First Contact, Cincy Style?

Feb 2, 2012 by Ben Sherman

I’ve said previously that I love learning new things about this city. I was born and raised here, so I always feel like there isn’t ton that I wouldn’t have heard or seen before. I’ve been humbled once again, though; this time by Citybeat with this piece on a rash of UFO sightings in the Queen City and all through southwest Ohio in October, 1973. They apparently caused quite a stir and got a fair bit of press:

The Cincinnati police told The Cincinnati Post their phones were “ringing off the hook” nightly about those strange bright lights in the sky. Cincinnati Police said “a mess” of frightened callers saw something just above the tree-tops around Mount Washington, Bond Hill and 14th and Vine, and that some type of machine had landed on the railroad tracks near the 2500 block of Beekman Street.

 

North of the city, in Trenton, some of the townsfolk swore a flying craft of some sort, not from around these parts, landed on Main Street, right in the middle of town. The town of Reading kept going dark due to power outages officials said were due to “equipment failure.”

 

The United Press International reported hundreds of sightings over southwest Ohio; all of them were at night. A woman, hysterical and screaming, cried to police that “some … some … thing” landed in her farm and killed two cows. Near central Ohio, a U.S. Army helicopter had been zapped in mid-air with a green beam of light. And The Enquirer was also on the beat, writing about “a radiancy of lights, frights and brights,” that were “dancing, flashing and hovering,” and “the reports were fast and they were serious.”

 

In Greenfield, police officer Sgt. Hugh, after chasing for several miles a circular white object with a yellow glow that was humming and flying just above the trees, told The Post, “I’ve never believed in UFOs until tonight.”

 

Indeed, even the Governor of Ohio, John J. Gilligan, had a close call with what he said was an amber-colored “vertical beam of light.” Shaken, he felt compelled to tell America during an emotional press conference that the UFO threat was real. “I saw one (UFO) the other night, so help me. I’m absolutely serious. I saw this.”

Now, the article goes on to (mostly) explain the incidents as a result of the kickoff of the military’s Operation Nickel Grass on October 13th. The US had elected to aid Israel in the Yom Kippur war, which meant a massive airlift effort, which meant that tremendously oversized cargo planes were landing at and taking off from Wright-Patterson AFB pretty constantly. If that’s not a good enough explanation for you, it’s also a fairly simple deduction that anyone with the technology to get from there (read: anywhere out there) to here in a reasonable amount of time would probably not have much reason to make a stop anywhere near such a comparatively backwater civilization. If you want an example of what I mean, just try to come up with an interesting conversation piece for a chance meeting with a real, live Neanderthal, and then expand the technology gap between the two of you by many orders of magnitude. In other words, Ug would probably figure out how to use an iPad a long time before we were able to wrap our brains around the physics of efficient interstellar travel.

Still, I suppose that anything is technically possible, so I’m forced to wonder exactly what would happen in Cincy if the proverbial Little Green Men did just pop the hatch on Fountain Square and ask to see our leaders. Ah, I can see the potential headlines on Cincinnati.com now…….

• FIRST CONTACT IN FOUNTAIN SQUARE: COAST points out that they’ve avoided Over-the-Rhine
• Mike Brown to demand alien assistance in renovating Paul Brown Stadium
• Aliens: “Hey, uh, we just came to pick Bootsy back up…”
• INTERSTELLAR INCIDENT: Aliens allege attempted poisoning, via goetta
• Aliens lost attempting to navigate West Side roads
• BREAKING: Aliens did not attend high school in the Cincinnati area
• UFOs attack and disable WEBN studios, citing “interstellar noise pollution”
• Aliens return Clooney: “Sorry, with all the attention, we just figured he was in charge.”
• Aliens….. shop at Furniture Fair? (ah %&&$%$#&%, another ad?!?!? Seriously?!?!?!?!)

(N.B.: This piece of playful fun-poking was also indirectly inspired by  this video, S____ People Say in Cincinnati, which you should watch if you haven’t already; it is priceless, though technically NSFW)

Image Credit: Some rights reserved by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

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Look Back in Time with WhatWasThere.com

Sep 29, 2011 by Bryan

Here’s a really interesting site: WhatWasThere.com. This site leverages Google Maps and crowd-sourcing to provide a great interface to share and browse pictures from our past. I love finding pictures from Cincinnati’s past. There are not many there yet, but they do have a nice old picture of the Tyler-Davidson fountain, and some other early architecture.

From their site:

The premise is simple: provide a platform where anyone can easily upload a photograph with two straightforward tags to provide context: Location and Year. If enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, together we will weave together a photographic history of the world (or at least any place covered by Google Maps). So wherever you are in the world, take a moment to upload a photograph and contribute to history!

So go take a look. If you have some good pictures to add, do that as well.

Source: The-Gadgeteer.com

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The Siege of Cincinnati

Sep 8, 2011 by Ben Sherman

I often think of myself as something of a Civil War history buff, and having lived here all my life, at least somewhat knowledgeable about the Cincinnati area. When I stumbled across this article from the Enquirer, I was actually kind of embarrassed at my complete lack of familiarity with the subject matter. I was aware that there had been gun emplacements built in Mt. Adams and Devou Park, but I hadn’t realized they’d come so close to being used.

