On any given day, 86-year-old Richard Grim can be found within 10 miles of the house where he and his siblings were born. When he’s not traveling on roads that are named after him, he is likely to be volunteering at the Shade Community Center – where his picture hangs on a wall honoring local veterans.
Anyone who knows the small town outside of Athens knows that Grim is its heart and soul.
Of all the places he could go, Shade, Ohio, is where he would most rather be, Grim said. In the ’30s, Grim traveled the same streets, two miles from his family’s farm to school, on a pony each morning.
He helped build the school when he was 13, graduating from it in 1942 along with 24 classmates. Today, Grim is one of few living members of that class, and the school where he once hitched his pony is now a community center.
“We all went to school there,” he said. “They were going to tear it down, but we couldn’t see it go.”
After a fight to keep Shade’s trademark building standing, it lacked the necessities to qualify as a community center. Aware of their wishes to restore the former school, developer Brent Hayes made a contribution in Grim’s name for a baseball field.
“Richard has done so much for me and that area; he needed to be recognized,” Hayes said. “If Shade had a mayor, he would probably be it.”
Hayes went into the excavating business straight out of high school despite having no experience and hardly any equipment, so he turned to Grim for help.
“I called Richard for help, and he was there that day or shortly thereafter,” Hayes said.
Grim’s family said although he could care less about the attention he receives for his acts of kindness, helping people around the community is always something he is eager to do. They sat around a table in the front of the room for Shade Community Center’s annual Valentine’s Dinner on Feb. 18, reminiscing about how much fun they had growing up in the small town.
“We would see kids with towels ready to go to the pool, and we were wishing that we had a pool,” Grim’s 88-year-old sister, Pauline Johnson, remembered. “But we would go home and ride our ponies, and then they wished they were us.”
Although Shade has seen establishments close and farmers move away in search of better paying work, Grim returns daily to the same farm he was raised on, as well as the farm he and his wife, Glenna, bought 20 years ago on Grim Road. He owns about 800 acres of a 39-square-mile township whose population is 1,403.
Grim said if the city-going students were to spend a regular day with him on the farm, they would probably say, “That’s a hell of a way to make a living.”
oy311909@ohiou.edu
@ThePostCulture
