Cleveland's Department Stores (OH) (Images of America)
Title: UA alumnus revisits old Cleveland storesAuthor: Staff WriterPublisher: Akron Beacon JournalDate: 5/31/09Nostalgia is the merchandise, and Cleveland's Department Stores delivers. The pictorial, annotated by University of Akron alumnus Christopher Faircloth, shows the great stores -- Halle Brothers, Higbee's, May Company and Sterling-Lindner-Davis -- in their downtown art deco heydays, with throngs of busy shoppers and helpful clerks.Readers of a certain vintage will recognize Higbee's Silver Grille and bargain basement. There is a chapter devoted to the many celebrities (Rock Hudson! Zsa Zsa Gabor!) who made promotional appearances at the glamorous stores. The Christmas season, including traditions like the spectacular tree at Sterling-Lindner, is well covered, as is beloved Mr. Jingeling.Cleveland's Department Stores (128 pages, softcover) costs $21.99 from Arcadia Publishing.Hiking 'Trail of Truth'Former Cuyahoga Falls resident Mark Stephen Taylor has had an eventful 64 years: work as a police officer in California, health problems and four divorces. He became an avid hiker and Bible scholar, and his book Hiking the Trail of Truth: Knowing God through His Creation, is part memoir, part exploration of the terrain and fauna of the Southwest and part Bible instruction.Taylor sanctions only a literal translation, adding his certainties that the Earth is ''just a little over 6,000 years'' old and that homosexuality is ''detestable in the sight of God.'' His descriptions of various desert creatures, like coyotes, snakes, eagles and locusts, are interesting.Hiking the Trail of Truth (332 pages, softcover) costs $18.99 from http://www.xulonpress.com. Taylor now lives in Petaluma, Calif.Inside Day's lifeIn his May 10 column about David Kaufman's biography of Cincinnati native Doris Day, Beacon Journal writer Rich Heldenfels notes that the author talked to ''just about everyone who was alive and able to provide insight into Day.'' One of those people was Mary Anne Barothy, who tells of her four years as Day's live-in private secretary in Day at a Time: An Indiana Girl's Sentimental Journey to Doris Day's Hollywood and Beyond.Four years doesn't seem like that long, but they were among the most eventful in Day's life and career: They included her son's near-death in a motorcycle accident and brief association with Charles Manson, and starring in a television show that her late husband/agent had contracted her to without her knowledge. And ''personal secretary'' hardly conveys Barothy's duties, which included fishing lawn furniture out of the pool and caring for -- and being bitten by -- Day's many, many dogs.Day at a Time (170 pages, softcover) is a snapshot of early 1970s Hollywood and an insider's look at a reclusive star. It costs $18 from http://www.hawthornepub.com.