Yup! When I was a young boy, listening to WIMA radio for school closings on those snowy winter days, I loved the "odd-sounding" names of the towns around us... "Delphos...Ottawa...Miller City/New Cleveland...Celina...Leipsic...Van Wert, public and parochial..."

And there was always that heart-stopping moment when I WANTED to hear "EEEE-lida", but the announcer said (with trememdous empahsis on that first syllable), "KAH-lida". Those Kalida kids got off school a heckuva lot more often than WE did...which is, why I think, the DJ's used to really STRESS which "-lida" was out of school that day...

****.

It was a great place to grow up in the 60's. Elida was just up Route 501 from Wapakoneta...and knowing that a guy who called Wapak "home" was gonna be the first man on the moon...well, I was cemented into space flight and aeronautics forever. Every time I launched my Alpha, X-Ray, Constellation, Gyroc, Star Blazer...I was going along with Neil on a ride. Now, if only I'd been able to scrape together the $10, I could have bought, built, and launched a Saturn and not needed quite so much imagination to "believe" my Constellation "looked" like a Sat V. Unfortunately, I could never find enough bottles beside the road to get enough nickels to add up to the money needed to buy that beautiful kit in the "pricey" section of the Estes catalog.

__________________
Dean Fox
NAR #53946SR

---- "Wherever you go, there you are"