Ohio
#7 Campbell Hill, elevation 1,549 ft.
Armageddon. School buses. Pumpkin’ chunkin.
Until 1969 Campbell Hill was home to the 664th Air Force Radar station, a bastion of America's Cold War early-warning defenses.
You can almost hear Major T. J. "King" Kong, memorably portrayed by Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, yee-hawing as he plunges to earth on his thermonuclear steed. The trip to Ohio was the first flight I took in support of the highpointing quest. Given the site's history, I thought a film clip from Strangelove an appropriate ode to Campbell Hill’s bygone notoriety.
Postcard of the radar station at Campbell Hill
The site is now a training school, and instead of radar domes it houses a fleet of school buses. The height of land is marked by a swank mailbox that resembles a drive-through bank teller window: the kind with a pneumatic tube. The certificates within are quality.
We visited in early November, a blustery and cold day of hunched grimaces. We needed to hurry back to Cincinnati. In the wake of Halloween, we were attending a "pumpkin' chunkin'" in the local park, where the venerable gourds are thrown by hand-crafted wooden trebuchets.
A visit to beloved Porkopolis also demanded a trip to Over-the-Rhine and historic Findlay Market, one of the jewels in the Queen City's crown. The sausage vendors alone will make your intestines spin. One of the local specialties is goetta, a haggislike blend of ground beef with pork, onions, and steel-cut oats. You don't gotta try the goetta, but you oughta.
And I drank then, so we hit The Party Source, a liquor store in Kentucky just over the Ohio River, described by some as the Disneyland of liquor stores. I bought a bottle of moonshine and a stash of maraschino cherries soaked in white lightning, which put the man back in Manhattan. We snagged a bottle of Four Roses bourbon as a wedding gift for friends.