We’re coming up on the anniversary (September 10th) of what historians refer to as the “Siege of Cincinnati”. Cincinnati was a vital river port for the union, and as such, was a fairly juicy military target. There were some very basic defenses built from the beginning of the war, but construction moved slowly. After the Confederacy invaded Kentucky in 1862, and the threat of an attack on Cincinnati became more realistic, construction was accelerated. Many trenches and gun batteries were completed in a matter of days outside of Covington and Newport, and likely just in time. In September of 1862, 6,000 confederate troops marched north from Lexington and made camp near what is today the intersection of  Turkeyfoot Road and Dixie Highway.

The “siege” didn’t really wind up being much of a siege at all. Confederate troops only stayed long enough to realize that they were up against roughly 72,000 (very recently arrived) defenders and 15 guns dug into the hastily built batteries. There was a minor conflict between Confederate scouts and the Union pickets at Ft. Mitchel, but after that, the Confederates quickly withdrew back to Lexington. If you’re interested in the finer details of the history and the defenses, there’s a great article on them on “Our History”, a blog on Cincinnati.com. I’ve attached a Google Map with pins in the (very) rough locations of the batteries and fortifications (and a giant hat tip to Geoffrey Walden, who put this tour together. The map would not have been possible without it).

There were a couple of other things that struck me upon reading about this. The first is that the subject of the original article, William Hooper (a very well-to-do private citizen), paid quite a bit for both the construction of the aforementioned fortifications and for the conversion of civilian steamboats to military use (armor, guns etc.). In the realm of things about this story that would be completely unthinkable by modern standards, that is pretty much #1. The second is that, at least according to this essay, (posted on Cincinnati Civil War Roundtable’s site), if the Confederates had arrived but four days earlier than they did, they would have found only a few hundred militia manning a number of unfinished fortifications instead of being outnumbered 10:1-ish. That could have changed the face of the war, at least for a little while. To paraphrase the same essay, it’s all academic now, but it is an interesting “what-if” none the less.

In one final note, when doing some of the digging for this post, I discovered that there’s actually a Civil War museum in Ft. Wright. The address and directions are available behind the link if you were as clueless about it as I was and have any interest in checking it out.

Image Credit:  Some rights reserved by David Paul Ohmer Thanks!

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Cincinnati Opera Libretti

Aug 11, 2011 by jennjolley

Before I saw The Magic Flute at the Cincinnati Opera, I finally decided to check out the local rare, old, and used bookstore—Duttenhofer’s Books.

I don’t know why I haven’t checked it out before, but when I did, I was surprised to see an entire box of vintage libretti in the music section.

Who knew they would have something like this?! They had (yes, past tense) a collection that included libretti from The Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Opera House, Chicago Grand Opera, and the Cincinnati Opera. Two days later I returned with my imaginary cash card and purchased most of them. If you’re interested in buying the rest, you should probably do so before I get paid again.

These two libretti are from the Cincinnati Zoo Opera Company, when the opera was at the Zoo Opera Pavilion.

Isn’t this fun? Of course, I’ve never heard of the opera Andrea Chénier, nor have I heard of the composer Umberto Giordano and the librettist Luigi Illica (yes, I should know the latter). The next libretto cover should be a little more familiar.

Nice, huh? Here’s the inside.

And here’s something I discovered with some of these older libretti. They include the melody line from the arias in the back of the libretto.

This is something supertitles can’t give you. It’s too bad these melody lines aren’t printed in current opera programs.

Images by JennJolley from her Flickr Stream

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Simon “The Pieman” Hubig: New Orleans Tradition’s Roots Are in Cincinnati

May 30, 2011 by Loki

I love finding links between the city I grew up in and the one I live in now. There are a number of interesting commonalities between Cincinnati and New Orleans, but this one takes the cake- or in this case, the pie.

Everyone in New Orleans knows the sight of Hubig’s pies. The lemon ones, the chocolate ones, all the small fried pies bursting with flavor that have been a fixture in neighborhood stores since my grandfather’s time. Little did I realize that this icon of the Crescent City came to us via the Queen City. You see, Simon Hubig was an amazing and groundbreaking baker and he was huge in Cincinnati long before he came to New Orleans

Here is an excerpt from a story by Becky Retz, for the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Hubig continued working as a baker until his early 30s, when he opened the Hubig Pie & Baking Company in Cincinnati, which over the next two decades grew to the point of producing 30,000 pies-per-day with Hubig’s patented machinery, an “output larger than that of any other bakery in the United States,” according to Goss.

The company also developed patented pie bags and crates that, for the first time, allowed for shipment of its goods over long distances.

During this time, Hubig served as president of the National Association of Master Bakers, a post he held for nine years and through which he became a passionate lobbyist of the federal government on issues such as the price of flour and eggs.

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Cleopatra: The Queen of the Nile in the Queen City (pt. 2)

Feb 28, 2011 by Loki

Brought forth from beneath the waves, marvels unseen by human eyes for many generations have arrived in Cincinnati. Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt is showing at the Cincinnati Museum Center, and it is a stunning exhibit.

I had the good fortune to get a few moments with Franck Goddio, the underwater archaeologist who founded the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous Marine (IEASM) in Paris. It is his aquatic efforts that are primarily responsible for bringing us this fantastic array of artifacts. I’ve set the interview to a slide-show of photos from the exhibit that were shot for CincyVoices by local designer / photographer Mickey De Silva. (Thanks Mickey!)

Once the credits at the beginning roll the slide-show begins. Enjoy!

Part one of this series includes Goddio’s opening statements as well as those of several other notables. You can find it here.

-Loki Founder and Curator

Media access provided by the Cincinnati Museum Center, or as I like to call it- The Hall of Justice!
Content of this post is copyright 2011 SocialGumbo, LLC. This supercedes the blanket creative commons license.

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