Serendipity Green Read Online Free PDF

my first inclination, too,” Donald Grinspoon said. “But Bill’s right. Artie isn’t all that famous outside Tuttwyler.”
    â€œWe could make him famous,” Sheriff Norman F. Cole said.
    Again Katherine Hardihood couldn’t resist. This time she didn’t whisper. “We could have a six-mile hobble. Our own little Boston Marathon.”
    Even Dick Mueller chuckled at that.
    â€œAnd we can’t forget what else Artie Brown is famous for,” D. William Aitchbone said. He was referring, of course, to Artie’s 1945 coupling with the appetizing but under-aged Lois Dornick, and, of course, the bastard son that unfortunate union produced.
    So there was no more talk of Artie Brown Days.
    â€œToo bad the snack cake line moved,” Phyllis Bastinado said, scratching the oat-bag of pink fat hanging from her horse jaws. “We could have Cupcake Days.”
    Everyone diverted their eyes and nodded.
    â€œWe’ve got to be famous for something,” Delores Poltruski said.
    That’s when Katherine Hardihood discovered why Donald Grinspoon had invited her to the meeting. “Katherine, you’ve got all those old books and records and things at the library. Find our what we’re famous for!”
    And so Katherine Hardihood’s search for a festival began.
    Tuttwyler is the southern-most village in Wyssock County, the southern-most county in a three-million-acre swath of northeastern Ohio called the Western Reserve. Originally this three-million-acre swath was owned by God, who, for a long time, decided it should be covered by ice. After a while God let the ice melt, exposing gentle slopes and low hills, flatlands and swamps, lakes and rivers and creeks. Unfortunately there were no great mountains or waterfalls or caverns to give future tourists something interesting to gaze at.
    When the ice was gone, trees grew and animals migrated in. But these were fairly run-of-the mill animals: rabbits and raccoons and the like, nothing exotic for later vacationers to see. The only animals with any potential for tourism—woolly elephants called mammoths—were killed off by the first humans to find the iceless swath. These humans, later to be called Indians by other humans called Europeans, lived on the land for many thousands of years. And they never built any grand fortresses or temples to attract future visitors.
    In 1630, James I of England decided he owned this swath. Had he located his throne there, later-day sightseers would have had something grand to gaze at. Instead he granted the swath to the Earl of Warwick, who, along with a gaggle of puritans and witches, was busy creating future tourist destinations on another swath of land called Massachusetts.
    Eventually the swath went to the tiny upstart colony of Connecticut, which did nothing to enhance its tourism potential for the next one hundred and seventy years. Neither did the French, nor the Eries and Hurons and Senecas, all of whom mistakenly thought the swath belonged to them. After the famous revolution that created dozens of future tourist destinations, Connecticut finally turned its attention to the swath and promptly sold it to forty-eight developers for, the fact-loving Katherine Hardihood read in one old book, a bargain-basement million-two.
    One of those forty-eight developers was a Yale-educated lawyer named Moses Cleaveland. In 1796, Cleaveland led fifty surveyors westward into the swath now called the Western Reserve. It was measured into counties and townships and settlers began trickling in.
    Settlers did not trickle into southern Wyssock County until after Ohio became a state in 1803. Those who trickled into the hills along Three Fish Creek were more concerned with planting wheat and corn than creating a future tourist destination. Search as she may through the library’s old books and records, Katherine Hardihood found nothing more interesting than the story of how Three Fish Creek got its