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1960s. She smiles as a looks over Atwood Lake and a breeze ruffles the hair that sticks

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS 58 Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor and Archer! Summer Swims    When Dad was working, we had some fun times as a family and some good vacations. We went to Atwood Lake and Berlin Lake to swim and picnic. These were happy times and everyone from the extended family came together for pot-luck picnics and cookouts at the lakes. It was fantastic spending time with Grandma and Grandpa Mc, Mom and Dad, all the aunts and uncles and kids. We’d swim, eat, fish and play together from early morning until after dark. Good times. Good memories.    One summer, Dad must have been working because Mom and Dad bought us season passes to the Menegay’s swimming pool in Louisville , Ohio . It had two high diving boards, a low diving board and a 20 foot high slide that was great fun. My sister Susie was too young to go but Skip and Sherry thankfully brought me along with them. We would bicycle the two miles to the pool or take a shortcut through the woods which cut

  PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS 57 Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor and Archer! The Dairy Queen Ten Speed    We lived in a green, two-story home on West Main Street. This was an ideal location when we could afford ice cream treats because two blocks east of us was the Varsity Isle ice cream shop and two blocks west of us was Dairy Queen. One year, Dairy Queen had a contest. The prize was a ten speed European style bicycle painted with the Dairy Queen name and logo. Dairy Queen had a display in their lobby where free entry forms could be completed and placed in a dropbox.    My Mom, Dad, little sister Susie and I all entered the contest. It was quite a happy surprise when Mom’s name was chosen from the box as the winner. A photographer from the local newspaper The Louisville Herald took Mom’s photograph too.

PAWPAW'S  MESSAGES TO MY GRANDSONS 56 Pawpaw loves Bryson, Connor and Archer! Flexible Flyer Fiasco    Growing up in Northeast Ohio, energetic children like me always welcomed fun ways to get through the long, cold winters. Sled riding was a great way to burn excess energy for hours even if the temperature was below freezing which it often was.    On those cold winter days, every kid in our neighborhood gathered at the two story tall hill behind our house where the trolley used to run. There were a number of good sledding runs but the best one was the one that ran right down the hill toward our house about one hundred yards away. This particular sledding run started off very steeply with a near vertical drop that created a lot of speed on the snow and ice. About three fourths of the way down, the trail hooked to the right at a lone pine tree. In order to make this turn, we sledders needed to lean our weight to the right or use the steering bar on the much wished for Flexible Fl