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From Liverpool to East Liverpool
By FRED MILLER, fmiller@reviewonline.com
Phil Bimpson has a self-ordained mission: To visit every city and town named after his home city — home of the Fab Four.
Bimpson, a trim 50-year-old auto body mechanic from Liverpool, England, arrived in East Liverpool last weekend, the third foreign Liverpool he has visited. Residents here have treated him royally and he in turn has charmed them with his Paul McCartney accent, George Clooney good looks, and Lou Holtz philosophical outlook.
His trip will take him to six sites in North America and one in Australia.
And he didn’t even know who Lou Holtz was until he happened to pass by the Lou Holtz-Upper Ohio Valley Hall of Fame on Fifth Street.
From the picture on the sidewalk, he thought perhaps Holtz was a famous golfer.
Inside, he learned Holtz was a famous coach.
“What does he coach?”
“Football,” he was told.
“Oh. For what team?”
“Notre Dame University.”
When he saw Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish logo, Bimpson was struck by another in a series of coincidences he said have occurred during his trek. When he visited Liverpool, Nova Scotia, this past June, he happened to buy a winter jacket bearing the image of a pugilistic Irishman, and took it home to England. He had no idea it was Notre Dame’s logo, or that legendary Notre Dame coach Holtz was a favorite son and promoter of East Liverpool, Ohio.
“I love that coat so much. I bought it not for once realizing there would be this weird common thread and connection,” he said.
When Bimpson viewed a Lou Holtz video at the Hall of Fame, he was struck that he had found another “Mr. Liverpool,” a term he uses to describe the civic-minded, uplifting individuals he has found in every Liverpool he has visited.
“There are Mr. Liverpools out there who are positive about life and respect for family values. Everybody who lives here should listen to that six-minute video. It touched my heartstrings. This is a great guy. I can understand why his team became great,” said Bimpson.
Bimpson, married and the father of six children aged 13 to 30, said he “woke up one day and thought it would be a neat thing to have a picture taken under the signs of every Liverpool in the world.”
Insisting “it’s not a midlife crisis thing - I’m very proud of my heritage,” Bimpson said he thought “it will be a very good thing when I am the only Liverpudlian to travel to all the other Liverpools.”
The Internet made his research easy. He found North American Liverpools in Nova Scotia, Pennsylvania (near Harrisburg) and New York (near Syracuse). A Liverpool in Texas has a population of only 500 while a large Liverpool in Australia, population 120,000, is 30 miles from Sydney. He plans to make the Australia trip next February.
Bimpson is not rich. He saved his money in order to fulfill his dream, first visiting the Nova Scotia Liverpool with his wife Gina, and then returning home for the annual Beatles festival in his home city.
Traveling solo now, he has visited the New York Liverpool, and will head for the tiny Illinois map blip of Liverpool, 140 miles from Chicago, when he leaves here Saturday.
“They don’t know I’m coming. They don’t even have a telephone,” Bimpson said.
Bimpson sent a few emails - to The Review among others - explaining when and why he was coming here. When he arrived last weekend, word spread like wildfire that the “Liverpool guy” was in town and had been guided to stay at the historic Sturgis House bed and breakfast. With the welcome he received, the visitor stretched his planned two-day stay into a week.
“The Sturgis House is absolutely fantastic,” he said. “Anyone who comes from anywhere in the world should stay there. It is so much better than these faceless hotels and motels. Digger Dawson made me welcome. He’s a modern day Mr. Liverpool. He’s done some great things for this city and continues to do so.
“You have an amazing historical society,” Bimpson continued. “I was so pleased when Tim Brooks and Joan Witt personally escorted me to the Thompson House. It’s like the Thompson family has just gone out for the day.”
Bimpson returned the favor by calling in a live report on his trek to the Pete Price radio show, sharing with 30,000 listeners around Liverpool, England, his positive experiences here.
