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A Love Letter to the Worst Town in America

How I Came to Love the Silly Little Town I Grew up In

By Caitlin CookPublished 6 years ago 18 min read
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“We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”

-Willa Cather, My Ántonia

The village of New Concord, Ohio sits isolated in the southeastern portion of the Buckeye State, 70 miles east of Columbus, 130 miles south of Cleveland, 120 miles west of Pittsburgh. Home to the East Muskingum School District and Muskingum University, it is roughly one square mile, consists of roughly 2,000 residents, and is primarily known for being the birthplace of John H. Glenn, the man who earned a spot in your textbooks and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for orbiting the earth three times in 1962. For this he became the great American badass to win the Space Race against the Russians during the Cold War, that is, until two other American badasses named Neil and Buzz came along.

My family moved to this town when I was eight years old, and I ended up getting my high school diploma at John Glenn High School. To get to JGHS, there are two routes you can take; Liberty Street or Friendship Drive. Liberty is definitely one of the scariest roads I’ve ever driven on, so I would often take Friendship Drive to get to school in the morning. Friendship Drive is named for the Friendship 7, the spacecraft used to carry out Glenn’s famous mission. You would never know it was named for something so glorious just by driving on it, though… As you drive along it, you’ll find tiny houses with Ohio State University memorabilia in the lawns, a small cemetery, a church, and some silos.

In 2014, something was added to Friendship Drive. Now, when one makes the turn from Friendship to John Glenn School Road, they absolutely cannot miss the fluorescent sign of Jesus that reads, “The Lord is my Shepherd” sitting on the front lawn of some house.

A friend in middle school once told me, “If I had to pick one word to describe you, I’d probably go with ‘creative.’”

I certainly tried.

In all honesty, New Concord is a difficult place for an artist to grow up. There are dance studios, there are some music teachers, there are some art teachers, but they are so few and far between, and almost always mediocre at best. New Concord is an even harder place for a filmmaker to grow up. In all my years spent there, I met a total of five people even remotely interested in filmmaking. One of them was Matthew, and he was one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

Matthew and I run our own “production company” called South 60 Films, and we grew up making films under that title. They were honestly awful. There was absolutely nothing good about them. Any of them. Whatsoever. They were always shot on $200 handheld camcorders, were terribly acted, and had storylines that hardly made sense. It was always primarily Matthew and I running the shows, because virtually nobody wanted to help us. But goddamn, we had so much fun making them. There are so many stories I could tell about my time making movies with Matthew. There’s the time we covered our friend Cody in fake blood and put him on the side of a fairly busy road to film a death scene and just watched the drivers of the passing cars react to the sight. There’s the time we asked the pastor at Matthew’s church to help us with a wedding scene by letting us into the sanctuary and playing the priest; he told us, “I’ve gotten a lot of requests over the years, but this is by far the strangest one.” There’s the time Matthew hosted a movie premiere right before I left for college so we’d never forget all the fun we had making movies together. They were shitty, shitty movies. But they were our shitty, shitty movies.

There were a few days at the end of October my junior year of high school that I skipped to travel to South Carolina to see the guy I was dating graduate from boot camp. When I left school the day before leaving, I remember seeing a few t-shirts in the display case in the lobby. The new art teacher had given her students an assignment to design t-shirts about some political or social issue. There was one about being kind to others, another about not using plastic water bottles, and another about how abortion is murder.

The one that sent a chill down my spine, however, simply read: “Gay is Okay.”

Yeah, I thought. That is NOT going to go over well.

On our last day in South Carolina, I found out that I had been correct. In fact, things had blown over even worse than I could have imagined.

Through text messages to friends and heavy digging on social media, I learned what was happening: our principal, notorious for being racist, sexist, and homophobic on account of his devout Christian beliefs, had the shirts taken down after a parent called and complained about the “Gay is Okay” shirt.

In response, a senior named Allison wrote a letter to the local newspaper.

“A few years ago,” she wrote, “my brother tried to organize a day of silence for bullying awareness, but was not allowed to do so because he was told that it would make the school look bad since the day of silence advocates gay rights.”

Pointing this out as a bad thing was already enough to make the blood of the pious citizens of New Concord boil. But Allison wasn’t even close to being finished.

