Writing It Real is happy to post an article this week by editor and creative fiction writer Jack Heffron. “The Flowering of Rabbit Hash” originally appeared this fall in Cincinnati Magazine.  Jack lives in Cincinnati where he works with Emmis Books.  As a fiction and creative fiction writer, Jack was hooked on an article idea about Rabbit Hash after he read a small piece in a local newspaper about Edna Flower, an elderly woman who had given the town a lot of money.

“What interested me, Jack said, “was the fact that she had saved the town, but people in Rabbit Hash didn’t really know her. They seemed somewhat sheepish about the size of the gift — undeserving, somehow. They hadn’t taken the time to get to know her. In fact, no one in Cincinnati seemed to know her either. The irony of that tickled me, and the sense that she had died so anonymously moved me. She had worked for 30+ years at Proctor and Gamble, and yet the company did not even know what she did there. Very little information about her existed, and the mystery of who she was engaged me. I wanted to make her the focus of the piece and try to dig around and find out more about her, writing it almost as a memorial. I also saw in the story a possible screenplay idea: a tiny, close-knit town is suddenly given a whole lot of money, which certainly would lead to conflicts.”

The Flowering of Rabbit Hash
by Jack Heffron

To get to Rabbit Hash from Cincinnati, ease onto I-75/71, heading south. Listen to the grinding whine of your tires as you cross the bridge into Kentucky, cars and trucks screaming along both sides of your car as you fight your way past Covington and Erlanger.

Enter Boone County, not so long ago a place of farms and fields, of lonely barns in the distance and hawks riding the upstream breezes. Now it’s the fastest growing county — by far — in the state. Nearly 14,000 newcomers have settled here since the 2000 census. A sea of subdivisions has risen up to meet them.

Take Kentucky 18 off the interstate and head into Burlington. Whistle in wonder at how much it has grown since you were here last. Pastures have turned into homes and streets, chain restaurants, strip malls, schools, a fire station as big as a city block, all of it looking so new it seems to still wear the price tag. Snicker softly at the thought of Daniel Boone, the county’s namesake, coming to terms with this sprawl despite his legendary need for “elbow room.”

Eventually the road narrows to two lanes that twist into the farms you expected to see much sooner. The journey now is through time as well as space, especially on a warm Saturday morning in late September, when fog blinds you on all sides, parting like a flock of ghosts as you drive. Soon you’ll turn right onto Rabbit Hash road. Make a quick left at the sign announcing Rabbit Hash General Store. You’ll swoop down a steep hill into the river bottom, where someone apparently put up a tiny town in the 1830s and then forgot about it.

The general store, though freshly painted, looks every bit of 170. A sign perched atop the store features a smiling, bottlecap-hatted Coke mascot from an ad campaign long past and a list of the stores offerings: tobacco, sundries, notions and potions. Today it sells mostly souvenirs, soda pop, and beer. A dog with a bit of chow somewhere in his lineage, drowses on the sagging porch. Across the narrow street stand the non-working iron works and a second-hand store that sells everything from eight-track tapes to a hand-made hobbyhorse. Several other old wooden buildings swell the ranks, including the town’s museum, a tiny log cabin.

As the day warms, the fog burns away and a trickle of people arrive for the annual Rabbit Hash Old-Timers Day. Before long, an odd mix of folks weaves in and out of the stores and museum. Most obvious are the locals themselves, dressed as “old-timers” in straw hats and bib overalls, a few of them puffing on pipes or leaning on walking sticks. Khaki-shorts-and-polo-shirts families from the suburbs stroll the streets too, and throughout the day, more and more bikers arrive, roaring into the town, some driving right through the main street. Many wear faded blue jeans and black t-shirts, some of the men with do-rags on their heads. They move through the crowd with a certain proprietary swagger.

 The large presence of bikers has been a divisive issue in the town. Some residents feel that any tourists are good tourists while others object to the noise and rowdy behavior in their quiet town. A few long-time residents have even moved away. Through town meetings and public complaints, Rabbit Hash has reclaimed a modicum of tranquility but the alliance is an uneasy one.

