By Mark Carpenter
People’s Defender
47 years. Almost five decades. How many of us can remember with any detail at all what we did that long ago? Mike Ginn sure can and he has used those memory skills to create a book that every Adams County football fan from the 1970’s should be sure to read. “No Steak: Incomplete-My Final High School Season in Rural Ohio” is the story of the 1979 North Adams High School football team and their quite memorable campaign, full of ups and downs and twists and turns but we don’t want to give away too much of the story. You’ll just have to buy the book!
“It was a story in my mind that wouldn’t go away,” said Ginn, now a resident of Covington, Kentucky. “When I come back to the county, I always drive by the football field and think to myself, ‘That was a good story’. During COVID, I was stuck in a hotel quarantined so that’s when I just decided to start writing the story. It took me about two years to write it and get it the way I wanted it.”That was the easy part. The hard part was getting an editor and publicist to get it out there.”
“I’d get together with friends over the years and we’d talk about those times and each one brought their own little memories about the game. The conditions were appalling, we played on a football field that was basically a swamp. There was just so much that happened in 1979, here and all over the world, a historical year. There were so may events taking place here locally, mainly the teacher’s strike, a new coach coming to North Adams, my first high school crush (who Ginn still refuses to name, referred to as Cindy in the book).”
Another thing that Ginn points about about why he wrote this book was to “pay tribute to the people and places that had such a wonderful impact on his life”.
“I always tell people that I grew up in Adams County (his family moved here in 1975) and learned my values here and I hoped the book would solidify that.”
Anyone who has tried knows that writing a book is not exactly an easy process. It takes a lot of processing of thoughts and ideas and then putting them into print as Ginn explained.
“I work with United Airlines and we were actually bringing the COVID vaccine back from Belgium. We were laid over and quarantined in Brussels and couldn’t go anywhere or do anything so I thought if I was going to do the story, that was the time to do it. I wrote most of the book in those 48-hour layovers. The Defender was great about letting me use their archives to research the book.”
“I’ve had people that I haven’t heard from in years texting me and saying the book was really good and that I really captured Adams County and that’s the best part for me. Not how many books I sell but the fact that it brought back a lot of memories and I really wanted Adams County to be celebrated in this book.”
Readers will also notice something as they make their way through “No Steak”. Ginn chose not to use the characters’ real names even though they were real people, so characters such as Cindy Cecil, Coach Zakaryan, Mark Steigenberg, Corey Hood, Steve Dawkins, Jimmy Rawlins, Ted Barnes, Uncle Norman, Jeremy Scully and Mickey Dixon were all fictional names but based on real people from 1979. Obviously, readers who also lived through that football season will be able to make the matches but Ginn kept them changed.
“I did that for privacy purposes, maybe they didn’t want their names out there,” said Ginn. “I erred on the side of caution.”
Ginn admits to feeling like a bit of an outcast when he came to Adams County, which he details splendidly in the book but knows what made that perception change.
“It was football. Football made the difference and was my way of becoming part of the unit, football players were treated like basketball players are today.”
In the book, Ginn traces the 1979 school year, through the ACOVSD teacher’s strike (where his parents were both teachers), a little life as a 17-year old teenager, a new football coach who was an unknown from West Virginia who stayed just one year, and of course the football battles with Peebles, Manchester and then the climactic county championship game, a 6-0 win over West Union, detailed in the chapter titled “The Mud Bowl”.
Asked what he learned for the 1979 season, Ginn quickly replies, “Life isn’t fair. For you for me or for other people but you have to move on, you have to persevere. You have to find other things”
Ginn also details the disappointment of football in the county being eliminated after his junior season, 1979-80, though he considers himself lucky that he had other sports, cross-country and track specifically, to fall back on.
“When the district pulled the rug our from under us, we would have had a really good team that next season and a lot of our players had no other sports to fall back on, they had nothing. To me, that was a big story.”
“We loved the game, we’d have played anybody anywhere. We were just passionate about the game. I loved football, though I admit I wasn’t very good at it, but it was a fun game for me to play and I loved the physical challenges.”
Readers may also be quite curious about the meaning behind the “No Steak” title, but that is a surprise ending that we won’t give away here. Suffice to day it was the unusual motivation for the North Adams team before they battled West Union for the county championship. “It was our battle cry the whole week,” said Ginn.
“The rivalry was real, we didn’t care for West Union and they didn’t care for us,”Ginn continued. “The contest was very physical and they had some really good players and it was a tough game for us, but in perfect conditions, we’d have won big, though I’m sure the people of West Union would disagree.”
To get his book published, Ginn’s aunt got him in touch with Peter Bronson, the former editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, who had a publishing company called Chilidog Press. He turned the work over to Bronson and they printed my story. “Without Marie Gemelli-Carroll and her company, Starboard Strategy, and Peter Bronson, the manuscript would still be stuck in closet somewhere,” says Ginn.
A graduate of Otterbein University, Ginn put in an application with United Airlines, thanks to his parents grabbing applications as they waited for him on a late flight, just for him to practice filling them out. The rest is history and in 1986 he was hired as a United flight attendant and he is still flying to this day, over 40 years later, a job that has taken him all over Europe, a far cry from a teenage life in Adams County.
He and his wife live in Covington and when asked if there were any other books in the future, he responds, “I’ve got something else in mind, but it will be a little bit different from what I wrote the last time. It will be autobiographical for certain.”
When asked what the one message he would like for readers to take from his book, Ginn simply says, “First and foremost, what a great place Adams County is and was to be a kid. I have so many great memories here. It was just a good place to be a kid.”
(If you want a copy of Ginn’s book, go to Amazon and type “Michael Ginn” in the search bar.)