“This gay acceptance shirt is not allowed to be displayed in the school, but in the main office hangs a picture of Jesus,” she continued. “I plan to ask the administration to remove the picture, and if they refuse, then I will be filing a lawsuit. Not for the money, but for my religious freedom.”

I later learned that she was not wrong and that there was indeed a picture of Jesus hanging up in the office. It was put on a wall that can only be seen by people working in the office, but it was there, and it had allegedly been there since the 1970s after a teacher, Miss Barnett, died suddenly while in class. Her church had the picture, which portrayed Jesus standing with a flock of sheep, donated to the school in honor of her.

For a moment, the small community of New Concord stood completely still. And then, all hell broke loose.

I knew I wanted to pursue filmmaking professionally by the time I was in eighth grade. It has always been hard for me to answer the classic question, “So what made you choose filmmaking?” To tell the truth, I don’t have a clear answer to that question. All I know is, as soon as I realized filmmaking was a career path I could take, everything suddenly made sense. I started researching the best colleges for film soon after, but I eventually succumbed to the idea that I was just a simple girl from a small town, and it may not even be worth trying for some of these schools. By November of my senior year, I was settled on a small school in Kentucky, planning to pursue media studies. I would work my way up from there.

It wasn’t until one day I spent recording footage of my friend Emily, when her mother, Gigi, approached me. “I’m going to start Googling the best schools for film,” she said. “Because you are so much better than a stupid tiny school in Kentucky.”

It was her pushing me that eventually led me to attend the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, ranked on all sorts of websites as one of the best places to study film in the United States. When I got there, it quickly became very clear to me how unique my life up to that point had been. Most of the students I was surrounded by had grown up in large cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston, and if they hadn’t, they had at least been within an hour drive of an urban area during their childhood, having the easy access to the culture I’d always envied. A lot of students had already run their own big, impressive student productions before coming to UNCSA, some of them having even landed their work in film festivals.

“So how did you get people to help you?” I would ask them.

“I just asked around.”

“We had a film club at my high school.”

“I just got my friends together and we made something.”

'Are you kidding me?' I thought.

As I navigated art school, I grew more and more discouraged, watching how skilled my classmates were and questioning why I was even a candidate to attend. It must have been a fluke, but I guess I was thankful.

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land — slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.”

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

The entire month of November 2013 was a heated time for the citizens of New Concord and those in the surrounding areas. Facebook blew up with posts from angry Christians wanting the picture to stay up. Debates sprung up everywhere; in the comments sections of Facebook posts, in the classroom, at the dinner table. I spent a lot of time discussing the issue with my parents, who were fully in support of keeping the picture up.

“What a lot of liberals don’t realize is that the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ doesn’t even appear in the Constitution,” it was explained to me. “The phrase was coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter, but it has no real place in our legal system. What the Constitution does say, however, is that we have freedom of religion. Freedom of religion. Not freedom from religion.”

These arguments made sense to me until my senior year of high school, when I took three social studies classes that all covered the Constitution, and learned that while the First Amendment doesn’t literally say “separation of church and state,” the Establishment Clause means that it might as well say it. Back then, however, I was naive and I fully supported keeping the picture up, because that was my understanding of religious freedom.

Even so, even I found it outrageous what one local printing company did in response to this case. They began making and selling two new products: one was a t-shirt with my high school mascot, the Little Muskie, holding a cross. The other was a sticker with the Good Shepherd painting on it that read, “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of God.” For all of November, people on either side were buying one of two t-shirts: the Gay is Okay t-shirt or the Muskie holding a cross t-shirt, and you could not go a single day at John Glenn High School without seeing at least one person wearing one of these t-shirts. The stickers began showing up on the walls of the school, on peoples’ lockers, on their cars, wherever they could put them. Even now, when I visit, I still run into people wearing the shirt or see cars with the sticker on it.

That whole month, we all waited for the upcoming board meeting where the five representatives of the East Muskingum School District would decide whether to stand up and fight for religious freedom or lose everything to the ACLU.