Nevertheless, all are met before noon to unveil two bronze plaques. The first, high on a poll to the left of the little main road, announces that the Rabbit Hash district has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The other, affixed to the front door of the history museum, expresses gratitude to a deceased resident of the town who left $250,000 to the historical society.

Don Clare, president of the historical society, the town’s de facto governing body, conducts the ceremony. Clare wears bib overalls, a white t-shirt, and wire-framed glasses. His hair is gray-white and his lush beard is snow white, but there’s a boyish charm in his face, his eyes twinkling as he talks about the greatness of Rabbit Hash

“Rabbit Hash is utopia,” he tells the crowd. “Rabbit Hash is the Emerald City. Rabbit Hash is the center of the universe.” He reads from a page of scribbled notes in a soft Kentucky accent that doesn’t so much twang as caress his words. His praise for the town is delivered with a sly grin, and it’s tough to determine how much tongue is in his cheek. Are we joking about the value of this place or truly honoring it? The crowd answers my unspoken question by offering an occasional cheer of approval and agreement. Rabbit Hashers seem to believe they are the center of the universe, or at least as much of it as they care to consider. A documentary film titled Rabbit Hash: Center of the Universe, released last year, supports their belief.

Best known for electing a dog as its mayor, the town hugs the Ohio directly across from Rising Sun, Indiana, home to the Grand Victoria Casino, where thousands of less fortunate folk feed their dreams into slot machines. They still yearn for the big jackpot. Hashers feel they’ve already found it. And they wear their riches like an old coat soft in all the right places.

Ed and Lynn Unterreiner moved here from Cincinnati eighteen years ago, enraptured by the anomaly of the place, which looked to them like something out of a history book. Since then they have raised four children and never regretted their decision for a moment.

“It’s a real home town,” Lynn says. “Everybody’s very friendly. People know each other’s business, but that’s a good thing. You know you can count on your neighbors when you need them.” Growing up in Western Hills was far different for her than life in Rabbit Hash, she says. She prefers the latter. “You know that movie they’re making — Rabbit Hash: Center of the Universe? That pretty much sums it up.”

Ed agrees. “When I drove out here for the first time, I fell in love with it,” Ed says. “I like getting away from the hustle and bustle of the city.” A general contractor, he often spends his days working in Cincinnati and is always glad to be home again in the peace and quiet. “People are relaxed here,” he explains. “Rabbit Hash is unique because it hasn’t changed. It’s always been this way.”

Keeping it this way, however, is not easy. In fact, it’s been nearly impossible. Development in Boone County continues at a frantic pace, bringing more people, cars, homes, strip malls, noise and pollution into what used to be wooded hillsides. To protect themselves, residents have applied for every preservation grant and registry they can find. Their efforts have led to the listing on the National Register of Historic Places as well as a recent designation by First Lady Laura Bush as a “Preserve America Community.” Such distinctions bring prestige to the town but offer no money and little in the way of protection from local interests. Being on the National Register protects the town only from projects involving federal resources.

Rabbit Hashers have fought development at every turn. Fortunes looked bleak in 1999, when plans were underway to install a large sewage treatment plant in the area. Residents figured sewage systems meant running water and water meant development. Despite the odds of standing up to county government, Rabbit Hash fought and won.

“I see development coming from all directions,” says Terry Markesbery-Young, who runs the general store. “It’s on my mind every day. Town is getting closer every time I go to town, and I don’t like that.” She has lived in Rabbit Hash for seven years, along with her husband, Richard, who is a stone carver and has a shop in town. As proprietor of the general store, she is at the vortex of the Rabbit Hash universe. She says the only thing that gives her comfort is that the river runs along the north side of town, and so at least development can’t come from that direction.

Don Clare disagrees. He says the casino has been a threat since before it opened its doors. Town leaders were aghast at the original plans for a pink boat with purple neon and a lighthouse.

