When Stuart Warner first found his true voice as an Akron Beacon Journal columnist in “Warner’s Corner,” he did so on the well-heeled backs of Muffy and Buffy, fictitious denizens of very real and quaint Hudson. Probably the richest Summit County zip code, Hudson seems out of place in nitty-gritty Northeast Ohio. It belongs in New England.
Years later, Warner explained part of the story of how this came to be. He owed it all to Mrs. Corner, whom he described as a “saucy Jersey girl” who “strutted into the Beacon Journal news room a new hire” and right into his heart. It happened in a blink beneath a green eyeshade: Whirlwind romance, marriage, Baby Corner—all grown up and now a publishing executive in New York City. Mrs. Corner bought her columnist a defining Indiana Jones fedora and he discovered “some magic in that old hat she found.” He literally became The Hat, a persona all his (and Mrs. Corner’s) own.
Suddenly, the guy who admitted he had “struggled to find [his] voice as a columnist” did so in spades by burying Hudson in derision. It could have been worse. In the cause of a belly laugh, he also wrote about those who lived in Kenmore, antithesis of hoity-toity Hudson and Muffy and Buffy. He labeled them “Kenmorons” and took some grief. One of those who came out swinging for his neighborhood happened to be mayor of Akron.
Comparatively speaking, Warner treated Muffy and Buffy with kid gloves, though he admitted he “suddenly felt emboldened to take on the battles other journalists feared to fight.” Those included exposing—uh, making up—”the secret lives of the housewives of Hudson, who were bathing in the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan era. Muffy and Buffy lived by the Code of the Hudson 2s: You can never be 2 rich, 2 thin, or 2 tan.”
More years later, Hudson apparently has changed. It may still be the richest zip code in Summit County but apparently some Kenmorites snuck into town in the dead of night, and have turned it into a candidate for a most famous unassigned area code—451.
That’s 451, as in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel in which firemen do not douse flames but fan and fuel them with the pages of troublesome books, which combust at 451 degrees. A hot-damn metaphor for censorship, both act and predictive book have become Hudson for real. In the town that might think itself so cool that it doesn’t require firemen, Mayor Craig Shubert has assumed the role not only of censor but also flame-thrower and over-heated autocrat whose brain may have combusted.
Shubert thinks he runs city government and the school system. He has told the school board members to resign or face criminal charges—he wrongly thought child pornography applied—for permitting a book titled 642 Things to Write About to slither its way into the Hudson with suggestive writing prompts concerning sex, alcohol, and even murder. Stuart Warner has turned a corner in his life/career so this is no charade.
Shubert’s misplaced attack on the school board has drawn not only rebukes but also unwanted national attention to his town that should make Muffy and Buffy cringe—and it is the second time this year. Earlier, Hudson found itself caught with its pants down in a Memorial Day spotlight after the mic of a keynote speaker retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter was cut off as he explained Black America’s role in the creation of this national day of remembrance. Kemter, who is white, is a 1962 Hudson High School graduate. The incident led to resignations, recriminations, and red-faced embarrassments. In other words, a perfect prelude to Shubert attacking the school board and administration for not sanitizing the college-credit course in which the book, but not all of the writing prompts, including some that so alarmed the mayor, had been used.
The book had been used in an advanced placement course titled “Writing in the Liberal Arts II.” It was offered by Hudson schools in association with Hiram College. It is the type of learning experience with which I would be proud to have the Stephen and Jacquelyn Love Endowment for Writing and Literature associated. The idea of two writers, the endowment helped to modernize and upgrade The Writing House at Hiram and supports writing instruction, though I do not believe it has been applied in this case.
After retiring from daily journalism I not only advised the Buchtelite, the student newspaper at the University of Akron, but also served as Director of College Relations at Hiram, where I earned a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. Joyce Dyer, mentor and one of two advisors on my capstone or master thesis, is an award-winning writer and, not coincidentally a longtime resident of Hudson. Now professor of English emerita, she was the first director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature. Our endowment is now administered by her successor Kirsten Parkinson.
When students become associated with Hiram College, they are treated like the young adults they are, and that would include high school students whom the college nurtures. They learn to take responsibility, and I would think that includes learning to use a book of writing prompts responsibly. To censor them, to remove the book from the class stinks of failure on the part of the Hudson administration to support their own instruction. Not every prompt in such a book will be appropriate; that too is a learning experience. But writing is exploring, sometimes fictionally, other times with creative nonfiction.
What Mayor Shubert should be digging into is the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. It prohibits abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. Though he does not control the Hudson schools, the mayor’s uninvited and unwelcome intrusion into education has found some supporters, according to reports. I hope Muffy and Buffy are not among them. That would embarrass their creator.
Stuart Warner invented Hudson archetypes in Muffy and Buffy. They may have been unmindful about Constitutional rights and superficial in their priorities but if anything bothered them it was, I think, having their beloved Hudson turned into a laughing stock. Warner turned them, not Hudson, into the laughing stock. In the end, the Corners moved there themselves. (Kenmore must have been a neighborhood too far.)
It is one thing for Warner—a mere writer—to make Hudson-types the butt of his humor. It is quite another for the mayor to become a laughing stock and take the town with him.