The board meeting took place in the JGHS cafeteria on Thursday, November 14, 2013. I made an appearance; I had to see how this all went down, with my own eyes. There had to have been around 200 people present, so many that a great deal of people had to stand in the back. All age groups were represented, and many sported their pro-Jesus Muskie t-shirt. Outside, in the parking lot, was a literal rickshaw with the words, “STAND UP FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM” written on the side in neon letters. There were also plenty of motorcycles out front belonging to around ten large men with scraggly beards and leather jackets who came by to represent Rushing Winds Biker Church, which was about a ten-minute drive from JGHS. You simply cannot make this stuff up.

About 30 people signed up to speak to the five board members that night, hoping to influence their decision of whether or not to remove the picture. One of those speakers was Kayla, a blonde college freshman who eventually dropped out on account of the lack of Christianity on her campus. She transferred, then, to a Christian college in Florida so obscure that its accreditation has actually been a subject of debate. The youngest of all the speakers, she lit up the room more than anyone else did.

“Did you know, ladies and gentlemen,” she told them, “that the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ is not actually found in the Constitution, but was actually coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter he published in a newspaper? And last time I checked, the Constitution read the words ‘freedom of religion.’ NOT ‘freedom from religion.’”

Kayla actually talked for so long that she had to be cut off by the board. Words like hers were spoken into the microphone for at least an hour, and they induced an obscene number of standing ovations from spectators. Given that the applause was so loud and that, of the 30 people who stood up and spoke, not a single one of them spoke in favor of removing the picture, it is pretty obvious what the popular opinion among the crowd was.

Eventually, the board members left to make their decision in private. I waited with my friend Valerie and her family for about a half hour to hear the verdict. It was such an intense half hour, with prayer circles gathering in all corners of the room, including one adorned in leather jackets that read, “BIKERS FOR CHRIST.”

Valerie’s father, Peter, was my science teacher. One day in his class, we started our very short unit on evolution, and he introduced us to all sorts of theories on how we got here, giving each of them equal importance. At one point, he gave us all whiteboards, and we had to write what we believed was the truth regarding the origin of species and show it to him.

Peter was a very formal, private family man, but that all went out the window that day. “It may be obvious to some of you,” he said, “what my position is on the issue. And I just want to encourage all of you to keep an open mind about this.”

Another time, he handed us all a pamphlet on all the different methods used to abort a human fetus. In detail, it described the gruesome ways tools are shoved up a woman’s vagina, crushing the fetus’s skull, removing its limbs one by one, or simply suffocating it.

When I talked to Peter and his wife, Kelly, even they were confident that the picture was going to be taken down.

“Let’s face it,” Kelly said. “We don’t have the money to fight this thing.”

As soon as the first board member made their appearance, the room fell completely silent. The superintendent spoke into the microphone, thanking us all for giving our input, this is what makes democracy so beautiful, etc. When she cut to the chase, we were told that, in a 5-0 decision, the board voted to remove the painting.

As she explained further why the decision was made and offered her time to answer questions, I saw a woman, around 40, shuffle her way towards the exit. I’ll never forget the gruffness of her voice as she muttered, “May God have mercy on your souls,” and stormed out.

Before being invited to major in screenwriting in film school, I had to sit down and meet with all of the professors in the discipline to talk about my plans, which was honestly very scary for me. I sat down with one of them, who had known me ever since the day of my admission interview and had been my screenwriting professor for the past two years. We had a great relationship, and she knew me well and my writing probably better than anybody.

I told her my concerns about choosing screenwriting; how my confidence towards my writing skills was constantly wavering and how I simply felt that I wasn’t as skilled as my classmates.

“Look, yeah, a lot of these kids can write,” she said. “We’re here to teach you all how to become better at writing. But since the day we met, I’ve noticed you have something most of your classmates have yet to develop. You have a very clear, distinct, and unique voice to your writing. And that’s not something we can teach you.”

I talked to another professor, whom I had never met before. He told me to introduce myself, so I did.

“Well, I was originally born in Omaha, but I grew up in this tiny little town called New Concord, Ohio,” I started. “Filled with rednecks and religious fanatics, population roughly 2,000…”

“2,000, huh?” he said. “Wow, that IS a small town.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I really hated growing up there. Boring, no culture, no opportunities for artists. I always wish I had grown up in a city or anywhere near a city like most of my classmates did. I constantly feel like I’m falling behind because of it.”

