Dorothy Morrison and Bailey Hutchinson, grandmother and granddaughter playing in the Little
Cuyahoga River, Akron OH, 2006

Dorothy’s boyfriend, Marc Vitone, owns a house on Uhler Avenue. If you are a strong walker, it is walking distance from Cascade Valley Park, through which the river passes. The water is cold and fairly clean nowadays. In the last century the Cuyahoga and the Little Cuyahoga were highly polluted in part due to a strong industrial base in northeast Ohio. In 1969 the Cuyahoga famously ignited and burned for a couple hours farther north in Cleveland. Yet even then local kids would play in the river. Dorothy is from West Virginia, a more rural state that in the past has sent many to the formerly heavily industrialized Ohio. Marc’s Labrador retriever mix, Pup, wades in as well.