Over the next 30 minutes he showed me his baseball collection; his Elvis memorabilia; a trophy collection that contained some hardware from the 1964 Miamisburg High championship basketball team he played on; a section of red seats from the long-demolished Riverfront Stadium; and an old scoreboard from a local junior high.
He pointed out a map showing the myriad road trips he and Jeanne, his wife of nearly 56 years, have taken across the nation.
And then came another map, this one tracing the route of his most amazing adventure — his 2001 Cross Country Bicycle Adventure — in which he pedaled 4,270 miles across America from Yorktown, Va. to Florence, Oregon, much of it by himself, in 78 days.
And yet on this afternoon, all those memory moments were nothing but a prelude to a pursuit that really defined what he was about.
“I want to show you something really special,” he said as he led the way back to the Elvis bar and pulled out a well-aged Spalding scorebook.
“I think I got this for free when I was a kid and got a new basketball,” he said.
Printed across the cover, from the hand of a 12 or 13 year old, was: “Ronnie Anslinger.”
Beneath it he’d written: “Pros, College, High School.” And down one side he’d added “ALL STAR.”
Inside the front cover, he’d taken a generic drawing of basketball players — all of them seemingly white — and made one mirror one of his idols. He’d penciled in a figure to make it darker.
“That’s for Oscar Robertson,” he said with the hint of long-ago boyhood pride still in his 79-year-old voice.
On the pages that followed he had kept meticulous scoresheets of college games he had watched on TV from 1959 through 1961.
Many featured the Dayton Flyers of the past — teams led by familiar names like Roggenburk, Case, Hatton and Allen — against the likes of Robertson’s Cincinnati Bearcats and 1961 NIT teams, Temple, St. Louis and Holy Cross.
He kept score for several Ohio State games, too — matchups where Lucas, Knight, Siegfried, Havlicek and company went against Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati in the fabled 1961 national championship won by the Bearcats.
“This book is what started it all,” Anslinger said. “This is why I think I was destined to be a scorekeeper.”
And if you wanted to know where destiny had led, you only had to be at the Miamisburg High gymnasium Tuesday night, where the hosts fell to Kings High, 65-56.
Along one wall in the gym is a big sign that reads: “Home of the Vikings.”
Many people might tell you the embodiment of that claim is best seen in the oversized mascot who often accompanies the cheerleaders while wearing a blue helmet fitted with silver horns, a full golden beard, dark tunic and big brown boots.
But those who know their Miamisburg history can tell you The Real Viking is Anslinger, who on this night — like he has for the past 55 years — sat at the scorer’s table wielding not a Norse spear and shield but three pens, two with dark ink and one with red for special designations.
Along with those five and a half decades registering every point, foul and timeout for the boys’ varsity teams at Miamisburg High, he spent some 30 years doing the same for the JV teams.
For the past 25 years he’s also run the game clock for the Miamisburg girls’ games. Although he no longer keeps the book for them, he still watches all the boys’ freshman and JV games, too.
He estimated he’s seen at least 4,471 Miamisburg High basketball games and worked 3,431 of them. Although early in his career he got $5 a game, he’s worked for free in the decades since.
With him, it has nothing to do with pay. It’s all about passion.
After being a 6-foot-4 starting senior guard on that 1963-64 Miamisburg team that won the Miami Valley League and was rated No. 2 in the area behind the mighty state champion Belmont High team led by Bill Hosket and Donnie May, Anslinger played a couple of years of basketball at Otterbein College and after four years in a junior high classroom, taught history at Miamisburg High for 33 years.
Along with his scorer’s table duties, he coached girls’ tennis for 14 years and boys tennis for two. He coached junior high and freshman basketball and after he retired from teaching he worked in school maintenance five years and as a school courier for another 15.
“I’ve been a Viking all my life,” Anslinger said. “I’m Miamisburg through and through.”
That commitment has been recognized by the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s Southwest District which is awarding him one of its prestigious Dale E. Creamer “Friends of Athletics” awards on March 8 at halftime of the Division I district tournament game at Xavier University.
“Dale was passionate about all those people who help make athletics happen,” said Phil Poggi, the Secretary of the OHSAA Southwest District and the former athletics director at Kings and Sycamore high schools. “To be considered, you have to have 25 or more years of helping everybody out. That’s the spirit that meant so much to Dale.
“And Ron Anslinger certainly has that.”
‘The greatest thing I’ve ever done’
Anslinger lives between Miamisburg and Germantown on property his family has owned since the Civil War.
“On April 8, 1865 — the day before Lee surrendered to Grant (in Appomattox Court House, Va.) — my great, great, great grandfather and his brother signed the mortgage,” said Brent Anslinger, Ron and Jeanne’s middle son.
“They could only afford 35 acres of farmland at the top of the hill, they couldn’t get the good stuff down below.”
Today, Brent lives on 31 of those acres with his wife Amy and their children. His dad and mom live on four acres parceled off long ago for the house in which they raised Brent, his older brother Bryan and younger brother Bryce.
After the Civil War, the first house on the property was a log cabin that was replaced by the 1870 house in which Brent now lives.