“I wouldn’t see it as a drawback,” he said. “I think that gives you a perspective most of your peers wouldn’t have any idea about.”

I paused and reflected. I had never, ever looked at it that way.

On the day I was officially accepted into the program, I laid down in my bed and sobbed into my pillow all night. Not because I was upset to officially be a screenwriting major. Not because this wasn’t what I wanted.

I sobbed into my pillow all night because, after 20 years of denying it, I had finally convinced myself that I was destined to be a writer, no matter the drawbacks or inconveniences that stood in my way. I sobbed because I had officially swallowed my pride and put myself on the path to become a writer. I sobbed because that absolutely terrified me.

“You clearly love Sacramento.”“I do?”“You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”“I was just describing it.”“Well, it comes across as love.”“Sure. I guess I pay attention.”“Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”-Lady Bird (2017), dir. Greta Gerwig

Perhaps what stunned me the most about the aftermath of the board decision was how nobody did what they said they were going to do. All of these men and women wearing the “armor of Christ,” who proclaimed their intentions to fight for this picture to stay up, did virtually nothing once the decision was made. They let the event pass by, as everything eventually does.

The picture itself ended up being donated back to the church that originally gave the picture to the school. The frame surrounding the picture, however, remains to this day hanging up where it always has in the office. The frame lost its picture, but it gained another meaning. It now serves the community as a memorial both for Miss Barnett and for religious freedom for Christians in America.

As soon as the decision was made, a couple living in a house off of Friendship Drive wanted to do something to show their unending support for Jesus inside and outside of the public school sphere. They originally wanted to build a statue of Jesus, but upon learning it would have cost about $30,000, opted to put a sign in their yard instead. The $6,000 project was supported by all sorts of donors and local churches, and the sign, depicting the Good Shepherd painting, has now been there for four years.

I tell this story often to people I interact with day-to-day. I also tell the story of the "Zanesville animal massacre." I tell the story of the sorority girl who gave birth on the Muskingum University campus and then threw the baby in a dumpster. I tell the story of the story of the organization I was in where I had to do a rap for children called “Sex Is Great by Dr. Loose” to encourage them to practice abstinence. Or the old man and woman who ride together, consistently side by side, on their electric scooter wheelchairs. Or the story of this man who, after 12 years, finished a 24,901.55 mile (the circumference of the earth) walk around the tiny, one-story Zanesville mall as a way of battling his alcoholism. Or the story of how John Glenn’s basketball team won the state championship for the first time in school history following the death of a widely loved alumnus of the basketball team, just a few months after his graduation.

A fellow filmmaker of mine, who grew up privileged with a cultured hometown and plenty of opportunities pre-college to nurture his skill, was once listening to me telling one of these stories. He stopped me and said, “Caitlin, you just have the strangest stories about your hometown.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m sure you have some stories like this.”

“No,” he said. “I really don’t. Your town must be pretty special.”

A couple of months ago, I finished the latest draft of my very first feature screenplay, based on the relationship between a friend from high school and her mother. As I looked back on the 70+ pages I had written, I could see through new lenses traces of influence this screenplay benefitted from: my sense of humor, my ear for dialogue, and inspiration drawn from the culture of New Concord, the people I met in New Concord, and things I experienced living in New Concord.

This summer, my family is moving away from New Concord to start fresh in Rapid City, South Dakota. I have no idea when I will be able to return once we move. All I know is that when I leave, with all my belongings stuffed in the back and strapped to the roof of my Prius, I will eye the steeples that make up the “skyline” of the village. I will look upon the empty fields of dead grass that surround it. I will blow a kiss to the fluorescent sign of the Good Shepherd, thanking this tiny, mundane, absolutely ridiculous place for being unapologetically what it is. As I build my home elsewhere, I hope never to forget the home that started it all.

“I’ve always believed that New Concord and Muskingum College are the center of the universe, because if you get your start here, you can go anywhere.” -John Herschel Glenn Jr., U.S. Senator, astronaut, New Concord native
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Caitlin Cook

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