This essay is for the more than 300 million puzzled Americans who, thanks to our resident professional football enterprise, may have noticed February has filled with the word “Cincinnati.” What is this place?
No matter where you go, you climb a hill, thanks to the glacier that planed much of the rest of Ohio 300,000 years ago. The city’s name, bestowed by the aspirational early settlers, summons the Roman leader Cincinnatus, who tidied up the empire then retired to his farm. A visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, under the sway of the local Catawba grape, sang of “the Queen of the West, in her garlands dressed, on the banks of the beautiful river.”
You soak up the 21st century edition of this vision going north on Interstate 71-75 in Covington, Kentucky. Pass through “the cut in the hill” and savor one of the nation’s most spectacular urban vistas. If this view doesn’t get you busting out with, “Baby, have you ever wondered/wondered whatever became of me,” check your pulse.
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The theme song of “WKRP in Cincinnati” swells hearts here nearly as much as the national anthem. That TV portrait delivers hard on the local flavor most especially in the Thanksgiving 1978 episode, from which arises our local prayer, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
But “WKRP” illustrates how the stiff, square Midwest was a critical ingredient in rock ’n’ roll. You got to have something to rebel against, man. The only sad note amid the joy right now in Cincinnati was the Jan. 29 death of actor Howard Hesseman, whose portrayal of WKRP disc jockey Dr. Johnny Fever made plain that even life’s biggest hippie dips could find a groove in the Queen City.
Gorgeous hills cannot hide Cincinnati’s manifold flaws, which worsened through the pandemic. The city owns world-class health care, but no one knows what that system can deliver once the new coronavirus crisis ebbs and caregivers crawl out from under the rubble. Cincinnati’s children have been killing each other with guns in record numbers. Too many of them go to sleep hungry and cut off from schooling.
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Over its life, Cincinnati has been a global heart of commerce and a Rust Belt ruin. Today, the shift to the information/biotechnology economy has matured and expanded. The University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center operated key points of research for the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. The growth and sprawl have lured prodigals home to the hills.
Bump into a Cincinnati resident at a Kroger or in Over-the-Rhine or in Mount Airy Park and hear the same story: went off to college/medical school/law school/gap decade, then returned with spouses and children and moved into houses next door to their parents. And there, they gather every Sunday for the Cincinnati Bengals.
Since the franchise last contended in the Super Bowl in 1989, such family gatherings turned into one aching exhibition of the Bungles after another, one agonizing climb after another of a hill never summited. Matters are not eased that taxpayers still pay for a stadium erected 21 rebuilding seasons ago.
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For today, though, all is forgiven. After so many hard blows to the municipal soul, victory pours through Cincinnati as sparkling as Catawba wine. City lights glow Bengals orange from every building and billboard. The young quarterback arrived from eastern Ohio country that the glacier also missed, so he gets us, and we get him. The team’s thrilling storm to the NFL title game now means more than 300 million Americans confront the character measurement of a Cincinnati chili order and the provenance of “Who Dey. Care for a plate of goetta?”
You will read fresh love letters to Fiona, the princess hippopotamus at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, and to Elbert “Ickey” Woods, the former Bengals star still resident in Cincinnati who lost his 16-year-old son to a 2010 asthma attack. Woods now raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for clinical research.
Practical Ohioans that we are, we know the Super Bowl is one game. When the Bengals do their job and return from Los Angeles, we’ll throw a parade and be generally off our nuts for a few days. Then we’re back to work. What abides here in the spirit of Cincinnatus is a concentration of what abides in America. Cincinnati is not perfect. But the people of Cincinnati believe that from these hills, perfect is within reach.
Anne Saker, a career daily journalist, recently retired as a staff writer at The Cincinnati Enquirer.
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