I was born in Kentucky and lived for a while in Ohio and can truly say I love both states. I have no problem rooting for the Ohio State Buckeyes football team. After all, here’s a collegiate team just less than 100 miles north of my Kentucky home that’s ranked No. 1 in all the land. In all honesty, though, if they played Kentucky I would no doubt root for the underdog. And a few of my Ohio friends have a problem with swinging over to support the Kentucky Wildcats basketball team. Nonetheless, it seems to me the differences once experienced by residents on one side of the beautiful Ohio River against those on the other side have dissipated, if not disappeared altogether. This wasn’t the case many years ago, especially among the younger set. In my novel, “That Summer of ’45,” I wrote about how when Tom Sycamore, a recent transplant to Kentucky from Ohio, and his Kentucky friends crossed the bridge into Ohio there was usually trouble. Insults were hurled by boys from both sides, insults that sometimes erupted into fisticuffs. The rift between these two particular groups was healed when at summer camp they mingled with each other as competitive Boy Scouts on their respective troops from both sides of the river. …
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