September 11, 2007
Bear with me, this one takes a lot of setup.
There's a small chain of grocery stores in the Akron area called Acme. (As an aside, there's a completely unrelated Acme Market in New Jersey, but that's not relevant here.) Now, for some reason, I had a dream where I was looking at or editing Acme's Wikipedia page.
Yeah, in dreams some people are superheroes, or they bang models. I edit Wikipedia.
Anyway, that concept burned itself into my conscious mind well enough that I actually looked it up on Wikipedia the next day, and was kinda surprised when I found it. I mean, a dozen stores in northeast Ohio is even less relevant than your average Wikipedia article.
From there, my brain jumped to Stuzman's, a small local grocery store in Cuyahoga Falls. My grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side of the family used to take my sister and I up there when we'd visit on weekends, to get ingredients for milkshakes. Mmm, peanut butter milkshakes.
I was curious as to whether the place was still in business, since I was in a happy-memory-from-my-childhood mindset. A quick Google search turned up no web site for Stuzman's, but looking around a bit more, they are still in business.
Now, most people would just let it go at that point. To be honest, normal people wouldn't have even gotten to that point. But I am definitely not normal. I checked a few of the other links for the store and wound up on the Cuyahoga Falls History message board. (No link, since it seems to be small and half-dead. It's easy enough to find if you're so inclined.)
Poking around I saw one of the admins compiling a list of historic homes in the Falls. There are a lot of them in Grandma and Grandpa's old neighborhood, which jibes with what I remember -- large, old houses on good-sized lots (I think their house sat on a quarter-acre, or maybe a half).
Now, some people are into genealogy. I'm into places. And that got me thinking: That old house has to be about 120 years old by now, at least. I don't know why it didn't hit me earlier (like, when Grandma was still alive), but now I want to do some research on this place and see what it's been through over the years. And the Falls History site is down at the moment, for going over its bandwidth.
Guess it's time to call Mom.