“They were making an atrocity,” he says. “It was a threat to our historical integrity.” Because at that time several buildings in town were on the National Registry of Historic Places — the town itself and thirty-three acres around it didn’t make the list until recently — Rabbit Hash was able to leverage a few concessions in terms of the casino’s design and the amount of light it was allowed to generate. But Clare and the other town leaders fear that Rising Sun, or the casino itself, wants to turn Rabbit Hash into a ferryboat landing.

“A developer called me not too long ago and said he’d knock down the buildings and blacktop the whole town for free,” Clare recalls. “I said, ‘What rock did you crawl out from under?'” He snorts a laugh, but the tightness in his voice suggests the offer was as insulting as it was absurd. To sharpen the point, he repeats, “Knock down the buildings!” He explains that interests in Rising Sun believe Cincinnatians could reach the casino more quickly by driving through Kentucky and ferrying back across the river at Rabbit Hash, thereby eliminating the need for driving through Lawrenceburg and passing rival casinos.

Clare says the town will do what it can to preserve itself. “In other countries, their historic legacies go back eons,” he adds. “They take pride in that. In the U.S., we like to bulldoze ours.”

A means of keeping the bulldozers away, at least for now, arrived unexpectedly in 2002. A long-time, part-time resident named Edna Flower bequeathed $250,000 to the Rabbit Hash historical society. The society’s museum features a motley mess of rusted tools, old photos of the town, and medical supplies circa 1920. There’s a certain pluck in the collection’s attempt to commemorate the past, and an undeniable charm to the museum itself, but the body of it can be viewed in all of ten minutes. The organization’s monthly expenses amount to a smidge over six dollars, so the unexpected windfall of a quarter of a million left a few bucks to spare.

Clare runs his fingers through his thick white beard as he remembers the call from the bank informing him of the donation. “It was surprising,” he says. “It was a whole lot more than I expected it to be.” After pausing for a moment, he adds “It was providence.”

With that amount of money, one would think the society could buy the whole damn town. And one would be right. They did. The society was able to borrow against the principle to purchase all the buildings from long-time resident Lowell “Louie” Scott, who began buying them in 1978 in an effort to protect Rabbit Hash from outside developers. As he neared retirement a few years ago, Scott asked for help from his neighbors, but they lacked the money to shoulder his burden. The society’s bank balance was less than a thousand dollars.

“We were circling the drain before Louie stepped up,” Clare explains, adding that the drain looked pretty close again before the unlikely savior appeared.

Edna Flower is a mystery. She bought a modest home overlooking the river in 1973, but spent little time there. A Cincinnatian, she wanted the home as an investment and occasional retreat. Few Rabbit Hashers knew her.

“She’d come in when the yard got overgrown and then disappear again,” recalls Kenny Williamson, a life-long resident. “You’d see her sometimes working in her yard, pulling weeds, wearing a sun hat. She was friendly but kept to herself. Other than waving to her in the yard, I never spoke to her.”

Williamson’s story is echoed by nearly everyone in Rabbit Hash. Edna came to town, worked in her yard, perhaps stopped at the general store or the craft shop, said little, and left. No one suspected she was worth millions or that she would help save the town.

“I knew who she was,” Clare offers, “but I can’t say I really knew her. She was pleasant to people, but she wouldn’t ever come to you and initiate a conversation.”

It’s not difficult to discern a bit of embarrassment among the locals when her name is mentioned. The irony of erecting a memorial to someone they don’t really remember — someone who lived for twenty-five years in a town that prides itself on neighborliness — is not lost on them. They struggle for phrases such as “nice” and “kind of quiet” and seem unable even to describe her appearance.

Betty and Werneth Avril, Edna’s next door neighbors, are the only Rabbit Hashers who knew her, and though the couple spent a good bit of time with her for a few years before she died, they never learned much about her.

