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| The connection between Books of Note and People That I Miss is that the Ritter's have funded with their wealth,a library in Vermillion, Ohio, where George was born. He took note growing up that Andrew Carneige funded libraries but never put one in Vermillion. |
I just finished re-reading Arthur Gordon's " A Touch of Wonder ". The book was copyrighted in 1974 and it was given to me as a gift in 1991. Some twenty-two years later, I am still reading it cover-to-cover, although you can read it by chapters in about any order. Yes, it is a book of spiritual inspiration but it's more like sitting on the front porch in a South Carolina beach house listening to a friend of many years telling stories. Gordon grew up in Georgia and that story telling craft wasn't much different from the South Carolina's way.
My copy is so ear marked and annotated in it's margins that I recognize a particular story by my own markings faster than reading the index. In fact, I have re-indexed it by material. One of my favorite stories is when AG,as a young man, ask Thomas Watson to lunch at the Central Park Zoo. He had no ideal who Watson was but Watson pointed him into the direction of new thinking that: " On the Far Side of Failure ", was success.
While the Bill Gates or Michael Dell's of today are interesting people, the men that I grew up with were the real business tycoons that had learned from people like Tom Watson, Henry and Edsel Ford, even R.A. Stranahan,Sr. or Mr.George W. Ritter, Vice President and General Counsel of the former Willy's Overland Motor Company. Today, we still know that company's product as the "Jeep". Yes, that Jeep.
George Ritter and his wife Mary, were people that just seem to "stay with you" over the years. What I remember of George and Mary would be strange to some but that encounter with them is something that I have cherished over the years knowing that a very few people have had the opportunity that
was afforded me by the Ritter's. The time frame as I recall was some time between 1965 and 1972. A few years before, they had built a private mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery-- not a mile as the crow flies from that beautiful piece of architecture know as the Headquarters of Willy's Overland. That HQ building has since been imploded to make way for what is now the I-475/ I-75 expressway,although, Chrysler does have a picture from 1948 showing the bottom half of the building with a full lineup of the Jeep products post war era and the grand staircase that marked the entry of the building.
I was invited to tour the finished mausoleum with it's beautiful stained glass window. The marble was their favorite rose marble because they thought white marble aged dirty. The invitation came following one day when Mary, was trying to describe the rose marble to me and I said to her that I knew what it was because my grandfather (who was two years older than George) had a headstone in rose marble because my grandmother had rejected a white marble for the same reason. Mary smiled widely and didn't say another word. While I was afraid that I had offended her, the call came the following week to tour their mausoleum. The mausoleum is situated on an angle that points directly toward the Willy's Overland Plant from the banks of the stream that flows through the cemetery on the north end of the bridge's bank, almost in a triangle to the R. A. Stranahan mausoleum and the Edward Drummond Libby mausoleum,guarded by the massive Spitzer mausoleum on the south end of the bridge. To this day, I still think that the Ritter's have the more desirable location for beauty and privacy.
