Tiny Cadiz, Ohio, celebrates famous son Clark Gable, 75th anniversary of 'Gone With the Wind'
Susan Glaser, cleveland.com Susan Glaser cleveland.com www.facebook.com
Cadiz, population 3,322, is home to a small museum in Clark Gable's re-created boyhood home, which celebrates the life of one of the country's most iconic actors, born here in 1901 and educated in nearby Hopedale.
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Cadiz, Ohio -- Frankly, my dears, Cadiz does give a damn -- about Clark Gable, that is, the 20th-century Hollywood heartthrob who hailed from humble beginnings in eastern Ohio's Harrison County.

The town, population 3,322, is home to a small museum in Gable's re-created boyhood home, which celebrates the life of one of the country's most iconic actors, born here in 1901 and educated in nearby Hopedale.

Here, you can check out photos of Gable as a young boy (a looker back then, too), inspect his grades (an 85 in physics, a 75 in English in 1917), and see posters and news clippings of his life as Hollywood's leading man.

Also on display: a childhood sled of Gable's, his pipe, a pajama top and more.

An entire room is devoted to his love affair with Carole Lombard, his third of five wives but his one true love, according to Nan Mattern, executive director of the Clark Gable Birth Home Museum. She died in a plane crash in 1942.

The actor, who died in 1960, is perhaps best known for his role in "Gone With the Wind," the 1939 film that romanticized life in the Old South and then chronicled its collapse during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The movie, which premiered 75 years ago in Atlanta, will be celebrated Friday and Saturday, Oct. 3 and 4, in Cadiz and nearby New Philadelphia, with celebrity appearances, an auction of movie-related items and a big-screen showing of the classic film.

"I was a teenager in the 1960s when I saw it for the first time," said Beverly Dippel, a Gable and "Gone With the Wind" fan from Rochester, New York, who stopped by the Gable museum last week with her husband, Kenneth. "And I've watched it several times since then. I never lose interest in it."

Clark Gable Birth Home Museum

138 Charleston St., Cadiz, about a two-hour drive south from Cleveland

10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, 1:30-4 p.m. Sunday, through September. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, October and November. Closed December through February.

$5.50

, 740-942-4989

Dinner, mystery play, celebrity forum featuring Patrick Curtis (who played Melanie Wilkes' baby, Beau) and Mickey Kuhn (an older Beau Wilkes). Cadiz Country Club, 800 Country Club Road. Reservations required: 740-942-4989

Celebrity forum, 1 p.m. ($10); movie memorabilia auction, 2 p.m.; movie showing, 4:30 p.m. ($10); Kent State University, Tuscarawas Campus Performing Arts Center, 330 University Drive NE, New Philadelphia

740-942-4989

She worries, however, that future generations will forget about these legends of the past. "Our kids don't know who Clark Gable is, except when we talk about him."

It was that fear of losing the legacy that spurred several in Cadiz to act 30 years ago.

The region's economy, reliant on coal and steel, was in a nosedive at the time, said Michael Cope, who was the treasurer of Harrison County in the 1980s. He and a few friends gathered to discuss ways to boost interest in the town, and talk turned to Clark Gable.

"People would come to Cadiz looking for information, but nobody knew where he lived," said Cope, because Gable's birthplace home had been torn down in the 1960s.

In 1986, Cope helped create the Clark Gable Foundation, which raised money to erect a marker on the property where the house once stood. A decade later, a local woman left enough money in her will for the foundation to rebuild the house -- a wood-sided, two-story home, located a couple blocks east of downtown.

Clark Gable lived here for only a few months – the stairs to his parents' second-floor apartment were too much for his sickly mother to handle. The family relocated when Clark was only 6 months old; his mother died a few months later.

After his dad remarried, the family moved to nearby Hopedale.

(Gable's dad was in the oil and gas business, an industry that disappeared in eastern Ohio for a century, but has returned with gusto in recent years, as locals are proud to point out: Harrison County is the heart of Ohio's Utica shale drilling region.)

Gable's family eventually moved to a farm in Portage County. Clark, on his own for the first time, relocated to Akron and worked for a time at the Miller Rubber Co. In Akron, he saw his first play -- and shortly after, he moved west to pursue a career in acting.

The rest, as they say, is history. Though he wasn't a success overnight, he went on to achieve superstardom with numerous films, including "It Happened One Night," "Mutiny on the Bounty" and others.

Posters of his many films, as well as photos of Gable with nearly every leading lady of the time – Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Joan Crawford and others – decorate the walls of the Cadiz museum.

Also in the museum: medals of honor from Gable's military service in the 1940s. At age 41, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, shortly after Lombard's death, and served for two years. (Interesting side note: Adolf Hitler, a big Gable fan, offered a reward to anyone who could capture the actor alive.)

The biggest artifact is parked in the garage of the house next door: a light blue, 1954 Cadillac DeVille, personalized with gold crests, special hubcaps, power windows and a foot switch to control the radio.

"He had five automobiles and five wives," said Mattern. "I don't know in which order he loved them most."

His personal life was just as interesting as his professional life. Married five times, he had two children – though his first child, a daughter born to actress Loretta Young, didn't learn the identity of her famous father until long after his death. His second child, a son, was born to Gable's fifth wife, Kay Williams, four months after Gable died in 1960.

Despite his high-flying Hollywood lifestyle, Gable never forgot his humble roots, according to Mattern.

Gable initially refused to attend the "Gone With the Wind" premiere in segregated Atlanta because actress Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, was excluded. (McDaniel, who went on to become the first black actor to win an Oscar, convinced Gable to go.)

At the Gable museum, two souvenir programs from opening night are displayed – one that includes a portrait of McDaniel, and another without her, omitted so as not to offend the Atlanta audience.

"He always wanted everyone to be treated equally," said Mattern, a long-time resident of Cadiz.

And, frankly, that is worth giving a damn about.