Ron grew up there and in the barn, you’ll still find the basketball hoop where he and the other guys on that ‘64 team — including Tom Nicholas, Barney Ziegler, Ronnie Long and Mike Pierce — often played pick-up games.
“In the summer there was no AAU ball or open gyms, so some of us would get together and pick up Rex Gardecki — he was a freshman when we were seniors, but he was better than all of us — and we’d go play guys from other towns,” Anslinger said.
“One night you might go to West Carrollton and other nights to Franklin, or a place in Oakwood and some others in Dayton. The players from all those places would show up each night and winners kept the court.”
Although the Miamisburg players hoped for a tournament showdown with Belmont, it never happened. They were derailed by Dunbar.
At Otterbein, Anslinger met Jeanne who was from Wooster. She too started as a teacher and later in life was a school librarian.
She and Ron raised three sons, all of whom are accomplished.
Bryan graduated from Purdue and is now a veteran Division I college basketball referee working in several conferences including the Big Ten, Horizon League, Mid-American, Summit and Mountain West.
“I just watched him on TV do the Milwaukee and Green Bay game,” Anslinger said. “His life is all travel now.
“Not long ago, he did a game at Air Force. The next night he was at San Diego State. Two nights later he was at Boise State and then went to South Dakota.
“A couple of weeks past, he was going to do a Wright State game. I talked to him the night before somewhere in Iowa and he said they were having the worst snowstorm ever. He had to get to Chicago for a flight to Cincinnati so he could drive up to Wright State. And right after that game here, he flew to Fresno.”
Brent is the Outdoor Recreation Program Manager for Five Rivers MetroParks and this weekend they are putting on the gala Adventure Summit at Wright State.
Youngest son Bryce is a graduate of the Ohio University Scripps College of Communication and, after an early career in broadcast journalism, is the Manager of Social Communications at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
It was Brent, an adventure outdoorsman himself, who convinced his dad to do the cross-country bike trip.
Ron at the time had ridden just a few of the Greater Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA) tours — he’s now done 28 — so he found a riding partner from a magazine and they pedaled together part of the trip before he took off on his own.
“That trip was the greatest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
During the trip, a ’64 classmate — Judy Hatzfeld — got regular reports from him that he typed out on library computers in the towns he passed through. She circulated them to the rest of the classmates — who threw a party for him at the Miamisburg American Legion afterwards — and the local paper ran a weekly update of his trip.
While he saw many memorable things on his trip — the long wheat fields of Kansas, the mountain peaks in Colorado, Civil War battlefields, the Santa Fe Trail — nothing will top the unexpected sight in Oregon of a hand sticking out the window of a passing car holding a candy bar.
He thought it was a Good Samaritan, but was shocked at the identity.
It was Brent and his new bride, Amy, who had detoured off their honeymoon hike along the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada to find him and give him an emotional boost for the final miles of his trip.
The Real Viking
Anslinger began his scorekeeping duties when the Vikings still played their games at Memorial Auditorium downtown.
“I remember when I was four or five years old, me and my older brother would go with him to the games,” Brent said. “The old scoreboard didn’t show it back then, so our job was to hold up cards on sticks that had the player’s number and how many fouls he had committed.”
The current gym at the high school opened in 1981.
Over the years Anslinger has seen most of Miamisburg’s greatest players. A few were from his era and the rest he chronicled in his scorebooks.
He still rates Gardecki, Miamisburg’s all-time leading scorer who then played for the Dayton Flyers, as the best to wear a Vikings uniform and Jeff Montgomery, the second leading scorer, as a close second.
He mentioned Josh Robinson and Andrew Hoerner, a 6-foot 9 All-Ohio first teamer last year, and then caught himself:
“I don’t want to start naming the guys because I’ll miss someone.”
When he thought about the Miamisburg girls, he didn’t hesitate on the top two:
Ericka Allenspach, who went on to Marist and Shannon Sword, who starred at Cleveland State. Both became 1,000-point scorers in college.
As for special hoops memories, there was the game Bob Cook set the school scoring record with 51 points and the contest when Greg Gyenes had 50.
There was the night the Vikings’ big man slammed down a massive dunk and shattered the glass backboard.
“Luckily we had an auxiliary gym to finish the last four minutes of the game,” Anslinger said with a laugh.
And he remembers a game against Centerville when the Elks were unbeaten by any area team:
“We were 17 down in the third quarter and beat them on a last-second shot.”
Tuesday night, when Kings shot the ball, Anslinger too often had to reach for the red ink. That’s how he designates three-pointers in the scorebook.
The visitors had several and the loss dropped Miamisburg to 5-16.
It didn’t take long for the gym to empty afterwards and that oversized mascot was gone too, his jumbo head and costume in storage until the next game.
And at that moment you didn’t have to go into Anslinger’s basement to find out who he is.
You just had to look at the midcourt sideline where he sat hunched over his scorebook, fully engrossed in tallying the final numbers of the game, just as he has done for 55 years.
Right then, there was no denying who The Real Viking was.
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