Small Town in the Big News
I often have trouble explaining where I grew up. When I mention Ohio, most people guess Cincinnati or Cleveland. “It’s outside Columbus,” I explain. “A little town called Granville, where Denison University is.” Sometimes people have heard of Denison. This week, though, Granville has made the major papers and the blogosphere. I may not have trouble explaining where Granville is for quite a while.
As I’m sure you probably know by now, the accuracy of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, the supposedly non-fiction book and Oprah’s first foray back into living authors, has been exhaustively questioned at The Smoking Gun. In one of the key conflicts in the book, Frey says he drove up on the sidewalk outside Granvilla Pizza, struck a cop and there was a kerfuffle. Granville PD records show no evidence of said kerfuffle.
Believe me, if there had been such a kerfuffle, it would have made the front page of both town newspapers. And my parents would have called.
When I lived there, the population was about 4K, half of which was the student population of Denison University. There were more churches (six) than traffic lights (four). While there are now more people and more stop lights, it’s still a lovely little town, more reminiscent of New England than central Ohio. And while Granvilla Pizza has changed hands, it still makes some of my favorite pizza ever.
I had to laugh at the idea of Granville as the site of Frey’s supposedly severe drug and alcohol debauchery. Peccadilloes and misdemeanors, perhaps. Many years ago when I was sixteen, a fourteen year old friend of mine got a few of the guys at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the fraternity Frey would join several years later, to buy a case of beer for us. Friends and I used fake IDs to buy beer at Granvilla, or in the nearby city of Newark. We knew to carefully obey traffic laws in town, though, so we stayed out of trouble. Frey wasn’t so cautious. He got busted, though hardly in the spectacular way he describes in his book.
The Smoking Gun backs up this small-town persona. When they called to ask for arrest records, they found themselves talking to the arresting officer himself. And since there are only a couple hundred arrests each year in Granville, there were still records back to Frey’s 1992 arrest. As the Granville chief of police noted, they’re not pressed for storage space.