Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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I really like peaches. When I was a kid, during peach season I put them on my Wheaties every morning for breakfast. Then I often had a peach with my lunch. And for dinner we might enjoy peach pie or maybe peach cobbler for dessert.
Sometime in the early 1970s, I heard about a peach orchard called Branstool, near Utica. Their peaches were wonderful, and I started making a few trips there every summer. They featured different varieties as the season progressed. All of them were good, but the “Red Havens” were my favorite. I loved those Red Haven peaches.
One of my trips to that orchard stands out above all the rest. It was in 1984. I drove there on a beautiful Saturday morning. I parked in their gravel parking lot and went inside.
As I opened the door and stepped into their large display room, some guy came up to me and shook my hand as he said, “Good morning, I’m Walter Mondale. I’m running for President, and I would appreciate your support.” That’s right, I was shaking hands with the 1984 Democratic candidate for President of the United States.
You see, the Branstool family was very active in Ohio’s Democrat party, and they had made arrangements to have Walter Mondale visit to “meet the folks.” He was really a friendly guy, and he said it was going to be a tough race and he needed my support.
The whole thing was quite a surprise to me. He talked mostly about the campaign. If I had some time to think about it, there were a lot of questions I could have asked … you know, questions about the “Cold War” or what his policy toward Castro’s Cuba would be. But we talked mostly about the campaign itself. And before I left, we talked quite a bit about peaches. Walter was also a peach lover, and those Red Havens were his favorites, too.
I saw him one more time that year. I was in Columbus on a shopping trip, and he was holding a rally on the Statehouse lawn. I walked across High Street and into the lawn to hear what he had to say. There wasn’t a very large crowd, and I felt a little sorry for him.
President Reagan was the clear favorite. Some of the people in the crowd were even wearing Reagan pins. In the November electoral vote count, Reagan won with 525 electoral votes to 13 for Mondale.
I never got a chance to talk one-on-one with Reagan the way I did with Mondale. So I really can’t tell you how he felt about those wonderful Red Haven peaches.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at
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