“Edna was peculiar,” Betty says. “She could be very distrustful, and she wasn’t a person who said very much about her life.” The Avrils, who now live in Dallas, bought their place in Rabbit Hash for weekend getaways while living in Mt. Adams. The family owned Avril meats on Court Street, and were pleased to learn Edna had been a regular customer years before.

“She knew my husband from that time and liked him,” Betty says. “Otherwise I doubt she’d have ever become a friend.” The friendship blossomed to the point where the Avrils picked up Edna once and week and drove her to the bank, post office, and various other places. They spoke to her on the phone nearly every night. However, they never were invited into her home and learned little about her life. After helping her move into an assisted-living center a year or two before she died, they never heard from her again.

“It was as if she turned a corner and had moved on with her life,” Betty says.

No one in Cincinnati learned much about her either. Edna was a childless widow who had few friends, but given that she lived and worked for eighty-nine years in Greater Cincinnati and died only a few years ago, piecing together her life is like chasing a ghost.

Edna Balzhiser was born in 1912 and raised an only child in Oakley. She graduated from Withrow High School in 1929. Her father was a musician who may have worked for a time in the circus and later worked for a railroad company. He was killed in a train accident, perhaps during the 1930s. Edna lived with her mother until her mother passed away and then continued to live in the same house in Oakley.

Sources contradict each other, but it seems that she worked her entire career, nearly forty years, for Proctor & Gamble. Some say she was secretary to the CEO or at least a high-ranking executive. Others say she was involved with arranging travel plans for incoming corporate guests as well as P&G execs. Still others say she worked in marketing. P&G has no record of her position. Contemporaries at the company have no memory of her, except that she kept to herself, so much so that she brought her lunch every day and ate it in her car in the parking lot. She retired in 1970. In later years she bought real estate, owning apartment buildings in Oakley and Hyde Park. Family members assume her considerable estate is the result of amassing P&G stock.

“I remember her talking a lot about the stock market with my parents,” says Charles Meister, a Cincinnati resident and Edna’s second cousin. Now 68 years old, he was too young to recall much about her when she would come to visit the family farm in West Liberty during the 1940s and ‘50s. He says Edna always kept everyone at a distance.

“She was very mysterious, pretty much a loner, I guess you’d say. I don’t know if we ever even had her address. After a while she stopped coming, and we never knew what happened to her.” He remembers thinking she was somewhat eccentric. “She’d come up here in an old beat-up car and old beat-up clothes. She had an old Plymouth station wagon with a rag stuck in the gas tank. We thought she looked like a person living on the street. But she must have been pretty well off even then.”

Larry Cramer, another cousin, agrees that Edna was intensely private.

“She was sort of a recluse, even she was younger,” he says. “She never mentioned any friends, and no one, not even the family, knew very much about her. I remember years ago when I’d meet people who worked at P&G at Kiwanis meetings I’d ask if they knew her, but I never met anyone who did. That was just Edna.”

He was surprised to receive a call from her in the late 1950s. Though she was over fifty by then, she had never learned to drive but recently had bought a car and asked him to teach her. Cramer, an industrial design teacher at Woodward High School at the time, also taught driver’s education.

“I would go to her home and meet her, but I don’t recall ever being asked into the house. She was always ready when I got there. We’d drive up to Ault Park, and she got to where she could drive around town. I even took her for her exam. After that day I never had contact with her again.”

Edna married Elmore Flower late in life but little is known about the couple. She may have been married once before, briefly, but again the trail is difficult to follow. She lived the final decades of her life alone, the final ones at Victoria Retirement Community in Norwood, where she died on April 26, 2001. She was worth millions, which she left to various charities, including two million to the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. She is buried in Greenlawn Cemetery in Milford.

