Where Is Tinder Street?

I’m sure we’ve all heard the old thing about telling a lie so many times you begin to believe it’s true. Apparently that also can happen when you tell a story in fiction often enough. Let me explain.

My Tinder Street family saga is set in the Old South End of Toledo, Ohio. I know this area well because I lived there when I went to high school. Back then it was a blue collar working man’s neighborhood, but unfortunately today it has become nothing but slums, and many of the homes of my childhood friends have been burned down or are boarded up. But there are still some die hard folks in the Old South End who are hanging on and will never leave, God love ’em.

There are several online forums about Toledo, and a couple of them focus on the old neighborhood. With the administrators’ permission, I have posted links to the series about the McNally family and their experiences from just before World War I until eventually the Vietnam War as the series progresses. Since many of the members of those groups have a connection to the Old South End, it has resulted in quite a few sales and new readers for the series.

There was a thread on one of these forums that I had to chuckle at because someone asked where Tinder Street was. One person said it had been a block off of Western Avenue, east of Mary Street, but was covered up by a realignment of Interstate 75 back in the 1970s. Somebody else told them they were wrong, it was off of Bloomfield Street and had been wiped off the map when the Union Station Depot was expanded to accommodate Amtrak. Yet a third person told the first two that they had no idea what they were talking about; the first book in the series clearly states that the street took its name from the Tinder Match Company which had been located down by the Norfolk Western railroad tracks. She knew this for a fact because her grandfather and uncle had worked there.

I decided to end the debate by explaining that while many of the locations in the series are real, and that some of the events in the books actually took place, there never was a Tinder Street, nor was there ever a Tinder Match Company. I used literary license to invent them for the series. Two of the three people who commented told me I was wrong. Huh? What do I know? Go figure.

In other news, the weekend before last we were down into the 20s, and the last few days we’ve been up into the 80s, with enough humidity that Terry finally gave in yesterday afternoon and turned our air conditioner on for the first time.

We have our office set up in the room in the back of the house with all of the windows looking out onto our pasture. At one time it was a porch that was enclosed, and it’s not insulated as well as the rest of the house. That and all the windows make for a pretty warm experience when we’re out there working in the afternoons. If the house AC doesn’t do the job, I’ve got a window unit that we had at our place in Florida for use with our Honda generators during power outages after hurricanes. I think it’s only been used for a couple of days, so we may put it in one of the windows back here if necessary.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – Don’t take criticism from people you would never go to for advice.