Ray Novotny
Mill Creek Park Memoirs
Nature Lessons Until I was two, my family lived off of Bears Den Road near Mill Creek Park. My aunt and uncle lived two houses away. Even after we moved to Austintown, we visited often. My earliest Park memory is tagging along with my older cousin Patty to search and find her lost bracelet on nearby Old Orchard Trail. She also “saved my life” when I found myself precariously perched on a huge flat, downhill-slanted boulder at Witch’s Cave. One day in summer 1968, Mom and Dad took my younger sister, brother, and me to the Old Mill Museum. We hiked the gorge “down creek.” While exploring beyond Sulphur Springs, where Mill Creek is easily approachable, we found bones—the skeleton of a snapping turtle! Who didn’t marvel at the hundreds of specimens exhibited at the museum? We quickly gathered it up and ran back to the Old Mill with our treasure. We wanted to become contributors to the collection, complete with our names on a “donated by” label. Although the man at the Mill was gracious enough about our find, he frustrated us by saying (with a bit of a smirk) several times, “You know it’s dead, don’t you?” Looking back, I imagine that the countless overly excited kids he dealt with everyday helped to forge his mischievous de-