The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Something about Lorain
‘Whatever is in us about Lorain ... we take with us when we leave here’, says longtime resident
Dorothy J. Anderson has just finished a book about fig trees.
The 92-year-old Lorain resident who is called “Dotty” is still part of two separate book clubs and her eyes light up whenever her stack of books are introduced to the conversation.
“You’re going to love this one,” she said as she sat down Nov. 9 to discuss the history of the city and produced the slim volume of “Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees” by Mike Shanahan. “You won’t believe that fig trees are really important and the fig tree might be the tree or source of saving our planet.”
Anderson was a young mother of one when her husband, Marvin, finished medical school in 1951. The family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, for his residency.
With those two hurdles out of the way, the young family, which was expecting another child, were looking for a place to settle down.
“Marvin and his friend were looking for a place to settle in northern Ohio,” she said. “Actually, we were going to Cleveland because we
had a friend, John Kellog,
and John wanted Marvin to come to Cleveland.”
This plan went by the wayside as the Andersons discovered Marvin wouldn’t have hospital privileges
in the larger city. So they headed west.
“Marvin stopped in Lorain and he liked it,” Anderson said. “It was a pretty little town when we came
here. There were flowers everywhere. Everybody had flowers.”
When the Andersons arrived they found a thriving downtown area packed with stores.
“It was just a nice, little town,” she said.
The Andersons found a church home at the congregational church at Fourth Street and Washington Avenue and became members of the community.
Marvin Anderson received privileges to practice at St. Joseph Hospital in Lorain and did so there until he died in 2006.
Dorothy Anderson said the family stayed in the city because she liked the city.
“The people are nice and even the times that were bad there were so many nice people in this area,” she said. “They treated us nice.”
The Andersons’ five children each attended Lorain City Schools.
“The schools were good,” she said. “They got a good education. I’ve got a Harvard man, a Lincoln, Pennsylvania, man, a Purdue man, then my fourth child is a Bradley person and my fifth child did everything. He went to my husband’s school, Fisk in Nashville, Tennessee, went to
my school, Howard in D.C., then he struck out on his own and went to Case Western, and that’s where he got his doctorate.”
“I’m proud of the education that my children got here,” she said.
According to Anderson, the nice quality of the citizens of Lorain has persisted to this day. Despite her inability to drive now, she said she can essentially go anywhere she pleases. Her neighbors are willing, and do give her rides to any place she might want to go.
Though the family moved from their original home to two subsequent residences, Anderson contends the neighbors were always nice.
“Our children played with all the kids and I think they had a good childhood,” she said. “We stayed in Lorain.”
She said a friend of the family had built a house for them in a different city, but they decided to stay.
“We like where we are,” she quotes her husband as saying at the time.
It was that nice quality in the people that extended itself to the societal issues at the time.
According to Anderson, there were a series of discussions about racism involving all the downtown
churches.
“Nobody was talking about racism back then,” she said. “There is racism everywhere, but I think Lorain was wise and good to talk about it when nobody else was talking about it and that’s the first time that I know of that the churches in a community talked about racism.
“I think people are more open-minded today because of what happened 30 years ago, maybe more than that,” she said.
And this brought Anderson back to the fig tree.
According to Anderson, the fig tree is unique in the realm of plants because it germinates from the top down instead of from the ground up. It takes over other trees.
The fig tree produces over 740 different species of fruit which feed multiple different kinds of animals and this is where Anderson draws the connection to the city.
“We could be over 740 different kinds of people but we live here,” she said. “Whatever we believe, we carry from here (Lorain) to somewhere else we go. Whatever is in us about Lorain, good or bad, we take with us when we leave here.”