And so ends what seems to be known about a woman who already is mostly forgotten, except for a plaque on the front door of the Rabbit Hash Historical Society’s museum that reads:

In memory and appreciation of Edna B. Flower
for her extraordinary generosity and support for the
preservation of the town of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky

But all is not financial trench warfare in Rabbit Hash. The town enjoys having a good bit of fun, even at its own expense. Though most residents are well-educated professionals, making the town seem like a real-life version Lil Abner’s Dog Patch is a community hobby. Rabbit Hash hats, t-shirts, coffee mugs, drinking glasses, and bumper stickers line the shelves of the general store.

They take pride in being known for electing a dog named Goofy as their mayor. The election, held in 1998, raised funds for the East Bend Methodist Church, as votes were sold for a dollar apiece and voters were encouraged to cast as many ballots as they wished. According to residents, Goofy served his office well, until he was put to sleep at the age of fifteen in 2001.

Back in November, the town finally filled the vacant position by electing Junior, a black lab, as its new honorary leader. The election raised eight thousand dollars, which will be spent on maintaining the old wooden structures of the town.

This tradition caught the eye of Los Angeles documentary filmmaker Jude Gerard Prest. During the winter of 2002 he was in Rising Sun, making a documentary for the Travel Channel on riverboat casinos. When told the little town across the river had a canine mayor, he had to see for himself. After one visit, he quickly gathered the resources to make a short film.

“We were thinking it would be a Daily Show type of piece, but within an hour of being there we knew it was something much bigger,” Prest explains. He spent weeks interviewing the locals, returning several times, including on Old Timer’s Day in September. “When people see the film they think I’m going to make fun of these people and make them seem like hicks, but then it turns, and it’s anything but that. It’s really an homage.”

On December 18, the film made its Midwest premier at the Madison Theater in Covington. Prest hopes that it will play the art-house circuit or be picked up for wide release, though nothing has been decided yet. In the meantime, it has played at several film festivals and at an art house in Los Angeles. He’s also developing a pilot for a television show that would chronicle the election.

He says he worked hard to ensure the film captures the essence of Rabbit Hash. “They’re an eclectic group of people who just get it,” he says. “They make a statement in their own way, and it’s just a simpler way of looking at things. I want the audience to leave thinking, ‘Maybe these people have it right, and we’re the idiots.'”

Rabbit Hashers certainly seem to agree. They’re having fun playing bumpkins while supporting a place that provides tranquility and a link with the past. If preserving that way of life also means putting up a fight, they’ll do that too.

“There’s something here that’s tough to describe,” Clare says. “People like Rabbit Hash. They like to say ‘Rabbit Hash.’ When you hear the name you smile. There’s just something unique about it, and we want to preserve that uniqueness. There won’t be a Rabbit Hash McDonald’s, and there won’t be a Rabbit Hash Wal-Mart. We’re sure about that.”

****

When he queried Cincinnati Magazine with his idea, the editors had no interest in the piece. Jack recounts that they felt “that neither Rabbit Hash nor Edna warranted a feature-length piece…”

“But for some reason,” he says, “the query must have hung around in their files. When the town made the news again with the commemoration of the plaque and the award from the First Lady, an editor contacted me and asked if I wanted to do a piece on Rabbit Hash. I asked if I could weave the story of Edna Flower into the piece, and they were okay with that approach.”

“I very much enjoyed hunting for Edna, piecing together her story like a jigsaw puzzle, investigating the past. I came to feel as if I knew her. The investigation required many, many phone calls to various people in her family, some neighbors, a few people who had worked with her. No one knew much, and so it was a matter of getting a bit of information here, a bit of information there, being told to call so-and-so, who might know more, and then so-and-so offering a nugget or two but telling me to call someone else who may know more. Following Edna’s trail back into her past was fascinating, watching as aspects of her character emerged.”

Jack “enjoys bringing true stories to life–evoking unusual places in America, telling stories of unknown people whose stories are worth telling.”  Humble as always, he says, “I wish I had been able to tell it better, to spend more time shaping it. Following the trail of Edna took so much time that I didn’t have as much time as I needed to really shape the piece and to write it well, to hit all the notes, as it were.

But I guess as writers we always feel a bit of that after a piece is turned in.”