'He tells it like it is': A reporter heads home again to Ohio’s Trump Country

This is the first in a series of stories called Going Home in which journalists from the USA TODAY Ohio Network return to the communities where they grew up to share firsthand how the contentious 2020 election is playing in various corners of the battleground state.

JEROMESVILLE, Ohio — The hardware store on the square?

No more.

The feed mill down toward the Jerome Fork?

Long gone.

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The lumber company along Main Street?

Torn down.

Even the service station at the edge of town where, as a kid left alone in Dad’s car for a moment, I slipped the ’58 Olds out of gear and coasted backward onto the Lincoln Highway?

Closed for years.

But last week a hot new business opened in the north-central Ohio village of Jeromesville: A temporary kiosk selling Donald Trump merchandise set up on a parking lot that decades earlier was part of the D&F Chevy dealership.

Despite the “hollowing out” of businesses experienced in many Ohio municipalities, the people I talked to in my old hometown of fewer than 600 souls are still hard workers. Many, however, now have longer commutes since such local employers as the Rubbermaid plant in Wooster, pump-makers in Ashland and old-line Mansfield factories like Westinghouse, where my father worked, have shut down.

The area roughly halfway between Cleveland and Columbus remains mostly agricultural. But there’s a catch, as I discovered when I sat down and talked to three generations of farmers: Ray Hall, 80; son Keith, 56; and Keith’s boy Andy, 28, who grow nearly 2,000 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat just down the road from my in-laws. They can think of only a couple of other families who depend solely on agriculture to make a living. Andy knows of only two high school classmates who went into full-time farming.

Farmers like the Halls and the Bicker family, whose 500-acre spread now stretches to the modest farm where I spent most of my first 12 years, must deal with grain prices that often are the same or lower than they were decades ago while the cost of equipment has skyrocketed to as much as $500,000 for a combine.

Dan Bicker says he’s just glad that four years ago the family got out of the milking business, which has hit rock bottom. The somewhat controversial new face of milking sits on a side road about a mile away, where a herd of dozens of cows are rotated through a factory farm and milked essentially around the clock.

But these farm families say they don’t connect their struggles with who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — in large part because their woes have persisted through both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Public school enrollment has plummeted. I had nearly 100 in my graduating class way back in 1973. Now classes average 60 to 70, with many parents opting for home-schooling, says Hillsdale Superintendent Steve Dickerson. A few years back the district fell under state fiscal watch and was one of a handful in Ohio to turn down state funding for a new school building because voters refused to provide local matching money.

But things have suddenly changed. The district is breaking ground Sept. 30 on an $84 million, 227,000-square-foot K-12 school building paid for solely with tax revenue from the new underground Rover gas pipeline and a compressor station built in the district.

The community supports law enforcement, and this almost exclusively white area consists mostly of “All Lives Matter” folks instead of “Black Lives Matter” people. Yes, there is that one house that regularly flies a Confederate flag under the American flag, although the stars and bars have been replaced for now by a Trump 2020 flag.

But I also talked to a Jeromesville-area woman who took part in a Black Lives Matter demonstration in nearby Ashland and complained about the Trump counterprotesters across the street acting like white supremacists.

Still, as Cathy Soles, owner for 18 years of a small market on the 205-year-old village’s square, told me, “This is mainly a Trump-supporting town.”

She said she voted for Obama twice, but like most of her customers now backs Trump.

“I think they’re just sick of the old politicians. They want change,” Soles said. “He tells it like it is. Like anybody else, he’s by no means perfect, but I believe more of what he says than most other politicians.”

It’s a theme you hear often: Don’t bother me with detailed findings from nitpicking fact-checkers, because Trump speaks a greater truth and he’s on my side.

The guy running the kiosk across the street — he wouldn’t tell me his name because of the “stigma” associated with Trump — said Jeromesville was chosen from among several alternatives. Indeed, business was good that morning.

Steve Richards, 47, who pulled up to buy some Trump swag in his 5.7-liter V8 Toyota Tundra after picking up his sophomore daughter from Hillsdale, said the incumbent “represents my values. He creates jobs. I think he runs the country good.”

Richards, disabled after a recent illness, said he admires the president for the sacrifices he’s made.

