King Mike died in 1920, and his oldest son, my great-uncle Will, became King of the Farm, but it was my grandfather who was placed upon the throne of Sandusky. This was not in strict adherence to the Succession Ordinance, but few men ever defied my grandfather and lived or did not have a business failure.
Under the reign of my grandfather, Sandusky grew in power and prosperity. A grain elevator was built and a factory and then another. My grandfather was always at war. He conquered Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and Oak Openings State Park, where there was a battle that lasted nearly two days in the dark and tangled woods of the bird sanctuary. In 1942 he defeated Port Clinton, using archers—as his father had—and massed infantry armed with pikes and swords at the bridge on Route 4. The mounted knights he fought, whose number made up nearly all the nobility and royal family of Port Clinton, were shot down with arrows or forced over the guardrail and drowned in their heavy armor before anyone could get to them with a powerboat. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Cavalry is important for mobility’s sake and for swift forays, but the true strength of an army lies in its well-trained foot soldiers. Also horses have to be fed and groomed every day and usually boarded at a stable on the outskirts of town.
King Barney commissioned a navy for Sandusky, with three-masted galleons. And he fought sea battles at Put-In Bay, at North Bass Island, and even at the mouth of the Maumee River, in Toledo harbor. Thus my grandfather wrested much of the freighter traffic in western Lake Erie from the Businessmen Princes of Toledo and Detroit, Michigan. He also fended off attacks from the barbarians who came down out of Canada in their war ferries. They wore no armor, only hats, and fought with axes, but they were fearsome warriors nonetheless and were driven from our shores only after they had sacked many fishing camps and a boat dock. There was an uprising, too, among the peasants who were in a labor union at the Willis Overland plant, and my grandfather put down that rebellion with great force. And he quarreled with the deacon of the largest Presbyterian church in town, a man who commanded powerful forces and wanted to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, which commanded Prohibition and caused a great schism in Ohio. My grandfather, at last, seized all the deacon’s property and foreclosed on some empty lots and small businesses that he owned, distributing them with his customary largess to the earls and counts who owned restaurants and bars and had fought loyally by the king’s side. He took for himself a Buick dealership. And built a palace for the royal household on Elm Street. By the time I was born, in 1957, King Barney ruled nearly all of north-central Ohio from Lorraine to Bucyrus and as far west as Perrysburg. What he hadn’t conquered by sword and fire had been annexed by the city government, and dukes and barons from surrounding towns swore fealty to my grandfather, even, in some cases, sending their own children as hostages on vacation visits to the royal court. Where, of course, they were treated with the greatest courtesy.
King Barney, though fierce in war, was at heart a kindly man, loved by his subjects. Very few were the times when he threw anyone into the dungeon at the Buick dealership, and only then when they had commited some heinous crime. And he hated to order an execution. Even when Lenord of Fostoria married my second cousin, Duchess Connie, and treated her cruelly, and was cast into the dungeon and broke $300 worth of distributor caps and taillight lenses which were stored there, Grandfather did not have him killed but just talked him into joining the Marine Corps.
My grandfather, King Barney, had five children. Crown Prince Bob was the oldest; then my father, who bore the title Prince of New Car Sales and was also the Captain of the Royal Guard; then Princess Annie; then Prince Larry, who ran the used-car lot; and my youngest uncle, Prince Fred. My father married Princess Doris, whose father had been the Emperor of Michigan City, Indiana, but who had been deposed in the stock-market crash of 1929. Her family had fled Indiana, and her brother Sam took refuge in a monastery owned by the New York Central Railroad, where he became Chief Abbot and a freight-train engineer. Her sister Dorothy married a real-estate salesman from Chicago who was very successful because he was the duke of a suburb.
I led an idyllic childhood, partly at the court of my grandfather the king and partly at his summer cottage. I was trained in the arts of warfare and at falconry and baseball and playing the trumpet. My father was a great favorite with the people. It was assumed that someday he would be king, since Uncle Bob had no male heirs. Oddly, I must have been nearly ten before I realized that I myself was therefore in line for the crown. And it was not long after I had made that realization that my father was tragically struck down. There had been trouble at the car dealership. A White Castle restaurant across the street had rebelled, and my father and my Uncle Larry, who was his chief lieutenant, gathered their troops and some of the mechanics from the garage and laid siege to the Amazon waitresses. It was only a glancing blow of a halberd that struck my father’s helmet, and Prince Larry told me that in the victorious glow of the burning lunchroom my father complained of nothing but a slight headache. But that night he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and went into the hospital and died. A hundred lancers on horseback and many people in a long line of cars accompanied him to his grave in Woodlawn Cemetery, where our family owned a plot.