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Most travel comes with a single theme. Business or leisure. A veggie plate or a meat plate. But not both.
On a recent trip to the Midwest, my experience was a foot-long shish kebab that had it all: chicken, beef, shrimp, pineapple, tomatoes and more.
On a 600-mile-long trip east from St. Louis to Cleveland, I:
- Spoke at a banquet in Taylorville, Ill., to honor a sixth-grade class I met during “Covid Spring — now graduating from high school — and give students $10,000 in scholarship money donated mostly by Oregonians.
- Watched sixth graders and kindergarteners lead a Catholic Mass, the stand-sit-kneel triathlon bringing memories of my boyhood days as an Episcopalian.
- Climbed 182 steps to the top of Taylorville’s courthouse bell tower with Bill Kennedy, the man who does this every Saturday morning to reset the clock inside the steeple.
- Toured Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Ill., including the family’s three-holer out back. (Who knew?)
- Made a free throw in the Knightstown, Ind., gym where “Hoosiers” was filmed. (OK, after six misses, three of them air balls.)
- Stayed in Cleveland with two Ohio State fans we met at Oregon’s Heceta Head Lighthouse in 2024.
- Had breakfast with a thirtysomething couple in Cleveland whose wedding I officiated in Eugene nine years ago.
- Stopped at six quilt shops as wife Sally, aka She Who Sews, reaped.
- Visited two Big Ten football stadiums, at University of Illinois and Ohio State, the latter where I discreetly flashed a photo “O.”
- Withstood a hurricane in a Canton, Ohio, wind simulator.
- Toured Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
- And experienced my first-ever Buc-ee’s, a super-sized freeway convenience store in Ohio that, with 108 fuel pumps, 22 urinals and 30 varieties of beef jerky, was equal parts amazing and insane.
In other words, it was a busy week. A great week. A week as fun and enriching as it was exhausting.
If the trip were a “horseshoe” — an open-faced Midwest sandwich whose breakfast version features toast, cheese, sausage and hashbrowns — the bread on which the journey was built was Taylorville.
During Covid in March 2020, I forged a relationship with a sixth-grade teacher at St. Mary School. Desperate to connect with students lost in the fog of remote learning, Cathy Schaeffer reached out to me for permission to let her record herself reading a book I’d written, “52 Little Lessons from It’s a Wonderful Life.”
That way, students could go online, hear a life lesson and respond to questions with which Cathy would challenge them. I happily granted permission. I later agreed to be interviewed, the kids firing wonderfully frank questions such as, “Which of your books do you regret writing?” And, when asked, I gave a commencement address — sixth grade is the caboose on the St. Mary educational train — backdropped by the surf at Yachats.
The experiences were so much fun I did the same for each of Cathy’s six subsequent sixth-grade classes.
Now, with the “Covid class” graduating from Taylorville High, I wanted to meet the kids and give them scholarships to say: “We believe in you.”
These, after all, were kids who’d been essentially stuck at home during the pandemic. Kids who missed getting to experience the school’s traditional ceremony and trip to St. Louis to celebrate their graduations. Kind kids, I’d come to find, who sent me crayon-written cards after my mother died, Christmas cards and birthday greetings.
I asked readers of my weekly Heart, Humor & Hope Substack for donations, hoping for $5,000 to pay for the banquet. They donated more than $20,000.
On May 14, at a banquet nuanced with a Wonderful Life theme, we honored 10 students from the 2020 class with scholarships, celebrated the successes of all seven classes and crowned the winner of a Wonderful Life Trivia Contest after a tie. (The Ruth Dakin Bailey table won the tiebreaker over Cousin Tilly.)
It was among the highlights of my 50-year writing career, a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit (see: Cathy and her kids) and of generosity (see: 100-plus donors who stepped up to make it possible) in a world that can be greedy.
Even after expenses, we’ll have enough left over to give away a handful more partial scholarships.
“What surprised you about the experience?” Cathy asked as a group of us debriefed afterward at a local watering hole.
“How appreciative the kids and their parents were,” I said. “You put on a wonderful event. My readers paid for it. But what worried me was that we might get a shoulder shrug from the kids and their parents.”
Early on, only 13 people responded yes to our invitation. But on banquet night, 150 people packed the St. Mary Cafeteria, one mother and her graduating senior son having driven seven hours from Arkansas.
The mood was festive and the kids were dressed to the nines. In keeping with the Wonderful Life theme, each table was named for a character in the movie. The current sixth-grade class made Wonderful Life dioramas that lined the entry way.
