The Delaware Gazette » Sylvia Zimmerman

The Rockefeller legacy

Sylvia Zimmerman — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:00:36 +0000

John D. Rockefeller wished for two things: to live to be 100 and to earn $100,000; he failed on both accounts.

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Coolidge helped get nation on its feet

Sylvia Zimmerman — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:53:08 +0000

President Calvin Coolidge helped put the nation back on its feet after the grueling indebtedness of World War I and the enervating scandals of President Harding’s administration

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Andrew Mellon benefitted Americans

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 03:48:30 +0000

Andrew Mellon has been vilified in American history books as the secretary of treasury under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, who wanted to reduce taxes only on the rich and increase taxes on

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The certainty of postmodern conservatism

Sylvia Zimmerman — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:11:43 +0000

I am not an expert, a researcher or a specialist, but rather a generalist, a universalist and a reader always deducing the good where I find it and calling out ironies where I see them.

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Our dog’s Christmas ‘gift’

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:24:49 +0000

Our dog ate a five-pound box of John Eagle chocolates one Christmas Eve leaving Christmas morn a mess for my mother to clean up. He had used the wingback chair as a ladder next to the cupboard to access the box, then nudged the top off and consumed every delicious morsel and then went to the basement steps and threw it all up on each step, leaving a final hurray just below the final step! It was horrible in all directions.

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Horse search turns up lightened spirit, cookies

Sylvia Zimmerman — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 03:47:41 +0000

Many years ago on a grey, drizzly early December day, I drove somewhere in Knox County to buy a horse. Thinking a horse might lift my dreary spirits, I answered an ad, knocked on the door of a small frame house in the midst of a decidedly unkempt farmstead, one I had concluded could not house a horse I would want!

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Tales of cats, kittens

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:59:12 +0000

Romney’s dog, Seimus, might have ridden on the top of his vacationing van, but my two kittens rode to Columbus in the hub of the wheel cap under my truck! My son helped get them out and they rode back to our Delaware County farm safely in a box in the bed of the truck.

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Wharf culture: Fish tales

Sylvia Zimmerman — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:25:01 +0000

It is a good thing I live inland because wharf culture doesn’t appeal to me — squawking gulls, smells of the sea mean fish and I don’t like fish. That doesn’t mean I managed to avoid fish, especially lobster.

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Death of a salesman

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:55:12 +0000

This will be the last of the letters to home from Francis S. Wolfe, a distant relative of mine. He writes of his many battles and scrimmages, the Battle of Gettysburg among the most compelling. After his battery was knocked out in the immediacy of the assault on Little Round Top, they retreated to regroup spiking the cannons as they left.

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Reflections on Gettysburg

Sylvia Zimmerman — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:16:50 +0000

There is one museum, one natural wonder and one historical site that after visiting have all left me breathless and without words.

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A soldier’s recollections

Sylvia Zimmerman — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:34:54 +0000

As Ohio pioneers my ancestors, George and Jane Pisor Wolfe, fresh out of Indiana County Pennsylvania and eager to homestead on their 100 acres in Athens County, had much to do. They cleared land, built a log cabin, planted and harvested a corn crop, had children, built a church and a schoolhouse and established a community. They also had to fight for their country and they did so willingly.

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Those earlier days

Sylvia Zimmerman — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:22:22 +0000

We are as a country heading for hardships, we are told, and perhaps now is a good time for a tonic from the past to remind ourselves of the hearty stock from which we emerged. The Wolfe Family History published in 1964 includes inspiring tales of early pioneers into southeast Ohio and beyond to Indiana and Wisconsin.

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Family reunions, part 2

Sylvia Zimmerman — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:55:15 +0000

To continue on the theme of family reunions, let me write a bit about recollections of my father’s side, the Wolfe family reunion.

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Family reunions: To remember, honor

Sylvia Zimmerman — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 01:59:20 +0000

Summer is full of family reunions and my husband’s family has met on the first or second Sunday of August for 92 years. One senior member at 92 was present at the first reunion! My husband’s family is not exceptional and for that reason represents what underpins the status quo of a great and good society. What matters as well is that one can watch this sturdiness work itself out in reunions.

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Puppies and peaches

Sylvia Zimmerman — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 23:45:13 +0000

Kelly Van Gundy and two of her four children just got back from South Carolina where they had gone to “help out” a sister Baptist congregation and their community.

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Unusual farm guests not always unwelcome

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:57:04 +0000

There is something unseemly about seeing two peahens perched on top of my chicken coop. The chickens inside think so, too. They hoot and holler taking offense at such an untoward intrusion among birds of a feather. They have, however, grown less interested and even bolder over the last six weeks as the peahens become more of a feature.

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Athens County farm memories: Summer daze

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:02:45 +0000

I spent my high school summer years staying with relatives on their Athens County farm. This was the ’50s and my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Orville had not quite adapted to indoor plumbing, but they did have it. The outside privy still had some traffic. And while Uncle Orville owned an Allis Chalmers tractor, he also didn’t sell Dolly, Molly or Rex, three large Belgium work horses; when two worked, one rested. It was a nice arrangement because I got to loaf with the off horse.

