In a photo from the July 9, 1950, edition of The Lima News, Stan Stench investigates debris near the South Main Street bridge. Stench, who professed a love for Hawg Crick, wrote, “Like a caress to my appreciative nostrils came that sweet scent – the unmistakable fragrance that means Lima’s river is in full bloom.”
Lima reached the middle of the 20th century feeling pretty good about itself.
“The last five decades have seen improvement in electric lights, advent of airplanes, automobiles, improved fabrics and a host of other things which Mr. Lima takes virtually for granted,” The Lima News wrote on New Year’s Day 1950. “Lima has more homes now, more people (the city’s population would top 50,000 in that year’s census); the city houses big business which carries Lima’s name throughout the world.”
“Mr. Lima,” however, also had a few problems, and one of them was difficult to ignore, particularly during the heat and humidity of midsummer. The Ottawa River looked awful and smelled worse.
On July 9, 1950, as the U.S. became embroiled in the Korean conflict and The Lima News reported that a civilian observation corps might be stationed atop Cook Tower to guard against surprise attack, Mr. Lima anticipated a visit from a state mobile laboratory to assess the Ottawa River, a stream residents called Hawg Crick (a corruption of Hog Creek, one of the Ottawa’s tributaries).
“Dear State Experts,” The Lima News wrote in an open letter, “I hope you enjoy your mobile laboratory’s visit to the banks of Hawg Crick. In fact, I hope you like it so well you’ll want to take the crick away with you.”
Several pages back in the same day’s edition, The Lima News introduced Mr. Lima to “Stan Stench,” an unlikely ally in efforts to make the river something more than an open sewer. Stench’s gas-masked visage would accompany articles heaping praise on Hawg Crick while deriding the efforts of those he labeled “bath-takers” to clean it up. Stench’s barrage of mock anti-improvement stories would earn praise for arousing public interest in cleaning up the river.
“People are always sneering about Hawg Crick,” Stench wrote by way of introducing himself. “They say nasty things about it and have even gone so far as to state that they wish Hawg Crick wasn’t. Now I, Stan Stench, like Hawg Crick. It is very beautiful. I also like morgues, dead cats, the A-bomb and the H-bomb.”
Photos accompanying the article, titled “Down by the Old Swill Stream,” showed Stench in his gas mask standing on a low dam choked with debris, peering over head-high weeds along the riverbank and digging through trash in the nearly dry riverbed.
“Leaning over the South Main Street bridge rail, I peered at the appetizing-looking stagnant water below and wondered how anyone could object to Hawg Crick,” he wrote.
Lima’s problems with the river that runs through it were longstanding. Although the Ottawa River in pioneer days “was a stream of clear running water that flowed throughout the year and afforded many pools suitable for swimming, fishing and the like,” it also regularly overflowed its banks, leaving the ground nearby swampy. After the calamitous 1913 flood, the river was dredged and straightened, alleviating the flooding.
By then, however, Lima was a thriving industrial city, and residents and industries treated the river like a sewer. By the 1920s, residents had begun to refer to it as Hog Creek and eventually Hawg Crick. After the state filed a handful of lawsuits to force a cleanup of the river, the city in 1928 tried to pass a $1 million bond issue to do just that. It failed.
“Later that year, the state threatened criminal action against the city,” The Lima News wrote in June 2005. “To stem that, a sewage treatment plant was built, which began operation in 1932.”
Within a decade, that plant could no longer keep up with the needs of the growing city, and the odor from the river continued to waft in the summer air.
In July 1950, the Lima Civic Improvement Committee was formed, and the anti-improvement Stan Stench was born. While the committee vowed “to stay on the job until Hog Creek becomes again the Ottawa River” and state officials examined the river, Stench, on July 25, 1950, proclaimed: “I, Stan Stench, am against all these goings on. We’ve got a nice odor-laden, mosquito-ridden, bug-infested Hawg Crick running through Lima, and I’d like to see it stay that way.”
Things didn’t stay that way. In early January 1951, the state issued recommendations resulting from its survey of the river the previous summer, including enforcement of laws against dumping rubbish into the stream and improving sewers, all of which the city began acting upon. In November 1951, Lima voters were asked to approve $220,800 worth of bonds to improve the river, as well as $3.5 million in bonds to construct a new Lima Senior High School near the river on South Pierce Street.
In the weeks before the vote, according to The Lima News, the civic improvement committee borrowed the image of Stench, “the gas-masked champion of Hawg Crick,” from the newspaper to promote the issue, posting hundreds of posters throughout the city with the message “Get Stench on Nov. 6.”
They did, approving the river clean-up as well as the new high school. A front-page photo in the News on Nov. 7 showed Stench, in gas mask with a pack on a stick, standing forlornly next to a Lima corporation limit sign.
“The leaden sky began to spit snowflakes,” the caption read. “They brushed against the lenses of the mask. But he didn’t see them. In his mind was the awful recollection of his defeat at the polls Tuesday, and the faces of the victorious bath-takers floated in the snowy mist before him. The mist closed in on the shuffling little figure, Stench was gone …”
Former Lima News reporter W.W. Ward, who in 1950 was editor of a newspaper in Texas, congratulated The Lima News for its part in promoting the bond issue in a letter published a month after the vote.
“I think the Stan Stench stunt was wonderful,” wrote Ward, who had fought for a similar river clean-up issue while in Lima 30 years previously and vividly recalled that “the odor that came from that river during the summer months was something terrific. Even now I can remember it.”
Following passage of the bond issue, a program was outlined for river improvement which included channel cleaning, elimination of industrial and domestic pollution and repair of three existing dams and construction of two new ones. A constant flow of water was assured by an upstream pipeline, which pumped purified water from treatment plants into the river when necessary to keep it flowing and, as one letter-writer noted, keep Lima from being “a city of many bridges but no stream” during dry summers.
In the final touches, civic groups volunteered to clean up the river’s banks, an effort that continues with the Ottawa River cleanup every April.
On Aug. 26, 1955, in the gymnasium of the new Lima Senior High School, the Lima Civic Improvement Committee held a ceremony for the “Dedication of the Historically Named and Reactivated Ottawa River.” In a souvenir program, the committee paid tribute to The Lima News for the publicity it gave the river improvement project.
“Stan Stench deserves a lion’s share of the credit for arousing public interest and selling the issue at the polls,” the committee noted.
Following the ceremony, as E.J. Ward, head of the civic improvement committee, Ohio Gov. Frank J. Lausche, Lima Mayor Clyde Welty and others looked on, last rites were held for Stan Stench on the South Pierce Street bridge.
“A bomb exploded, police sirens screamed and Lima’s ‘bath-takers of the first water’ (as Stan described those who campaigned to clean up Hawg Crick) were agape as gas-masked pall bearers lugged the coffin from a garbage truck and dropped it into Stan’s old bailiwick — rededicated as the Ottawa River,” The Lima News wrote, adding that “The Senior High School band, which had blasted an off-key fanfare to open the ceremony and played the funeral march, concluded the rites – on key.”
One of the pall-bearers was former Lima News reporter Tom Hunter, who, the News acknowledged in a September 1953 story, had acted as a “ghost writer” for Stan Stench.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