“He could’ve been living a billionaire’s life. He didn’t have anything to gain, and actually lost money. I believe he’s truly for our country.”

Trump signs and flags adorn lawns and houses as you drive up and down Jeromesville streets — including the brick one that runs past my former abode. However, to find a yard sign for Democrat Joe Biden, I had to get guidance from Keith Hall and drive more than a mile outside the village limits.

It was planted at the home of Keith Gardner, 72, who served on a Navy destroyer and was an electrician who worked at the GM plant in Mansfield until the company shut it down in 2008.

“I can’t stand Donald Trump,” he declared as we chatted on the shaded porch of a home on property carved out from his family’s 81-acre farm.

“He’s a liar. He puts people in office who don’t know anything about the office. They’re just big-time contributors,” Gardner said. “I don’t trust the guy. He’s a millionaire who’s had it his own way. He is egotistical to the hilt. He’s got all his children in office down there. That’s unheard of.”

But Gardner also said, “I don’t really care for Joe Biden. He seems too old and frail. It’s too bad the Democrats couldn’t come up with something better.”

He calls Biden running mate Kamala Harris “a smart, tough lady. It seems like she could step in, no problem.”

In 2016, Trump triumphed among Jeromesville’s 230 residents who went to the polls by 40 percentage points, 67% to 27%, over Hillary Clinton.

The runaway was even bigger in surrounding rural areas, leading to a Trump blowout, 74% to 19%, in the village and three adjoining townships combined.

It was a microcosm of how well Trump performed in rural Ohio four years ago, from the 71% he won in eastern Ohio’s Carroll County to the stunning 81% he took in Mercer County on the state’s western border.

Can he do it again?

Jim Justice, one of two Ashland County commissioners from my high school class, said he thinks the turnout for Trump will be even stronger this year. Justice gives three reasons: Trump’s support for “life at every age but especially the unborn,” the Second Amendment and the military.

But if you want to truly understand areas like this, you must realize that politics just isn’t the blood sport here as it often is in more urban locales.

In a garage just up the street from where my home Jeromesville Christian Church gathers — about 60 strong pre-COVID-19 — several guys including former dairy farmer Bicker are working together to unload a trailer of food into a walk-in cooler. In a rarity among the folks I saw, they all were wearing masks to protect others from the coronavirus.

When I ask about the presidential race, no one is eager to talk. Upon prodding, most acknowledge they likely will vote for Trump. One goes out on a limb and calls Biden “too wishy washy.”

But they heartily agree that what they’re doing that muggy Friday morning is far more important than who wins the White House: helping to feed five dozen families through a ministry called Hillsdale Cares, which involves 13 area churches.

Cindy Young, who has coordinated the ministry since 2003, noted it’s a rarity because volunteers deliver the food to people’s homes. Exuding enthusiasm and resourcefulness, she’s learned to grab provisions from multiple sources, from the government, to area restaurants, to a wrecked truck that provided 300 dozen unbroken eggs, to local farmers, who from time to time donate a cow, hog or even a deer.

Her father, Ernie Cline, 84, usually drives to pick up the food and helps unload and deliver it. For those who want to stereotype these folks as just knee-jerk Trump-supporting white evangelicals, you should know that for more than a dozen years while Cline wintered with his late wife, Dolores, in south Texas after retiring, he was part of a group that regularly crossed the Mexican border to help build a school and make repairs at a children’s home.

Yes, that’s an old white guy from Trump country volunteering to help out brown kids in a different country.

When I mention that to him, his reply is simple: “People are people. I don’t care where they are.”

Across the street from the church building, Don Fickes, 75, ran the town’s furniture store and, across another street, the funeral home — just as his father and grandfather did before him, and his son Mark is after him.

The elder Fickes laments the employers that have departed the area, and the shrinking number of owner-occupied homes.

“I know about a third of the people now,” he says as we sit at one of the tables for sale (list price $795, plus $295 per chair) in the furniture store, a converted one-room schoolhouse.

“I used to know all the people. I even knew their dog’s name.”

While he decries declining local church attendance and a lack of discipline in both homes and schools, Fickes acknowledges that he has zero desire to leave his lifelong stomping grounds.

“We still live in Mayberry. And I’d still rather live in Mayberry.”

drowland@dispatch.com; @darreldrowland