FRED MILLER
Scratch an Adkins from around East Liverpool (and there are quite a few) and you’ll probably find at least a second-hand connection to Chuck Yeager, legendary pilot, World War II ace and first man to fly faster than sound.
Brigadier Gen. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, a favorite son of West Virginia and a native of Hamlin, the county seat of Lincoln County, died Dec. 7 at the age of 97.
My mother Lucille was an Adkins from Hamlin. She was born in 1918, so was four and a half years older than Yeager.
Her younger brother Louis Sweetland Adkins, however, the same age as Yeager and was in his graduating class at Hamlin High School. I never met Chuck Yeager, but I think he and my Uncle Lou were a lot alike: direct can-do men, born storytellers, with a sardonic sense of humor and always active, never still. Lou’s siblings called him Sweetland, and I used that name for him when I wrote about him in this column back in the ’90s. Retired, long divorced and restless, Uncl
Indian Summer starts out like one of those reunion movies where friends from long ago gather again, to settle old scores, sort out old romances, open old wounds, and make new beginnings. All of those rituals have been performed by the end of the film, but curiously enough, the movie isn t really about what happens. It s about how it feels. This is a story more interested in tone and mood than in big plot points.
The film takes place at Camp Tamakwa, on the wooded shores of an Ontario lake, where an aging camp director known to everyone as Uncle Lou (Alan Arkin) has invited some of his favorite campers to return for an autumn reunion before the camp is boarded up for good.