“Ben was everybody’s next-door neighbor who leaned over the back fence to tell us the latest in our Columbus neighborhood,” said Fred Holdridge, a past president of the German Village Society. “He always had something interesting to tell us.”
Ben Hayes was a writer and columnist in Columbus Ohio for forty three years.
The most difficult story Ben ever covered came in 1938 – the Ohio Pen execution of 32-year-old German-born Anna Marie Hahn. Hahn – the first woman ever to be executed by the state of Ohio – poisoned & robbed five elderly men in Cincinnati to support her gambling habit.
Ben spent summers together growing up with his first cousin Woody on their grandfather’s farm in Noble County. They were about a year apart in age. Woody played football at Newcomerstown High School while Ben started writing at age thirteen for The Caldwell Journal.
After graduating from Dexter City High School, it took Ben seven years to get through Ohio University. He wrote for the Green & White campus newspaper and graduated in 1935. After a year writing for the Athens Messenger, he moved on to the Ohio State Journal in Columbus in 1936.
In 1941, Ben married his wife Betty who a seamstress. He jumped to the Columbus Citizen newspaper the same year and got his own column six years later. He wrote six columns a week and a feature story on Sunday for the next thirty years.
Ben has been described as an artistic soul, folksy and earthy, a wordsmith, the pulse of the city, a resident wit, the staff historian, and the C-J’s reference department. Ben had an easy smile, a dry sense of humor, he was introspective, loved gardening and despite being a writer, was a private person.
He wrote a column about Columbus’ first Miss America – Mary Katherine Campbell. He went to visit her at her home at 41 S Garfield Ave and to his surprise found her doing housework. She was mopping the floors. Not what he expected. Campbell won the crown twice – 1922 and 1923 (at age 16 and 17).
He once switched jobs with his wife so he could be a ‘househusband for a day’ while she went in to write his column. “There I lolled, in pajamas and bathrobe, by the kitchen window, watching the missus hike down the road to catch the bus into town,” he wrote. “I’ll get my hair combed by 11am I promised myself, but only half believed it.”
“Ben Hayes was the been-there-forever man-about-town columnist, who wore a straw hat and wrote eccentrically paced, amiably toned stories full of whimsical items about Columbus,” wrote Bob Greene in his book ‘Last Edition’. “Ben Hayes was a newspaper columnist with no perceptible ego or lust for power and influence; he was just spinning his daily yarns.”
In 1952, he wrote a column about his famous cousin Woody called ‘How about a kind word for Woody.’ The Buckeyes had finished a pedestrian 4-3-2 in his first season in 1951 and were off to another average 4-2 start. He blamed the fans for his cousin’s predictable play calling. “Their endorsement of Woody has been half-hearted and with dangling qualifications,” he wrote.
The Citizen merged with the Ohio State Journal in 1959 to become the legendary Columbus Citizen-Journal.
His daughter Christine – his only child – accompanied Ben a lot to theaters, openings, press parties, museums, art galleries, graveyards, historic sites, visiting old timers and celebrities. They had free passes to everything. She and her dad spent endless hours at local restaurants and a lot of time on early local television. She got to meet Roy Rogers.
“Columbus was fairyland to me – full of parks, flowers, fountains, the state fair, old mansions, fancy buffets, beautiful people,” says Christine. “He never made it down a city block without being recognized and given a news tidbit or two.”
Christine went to college to study theater in 1965 at the University of California-Irvine and stayed for 24 years. Ben wrote her a letter every week, filling her in on Columbus.
Ben loved to research the history of Columbus. He was affected by the plight of our African American neighbors and in 1967 wrote a 10-part series on the historical roots of the black community in Columbus.
Ben was given the Governor’s Award at the Ohio Newspaper Association meeting “for the advancement of the prestige of Ohio.”
He retired in 1978 and for the most part he became a kind of a hermit according to his daughter, though he did contribute to the Ohio Magazine and the Short North Gazette.
Ben passed away in 1989. He was 77.
“He confessed to his daughter Christine, that beneath the breast of an ink-stained wretch, beat the heart of a Druid,” wrote Dispatch writer Mike Harden of Hayes after his death. “He indulged ten thousand calls from readers to whom his conversational and breezy style made him more of a friend than a lot of their neighbors were.”
“Grinding out a daily column is a soul-breaking way of making a living,” wrote Daniel Flavin, a colleague at the Ohio State Journal. “At his best he was very, very good. On his off days, he was better than most.”
Ben Hayes loved Columbus, Ohio. He graced our city with his gift and his wit for decades. Seeing and feeling life through his eyes, even today, makes history a tastier dish.
Sources: Ben Hayes Scrapbook compiled by Christine Hayes & Jay Hoster (1991); Ben Hayes’ one hundredth birthday by Christine Hayes, April 1, 2012, www.columbusbicentennial.blogspot, com; Our Ben: Man of many glowing facets by Pauline Wessam, Columbus Citizen Journal, November, 1978, digital-collections.columbuslibrary.org; ‘30’ is written on the Ben Hayes story by Graydon Hambrick, Columbus Dispatch; Christine Hayes, Shaw-Davis Funeral Homes, January 5, 2024, www.shaw-davis.com; Anna Marie Hahn, https://maamodt.asp.radford.edu; Mary Katherine Campbell, www.pageantplanet.com; He secured his own retreat by Mike Harden, Columbus Dispatch, July 31, 1989; All pictures are courtesy of the Columbus Metropolitan Library.