Landmark directions can confuse

It was time to hit the road.

We were at the family farm in upstate New York and needed to get back to the thruway to continue the journey.

For some reason, Connie’s Aunt Mary Frances volunteered directions.

They went something like this: Go back to U.S. 20, then go to Pompey and turn left where the Wilsons used to live, then you’ll want to bear right at Penitentiary Hill and watch for that big oak tree and on and on.

OK, that’s a gross exaggeration. But I remember Penitentiary Hill was in there somewhere, and neither of us had ever heard of Penitentiary Hill.

That incident came back to me the other day when my friend Jerry Sullivan stopped by the office with a story.

It seems he needed to get one of the new, high security Indiana driver’s licenses, the kind with a star on them so you can use them as identification when flying. To get one, Jerry needed a birth certificate.

So he went to the courthouse and walked through the doorway that used to lead to the county health department. Trouble is, the health department moved. It’s now the assessor’s office.

Still in need of a birth certificate, Jerry was told that the health department had moved to “Dr. Steffy’s old office.”

And he walked out just as confused as before.

“I didn’t go to Dr. Steffy,” he said. “I went to Dr. Keeling.”

The assessor’s staff had used “Dr. Steffy’s old office” as local shorthand for the health department’s annex building on West Arch Street. It was a lot like our encounter with Penitentiary Hill.

How often do we do that? I wondered. All of us who have been around here for a while fall into the same habit, referencing landmarks and businesses that may be long gone and leaving confusion in our wake.

It’s particularly unhelpful when a building has been the home to numerous businesses over the years.

Take One-Shot Sports, for instance, at Harrison and Main streets in Portland. I think of that building in numerous incarnations: Sertech Heating and Cooling, Vance Heating and Cooling, the Art Craft and the Marsh “foodliner” of my childhood all come to mind. 

And I’ve probably missed a couple others.

Or take the main Jay County offices of First Merchants Bank. Only a small portion of that building was originally a bank. Other parts of it were occupied by a sewing machine store, a barbershop (actually two different barber shops), a jewelry store, the Equity (a kind of soda shop) and a bar.

There’s a sort of archaeological series of substrata that would only confuse someone in search of directions.

And the older you get, the more likely you are to refer to your own version of Penitentiary Hill.

For instance, I could give somebody directions in Dunkirk that might refer to the Tops or the Main or the union hall or McCord’s 5&10.

Or I could give somebody directions in Redkey that reference Shambarger’s or the Birdcage or the downtown bank building.

Or I could try the same thing in Portland and refer to the Railway Express Office or the Adair Hotel or the Hines.

Depending upon their age and how long they’d lived around here, chances are I would leave them scratching their heads.

Just like Jerry was when he went looking for “Dr. Steffy’s old office.”

I sure hope he got that birth certificate he was looking for.

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Editor’s note: Just to clear things up, it should be noted that in Dunkirk the Tops was a restaurant located where the Dunkirk City Building now stands, the Main was a movie theatre that has since been torn down, the union hall also has been razed, and the McCord’s store building is still standing on Main Street. In Redkey, Shambarger’s Restaurant was located on High Street near the railroad tracks, the Birdcage was a ’60s-era teen hangout downtown on High and the bank building is now home to one of Redkey’s many antique stores. In Portland, Railway Express was located at Ship and Main streets, the Adair Hotel burned down and is now a First Merchants Bank drive-thru location, and the Hines also burned and is the site of a parking lot for county employees on Walnut Street.