Memories still abound from the last year I lived in Ohio

There are years from my childhood I hardly remember at all.

Then there's one I remember quite well. It was 1962, I was 12 years old and it was the last year before we left Ohio and moved to Virginia.

If there's one thing some people have and others don't, it's a sense of being from somewhere. I have a cousin who has lived his entire life -- nearly 63 years of it -- in the Columbus, Ohio, area. Then there's me. Starting with Ohio, I've lived in nine different states and one foreign country. There are three places I've spent at least 10 years -- Ohio, Virginia and California.

This was home in 1962.

It isn't always a question of how long. Sometimes years matter more at different times. I lived in Ohio for just 10 years, but they were 10 of the first 13 years of my life.

I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, but they were from age 40 to 60. I think Ohio had a lot more effect on the type of person I became than anything in California.

In 1962 we were living in the house in the picture. My bedroom was upstairs at the left end at the back of the house.

The trees were a lot smaller then -- in fact, they had just been planted. We had been living in Huber Heights -- just north of Dayton -- since the summer of 1957. It was a nicer Levittown, a nice community where WWII and Korean War veterans were able to purchase homes and raise their families in America's largest community of all-brick homes.

I've written about Huber Heights before, and that's not the point of this piece. We moved into this house just before the end of 1961. My mother had her fifth child in October and seven people just wouldn't fit into the three-bedroom house we had been occupying.

The new house was 650 square feet bigger than the old one. My Dad was 36 and he must have been proud he was doing well enough to put his family into a home as beautiful as this.

It was the year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, the year after the nearby Cincinnati Reds had been to the World Series and lost.

In March, southwestern Ohio became the capital of college basketball. The University of Cincinnati won the NCAA championship by beating Ohio State. We lived about halfway between the two schools, an hour or so from each.

But even better to us, the University of Dayton capped off a 23-6 season by beating St. John's at Madison Square Garden and winning the National Invitation Tournament.

That was the year I really started loving basketball. I had played youth ball in fifth grade and shown absolutely no skill at all. I tried again late in 1962 in eighth grade and had pretty good dribbling, passing and defensive skills. But I played five or six games before we left for Virginia and for some reason, I never even attempted to shoot the ball.

It was a strange year. A local bully had singled me out for most of the last four years, and I had done a pretty good job of avoiding him. But walking home from school one day that fall, I turned a corner and found him standing there with one of his minions. He could have given me plenty of trouble by himself, but he had his buddy hold my arms behind my back while he punched me in the stomach a couple of times.

I was just 12 years old at the start of eighth grade and small for my age. I seem to recall that puberty came late for me, and I had the misfortune to run afoul of another bully that fall.  He was the biggest kid in school, 6-foot-3 in the eighth grade, and he wanted to take my place at the ping pong table. I told him no way and yanked the paddle back from him.

He told me I would be sorry. "I'm going to kill you," he said.

All of a sudden, moving to Virginia made sense.

But the last memory I have is of two milestones in television history that occurred within a few weeks of each other. One comes to mind because Donna Douglas just died. She didn't have a huge career as an actress, but she did play Elly May for nine seasons on "The Beverly Hillbillies."



That first episode showed us that we weren't going to see great comedy, but instead a show that was far more risque than anything previously on network television. We saw the voluptuous Elly May popping the buttons on her shirt, just the beginning of nine years of innuendo.

Four weeks later, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about Soviet missiles in Cuba. My parents both worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which would have been a prime target. We had canned goods in the trunk of our car in case we had to evacuate.

Of course we didn't have to go, but I remember that fall so well, and as I age, it's nice to remember anything that far back.