Rawson was born in 1910. I knew him when he was in his late fifties. I took this image of him in his house on Dexter Avenue in Cincinnati.
J Rawson Collins
I lived with my Uncle Rowland on and off during the three years that I attended the University of Cincinnati.. 1967-69. One of Rowland’s friends was J Rawson Collins. (The “J” before Rawson makes his name seem like a title.) Rawson was wealthy. Not just your basic rich people’s kind of wealthy, but rich in that he gave money for new buildings for the University, for creating a place and paying salaries of staff who worked with disabled children at the Olympus Center in Cincinnati.
In 1972 Rawson asked Jadyne and me if we would be willing to go to London with him. He wanted to look at art, buy paintings, and he asked if we would accompany him for dinner every evening and share our experiences from the day. He, or course, paid airfare, all our expenses, the cost of the St. James Hotel (where maids turned down our beds at night, left a chocolate mint on the pillow, and served toast with the crusts cut off), and made sure we’d have a car and driver available at our request.
Rawson, Andy, Marilyn
In addition to simply having money, Rawson was kind, generous, and giving. I gardened for him in the summer, went to dinner with him and Rowland many times, and simply spent hours with a someone who was interested in what I thought. He was a listener.
In 1996 I returned to Cincinnati and made plans to see him. At that time Rawson was 86 and living in private quarters at a senior home. One day earlier I went to Riverfront Stadium for Opening Day for the Cincinnati Reds, when in the first inning, the home plate umpire, John McSherry, collapsed and died on the field. The game was postponed one day, the day I was to see Rawson. I went to the game with my brother Jack, missed seeing Rawson, and learned of his passing later that year. I have regretted that decision.
And as a footnote, unrelated to Rawson. Before the game resumed the next day a minister asked all in attendance to pray to Jesus for the soul of John McSherry. I thought about the fans in attendance, the ones who prayed to Allah, the ones who would have respected the umpire’s passing with a moment of silence, the huge Jewish population in Cincinnati, and I felt then what I have felt many times in the fifty years since I piled up the U-Haul in Oxford, a stranger in a strange land, removed in spirit and thought from all that I remember about Ohio.