Fact is, Shorty Gleadell encouraged the lad to come over to watch the gold finches turn that Day-Glo yellow at the ever-busy feeders at Gleadell’s wooded farm lot.
In the same way, Gleadell was happy to see the neighborhood kids wallowing among the crawdads and frogs in the creek next to his weeping willow tree.
As a result, the now 46-year-old Schantz still smiles at memories of the rise in his pulse every time Mr. Shorty’s cows got out again — and of the day he decided that Mr. Shorty’s barn would be a poor place to shelter during a tornado, given the vast collection of always sharp antique tools hung there.
Just as the development of a conservancy district has brought new awareness to the character of the land all along aptly named Mud Run, it has people who live near Fairfield Pike and Tecumseh Road recalling one of the memorable characters of that area and era.
One reason for the lasting memory was Gleadell’s association with the long demolished Oak Grove School, which sat cater-corner from his land and at the center of community life of its time.
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Gleadell, who lived atop Oak Grove Hill, was both the school caretaker and bus driver.
Mertie Parks, who attended Oak Grove – as did her husband, children and one grandchild – said he was popular with the children he drove.
“My daughter and another girl made him a birthday cake, they liked him so much,” she said.
(Children of the 1970s have as fond memories of Shorty’s dog, Chris – short for Christmas – who was his constant companion.)
Because the Gleadells’ daughter, Kathy Smith, was raising three children during the same years Mrs. Parks was, the two became fast friends and their families spent a lot of time together.
“Of course, nobody had a lot of money back then,” Parks said, so picnics, wiener roasts and ice skating parties were standard fare.
And although she did not know Shorty well, “I guess he was a good cabinet maker, because, he made the kitchen cabinets when (Smith and her husband, Donald) built the house at the bottom of (Oak Grove) Hill,” Parks said, “and they were nice.”
Such skills also came in handy around Oak Grove School, of course, where Miss Florence Gordon, a large woman, loomed large for three generations of Parks children.
Mrs. Parks’ son Ron has three indelible memories of Gordon.
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1. “If you were bad, she would put you under her desk and pretend she was sitting on you.”
2. “If you had an apple you wanted to share with somebody, she would twist it (in two) and it looked like it was sliced with a knife.”
3. “She lived in a little house on the corner across from Oak Grove,” sharing a house with her mother, Maggie, who, in her 80s, had a pet parakeet that would fly around the inside of the house and land on her shoulder.
As memorable to him were the monthly community nights that filled the upstairs auditorium at Oak Grove for entertainments. Parks’ brother was the bridegroom and he was an usher for the Tom Thumb Wedding. Another crowd-pleaser was the Womanless Wedding, in which men played all the roles, including one of a grossly oversize baby in a grossly oversize custom-built carriage.
Just as Kathy Smith succeeded her father as a bus driver, Parks succeeded Smith. So just as Shorty once enjoyed driving the Greenon High School Band to an Ohio State University football game when Parks was a freshman, Parks now enjoys driving the high schoolers he once drove as elementary school students on field trips all over.
Val and Jim Kelly, who lived next door to Shorty and Alice Gleadell for years, have special memories of him, too.
They remember Shorty standing stock still, staring at the ground for 10 minutes at a time with shotgun ready while hunting groundhogs.
Then there was Shorty’s rooster, Rocky, who, when he wasn’t chasing Alice around the yard, chased the Kelly’s paper boy and made Mrs. Kelly late for work occasionally by preventing her from reaching her car.
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Rocky got his comeuppance the day he took on another rooster and retreated into the Kelly’s yard with a few feathers missing.
When Shorty was about 90, the Kellys remember talking him off his roof, where he was doing some repairs, fearing for his safety. Although he successfully descended the ladder, Shorty promptly fell to the ground and rolled down the slope of his front yard.
Even when Shorty was younger, “He was always scaring us,” said eldest grandson and Kathy’s firstborn, Sandy Smith, a retired physicist who lives in North Carolina.
The huge teeth on the belt-driven saw his grandfather used when clearing brush were enough to frighten a young Smith.
So was the combination of uneven terrain and his grandfather’s driving.
“We were sure he was going to turn over his little tractor or his truck,” Smith said. “He never really got hurt by it, but that was his way, it looked dangerous.”
And just as his grandfather went to farm and estate sales often enough to fill up all the farm’s outbuildings with tools, he managed to get his truck stuck in the mud by the creek time after time, then have to get the tractor to pull it out.
In his 80s, Shorty brought the same persistence to a garden that became a family joke.
Each fall, he’d declare himself done with it, Smith said. Then each February, the seed catalogs would arrive. He’d then plant in the spring and, come fall, have enough tomatoes “that he could feed Arby’s with it .”
“It was one of those things to keep himself going,” Smith said. And while he still steers away from huge circular saws and never came close to tipping a tractor, the 75-year-old says “I still stick by” his grandfather’s stick-to-itiveness.
Shorty was 95 and a widower for five years when he died in February of 1995 in Heartland of Springfield.
And just as Mertie Parks claimed three rocks from Oak Grove School after it was torn down, son Ron returned from Shorty’s estate sale a workbench and everything on it as a memento.
“My wife bought some antique crocks from him” that she still displays, he said.
Val Kelly went to the sale to buy some of Shorty’s collection of old McGuffey Readers, presumably from Oak Grove School, and some of his books on antique tools.
Sandy Smith has a fair number of those tools, which include adzes, but feature a wide variety of wood planes of the sort he found in a basement that in childhood seemed like a dungeon.
Twenty-five years after his death – and long after his house burned down – Shorty Gleadell is fondly remembered as a character who embodied the character of his times.
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