By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune columnist
I’ve been a voracious reader since childhood, including newspapers and other periodicals. Growing up in the southern part of Campbell County in the 1960s, I read the Cincinnati Post & Times-Star and Kentucky Post, along with the Falmouth Outlook. Today, living in Central Kentucky, I obviously read the Northern Kentucky Tribune — for which I write — along with snatches of other sources about the northern part of the state. It keeps me connected to my native area.
So, I was glad to read a profile of Chester Geaslen that a friend of mine, Deborah Kohl Kremer, wrote for the Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky over a decade ago. In the 1950s, Geaslen wrote a weekly column for the Kentucky Post called Strolling along Memory Lane. He later compiled the columns into a three-book series in the 1960s with the same name, and afterward, wrote another book called Our Moment of Glory in the Civil War.
Not bad for a person who started his serious, and successful, writing career in his advanced years. By then, he had already led quite a productive life, one of dogged resilience and a creative nature. His columns and books were no doubt a product of his keen self-awareness and sense of place, starting in childhood and manifesting it through his adult work life.
Born in Cincinnati in 1896, Geaslen’s family moved across the Ohio River to Covington in 1902 when Chester’s father’s employer moved its ironworks plant there. After high school, Chester joined the World War I war effort and became, he said, “one of the boys of the Sixth Regiment Marines” and numbered himself “among the fortunate ones to return to our American shores and family firesides.”
With his two-year military stint finished, Geaslen enrolled locally in night school at Xavier College to play football. Not lasting long there, he wrote that he “took a fling at professional baseball and had the pleasure of pitching batting practice for Pat Moran’s Cincinnati Reds.” That led to signing a baseball playing contract with the Paris, Kentucky, team in the Blue Grass League. But more importantly, he made an important employment contact with the L&N Railroad, and Geaslen noted that “they hired me in 1922 as a fireman, and they retired me as a passenger engineer in July 1966, at 70 years of age.”
While working at L&N during the Great Depression, however, he was furloughed for nine years but luckily found employment with the Cincinnati Post in the circulation department. His job was to promote sales for The Kentucky Post (owned by the same company as the Cincinnati Post). Geaslen reached down into his creative bag of tricks and, he said “carried a notebook and camera and I started to write human interest stories and snap pictures in the hamlets and villages where I was attempting to establish home delivery service.”
He published those stories and pictures and subscriptions increased as people wanted to read about who he had included. And so began Geaslen’s writing ventures. And though he was successful at the newspaper, the L& N company offered him his job back at the beginning of World War II and he accepted. Between train trips, he snatched enough time to write his weekly Strolling along Memory Lane columns for the Kentucky Post, and later he penned historical articles for the Kentucky Times-Star and the Cincinnati Enquirer. In the 1960s after his retirement from railroad work, Geaslen became, as mentioned, an author of four books. They are still available to order from Amazon.
In regard to his books, he wrote that they were “encouraged by my wealth of life long friends and associates here in the Valley of the Ohio and Licking Rivers, to compile my many tales of memorabilia in book form for the pleasures of our elder folks as they reminisce in their favorite rocking chairs, and for the edification of our younger gentry who in their turn will be called upon to perpetuate the heritage of their ancestry.”
Now, I’ll get back to my friend Deborah, who introduced Geaslen’s story to me. Deborah is the daughter of Peggy Geslean Kohl, Chester’s third child. “When he (Grandfather Geslean) told stories, they always had a funny or dramatic twist,” noted Deborah. “One of his favorites was to say he had fourteen grandchildren, all of which were boys except eleven of them.”
Deborah has found her grandfather’s writing quite prolific, even as she researches her own work. “I have written about Northern Kentucky history for many years,” she said. “And it never fails that as I peruse old newspapers, either on the internet or on microfilm, I come across an article by him. And, even if it doesn’t pertain to what I am looking for, I stop what I’m doing and read his article. I always get the feeling that he must want me to read it.”
She also related that her grandfather, as a baseball player, was thrown out of the Blue Grass League when he “traded profanities from the field with an angry fan in the stands.” And, when he found out about the railroad position being available while in Paris, he told the story, she said, that the railroad “was looking for young men with weak minds and strong backs to fire their steam engines… and he would say ‘I was sure that I was just the kind of fellow they had in mind.’”
Chester Geaslen surely must have rubbed pixie dust on his granddaughter. Deborah has written several popular books of her own, including Explorer’s Guide: Kentucky, Northern Kentucky’s Dixie Highway, Villa Hills (Images of America), and Benedictine Sisters of St. Walburg. She also serves as an assistant editor at Kentucky Monthly.