He has found many similarities between the Liverpools. His home city, for instance, went through a terrible economic depression in the 1960s with the decline of its shipping industry. With the resiliency Bimpson has come to regard as a Liverpool trait, English Liverpudlians have remolded their city into a thriving center of tourism, culture and education.
He can see the beginnings of the same things happening in East Liverpool.
“A depression leaves behind two types of people, the poor people who cannot leave and the people who have invested in the city,” said Bimpson. “These people have a tenacity that makes them Liverpudlians. What you need is strong leaders, and you have strong leaders here. They are doing the right thing for the town.”
EAST LIVERPOOL - Liverpool, England, resident Phil Bimpson visited East Liverpool the first week in October on his self-imposed quest to visit every town in the world named “Liverpool.”
Five weeks and three more Liverpools later, Bimpson stopped back in this city last weekend to report on his travels.
“It has just been a phenomental journey, 5,000 miles by car on my own, New Orleans and Memphis and sleeping in my car a lot,” said the English auto mechanic.
So far he has been welcomed by the mayor of every Liverpool, including Becky Humphreys, mayor of Liverpool, Ill., population 109.
That Liverpool was a popular fishing and hunting resort area in the 1930s, said Bimpson.
“Al Capone used to come down from Chicago. He had a shooting lodge,” said Bimpson, who learned the town once had hotels five stories tall.
The levies along the Illinois River broke, the fishing industry went belly-up and the town dwindled to a backwater, he said.
Until Bimpson informed them otherwise, the people of Liverpool, Texas, thought they had the smallest Liverpool with 500 residents.
His Texas hosts amazed him with a giant barbeque grill capable of cooking 11 beef briskets at a time. “It took two days to cook them,” he said.
They also “showed me how to make ‘drunken chicken,’” a technique involving opening a beer can, inserting it into a whole chicken, and throwing it onto the grill. “It is self-marinating internally,” he said.
The Texas Liverpudlians also told him “tales of death, despair and sadness” from the Confederate perspective in the Civil War.
Liverpool, Pa., he found to be a “quaint” town of under 1,000 residents on the Susquehanna River 20 miles from Harrisburg, the state capital city.
“Half the people are hunters,” said Bimpson. “They went out hunting before they went to work.”
While in Liverpool, Pa., Bimpson became intrigued with story of Dr. Elizabeth Rife Snyder, a resident and early physician.
“She was the first female missionary to Shanghai, China. She founded the first hospital there and named it after her mother,” he related. She brought Chinese children back to Pennsylvania. Dr. Rife Snyder died in 1922, he said, and while in China may have had a connection to a young girl who later became Madame Chiang-Kai Shek .
When Bimpson left East Liverpool after his first visit in early October, he went to see a Beatles tribute band called “Abbey Road” perform in Canton, Ohio.
He noted with humor that because of his accent, a number of people thought he was “part of the band, part of the show, there to meet and greet people.”
Bimpson said the Alamo rental car people may be surprised that he has racked up 5,000 miles on his rental car. He said he wisely opted for unlimited mileage.
On his trek he stopped in cities including Birmingham, Ala., Knoxville, Tenn., New Orleans, La.
He made a special visit to Springfield, Ill., to “pay my respects” at the tomb of Abraham Lincoln.
“In England we have a lot of admiration for Abe,” he said. He was pleasantly surprised to find a tour guide stationed inside the brass door of the marble tomb who showed him Lincoln’s casket and “told me all about Lincoln.”
Also inside was the model of the statue of a seated Lincoln that graces the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Bimpson made a point of visiting that and other monuments in the Capital before touching base back at East Liverpool.
From East Liverpool, Bimpson was to travel back to Liverpool, N.Y., to visit for three or four days, then return to his home city in England “to recharge the batteries” and prepare for his visit in January or February to the last Liverpool on his list.
Liverpool, Australia, is a city of 120,000 people in New South Wales. Nearby features include the Liverpool Mountains and the Liverpool Plains.
(Internet users can keep up with Bimpson’s quest by visiting www. myliverpools.piczo.com)
