I-71

I have spent some of my life on Interstate 71. It is a great connector to I-90 coming out of Buffalo to Cleveland down to I-65 in Louisville, Kentucky.

I watched it being built when I was a teenager in the 60's and drove some of the completed portions on the way to college at Ohio State. A friend and I would race to the Mount Sterling exit on Friday evenings so we could go home and farm with our dads.

Now it will be our connector to the north to our daughter's family in Lakewood Ohio. Lakewood sits right on Lake Erie near Interstate 90 and Interstate 71. I know they have good schools because every person I met from there is very smart, at least well educated.

Cleveland is a melting pot like Buffalo in the early days. You had all these immirgrants coming from poor countries in Europe just desiring a chance at freedom in the American life.

Cleveland was so foreign to me when I was a student at Ohio State. I was not raised in an environment anything like those students were. I can't say I ever made any good friends there because Cleveland is city and my home town of Sardinia is surely country.

But we got along OK, it was just so hard to compete with those better educated students. I never competed very well. They had no clue about farming and I had no clue about physics. They were very entertained by my southern accent as I was with their northern accent.

Cleveland has been called the mistake on the lake. The Cuyahoga River caught fire at at one time during the industrial age. Now I think it is pretty much an information based economy.

It's nothing short of amazing how small the world had gotten with technology. Now my daughter's family lives in Cleveland which was a very foreign place to southern Ohio when I was a child.

I know my dad saw a lot of change over his lifetime and now I have too.

Ed