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Valuable woman’s work

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 01:24:08 +0000

I once owned a mangle for a very short time. I bought it at a farm auction and had my husband and others haul it home. A mangle is the size of a small freezer, but in those days, because its chassis was mostly steel, it took four men to move it! Mine only ran one time before smoke bellowed from inside and it quit, the little red light went out and with it a small symbol of a less complicated living.

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Meditations on trials of modern air conditioning

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:48:55 +0000

I hate air conditioning, institutional AC that is, not car or even one’s home where it can be regulated. I think AC turns us inward, content in an artificial world of self-indulgence. I think only of myself and suffer when a manager at a restaurant or a grocery store or a professor in a college classroom says, “We cannot change the temperature; it originates somewhere else.” That somewhere else is usually hidden in a control panel in a subterranean room where only the jailer has the key. If ever I have felt a prisoner, it is being compelled to sit in an expensive restaurant next to a vent hurling cold air onto my neck and back. I have been reduced to wrapping not only a slight sweater around my shoulders but also several napkins. In a fit of despair I once had a waiter put a serving tray on top of a register that blew cold air onto my legs and up my skirt. Marilyn Monroe should have such troubles. Try price comparison while shaking from subzero ambient AC at your local food chain. I now take a winter jacket along with my purse and sacks, an extra burden when outside it is a fine 85 while inside a terrifying 65. I am furious at being a victim of such commercial universalism, not to mention my own individual surrender to out-of-control “control panels.”

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A heap of humility

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 22:48:44 +0000

I don’t know another species of the workforce so forgiving of its mistakes than a farmer. A surgeon has great guilt over his botches and carries insurance to help him through. Acts of nature, of course, afflict the farmer and he, too, can carry crop insurance, but he cannot protect himself from acts of his own stupidity. He must just stand there and despair, quit or ask forgiveness and then return it to others. I think this is the stuff of humility which rightly so comes from the word humus or soil.

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A second Axial Age: Back to the future

Sylvia Zimmerman — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:09:46 +0000

I am not sure many people understand what Post-Modernism is or why it matters much. Most of us think we are living in modern times. How then can we speak of Post-Modernity? This is not back to the future talk or fantasy futurism, but rather worldview language and how we hold the happenings in our lives. Nevertheless, I do want to go back in order to bring us up-to-date. Let’s start with the first Axial Age. This was the time of the great philosophers and theologians: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Prophets, the Buddha, Confucius, the Upanishads, Zoroaster. Because these thinkers and writers saw all of life integrated and of one, politics and religion, nature and man existed out of a single purpose and there was a mighty force at the center of life. All creatures, events, present and future were held together for a reason not readily understood but embraced in mystery.

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A hole in a bucket

Sylvia Zimmerman — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:55 +0000

I ran over a five-gallon plastic bucket with my tractor and tore a rent in its side. Using it to haul feed or water was no longer viable, but it still could be turned over and sat on while bottle feeding calves. Over time, however, the tear bulged under the weight (reader discretion advised) and so yesterday morning when I went to move the bucket to the next pen, a cat crawled out. For a brief time, he had found comfort under the bucket which was under me.

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Delaware County connections

Sylvia Zimmerman — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:35:40 +0000

My grandmother was born in Ostrander to Elizabeth Maugans and George Webster Case. She and her twin sister were put in shoe boxes and then into the warming part of an old cook stove. This “incubator” worked well; they both — Erdeen (my grandmother) and Aliene — grew into substantial women whom their youngest brother Gerald would call The Beef Trust!

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A mother remembered

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:07:29 +0000

My mother would have been 100 on April 1. No one ever forgot her birthday — the only benefit of being born on April Fools’ Day.

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Sweet and salty

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:15:05 +0000

Everything sweet comes from the earth; every grain of salt emerged from the sea. Both of these ingredients are biblical; they loom large in our physical and spiritual histories. Our Judeo-Christian heritage promised a land of milk and honey. Honey is obvious but milk too is laden with sweetness. Carnation condensed milk, anyone?

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What is beauty?

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:06:16 +0000

Beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder; it originates beyond the physical or phenomenal. It exists, as the Greeks discerned and Emmanuel Kant affirmed, a priori. It is in our nature to know beauty and respond to it. And beauty is the form of farming.

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Animal anomalies

Sylvia Zimmerman — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:16:38 +0000

It wasn’t a chuckle I felt as I slowed down to watch a strange, somewhat inert bird squatting by the edge of the road. At first I thought it was a quail and let it go at that. I felt pleased that the bird was making a comeback.

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The land was everything

Sylvia Zimmerman — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 20:20:01 +0000

You better have plenty of magic markers and colorful tabs as you read Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Land Was Everything” (The Free Press, N.Y., 2000) because every page is plum full of quotables of accurate observation of what farming was and is today.

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The past as told by blankets

Sylvia Zimmerman — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:24:41 +0000

Now that the older generation is passing on, I am taking a longer look at what they have left behind and, on this particular day, I see blankets.

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A pocket knife and trust

Sylvia Zimmerman — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:25:14 +0000

A pocket knife with a 3 inch blade in the hands of a 7 year old would catch the eye of most parents. On the farm, however, a knife is a tool to perform a task. In the small hands of Jonah, a kid helping his dad unwrap baleage to feed 35 dairy cows, a knife becomes a symbol of respect, experience and service.

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