I gifted every student — about 50 — with an autographed copy of my latest book, “Writer,” and a crisp $50 bill, which, I imagine, quickly made them forget about the book.
“They were giddy,” I said. “Thanking us. Asking to pose for photos. And what about the Class of 2020 bringing it in for that giant huddle, arms wrapped around each other?”
“Covid built camaraderie,” Cathy said. “That class was closer than all my other classes because of what they went through together.”
“Well, it was a night to remember.”
And, really, a week to remember. In Taylorville, Sally and I stayed in an Airbnb in a century-old building. We lunched with Dave Coker, who, weirdly, we’d first met, in Eugene, two months ago when he was visiting his Taylorville-bred daughter, Kelsey. We ate at Bill’s Toasty, a 10-stool diner that dates to 1932 and refuses to be anything other than what it is.
“This is not Burger King,” reads a sign. “You don’t get it your way. You take it my way, or you don’t get anything.”
In Springfield, an hour north, we immersed ourselves in Abraham Lincoln — museum, tomb and house. I was fascinated by walking through the Lincoln home, thinking: That’s the couch on which Abe read his evening newspaper. The tour and a couple of movies at the Lincoln Museum informed and inspired me far more than anything I saw at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
On our way from Taylorville to Cleveland, I was reminded that the world is, indeed, flat — at least in the Midwest, where the three-state high point is 1,549 feet, or roughly half the elevation of the Coburg Hills’ high point (Mt. Tom, 3,173 feet).
After my trip to the Midwest, Spencer Butte looks like a tree-studded Mt. Everest.
In seven days of driving — at times slowly, through towns and cities — we didn’t see a Prius until about Mile 400. We saw few unhoused people, few bumper stickers and nobody wearing a mask. But we saw a plethora of semi-trucks; a 4:1 ratio to cars on one freeway stretch. And freeway rest stops so architecturally astute that they put Oregon’s cinderblock potty stops to shame.
On a recent road trip to Phoenix, I was flipped off twice by other drivers, but had no such experiences in the Midwest, where people seemed friendly, forthcoming and curious.
“Tell me,” said one, “about this patchouli oil you have in Oregon. Never heard of it.”
In Taylorville, we saw a flagpole bent into 90-degree submission by a 2019 tornado. In Indiana, a quilt shop so far from the beaten track that, until we found it, we’d assumed our GPS had gone astray. And in Ohio, high school girls’ flag football.
The Midwest, I found, is a world of neat farms, red barns and grain silos. A world where the period at the end of each small town’s sentence is a Dollar General. A world in which Oregonians are, for the most part, a curiosity.
And yet, here and there, we found connection: At a Cleveland restaurant, Seth, our waiter, lit up when learning we were from Eugene. His father got his master’s degree at the University of Oregon and Seth has visited Eugene, Bend and the Oregon Coast.
We stayed in Cleveland with Pat and Sue Renner, whom we had met in October 2024 when celebrating Sally’s 70th birthday party with a stay at the Heceta Head Lighthouse. Pat and Sue were in Oregon for the Ducks-Buckeyes game. After hearing of their convoluted, shuttle-bus plan to get to Autzen, I suggested they come to our house and walk to the game with us. They did. (In this home-and-home series, we’ve extended the couple an offer to join us in Yachats in 2027.)
Truth be told, I expected to not like Cleveland; I am, ashamedly, steeled in stereotypes. Rivers on fire. Run-down neighborhoods. Factories forever. But I found Cleveland warm, vibrant and progressive, sprinkled with Victorian houses that Sally and I were drooling over.
In Cleveland, we ate at a Gatsby-esque restaurant — The Marble Room — that’s located in a former bank that once occupied a building completed in 1893 by the sons of the assassinated U.S. President James A. Garfield as a tribute to their father. I’m not sure which was better, the company we were with, the food we ate or the atmosphere we experienced, which included a roving saxophone player wearing light-flashing shoes.
Such moments and more subtle ones will stay with me a long time: the “thank-yous” from the students. The inspiration of Lincoln when it comes to leadership and generosity toward others. (“I don’t like that man; I must get to know him better.”) And the words of Father John Burnette, who, during Mass, told the now-graduating seniors of St. Mary’s sixth grade “Covid Class”:
“Keep exploring. This is what it’s all about. Stop looking for happiness. Happiness comes to us when we discover goodness. Go to the desert and look at the stars. Go to the sea and consider its depth. Go to the mountains, the creations of God. And keep looking for the goodness in other people.”
I found plenty of it in Taylorville, Ill., and beyond.
