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McKinley House draws visitors

NILES — Seven-year-old Lauren Lytle of Boardman needed some information about the 25th U.S. president, William McKinley, for a school report.

So she and mother Kim headed Monday to downtown Niles and the McKinley Birthplace Home to pick up some facts straight from the man himself — sort of. Mike Wilson, a Champion resident and executive director of SCOPE, has moonlighted as a McKinley impersonator for a quarter of a century.

“He told me about his two daughters, two cats and his parrot,” Lauren said about some trivia told to her by “McKinley,” the Niles native who made it to the White House in 1897. “I also found out he went to the same college as my dad, Mount Union.”

Wilson said this is a busy time for him to dress the part.

“From his birthday (Jan. 29) to Presidents Day, it has been hopping. This is my seventh straight day doing something,” Wilson, who spent four hours Monday at the Niles attraction, said.

Curator Nicole Straub, who has been working at the McKinley House for about two years, said some 15 visitors had already toured the home during the first two hours of the open house.

“The face masks of six presidents were really popular with the kids,” Straub said as she pointed to the likenesses of such presidents as Washington, Lincoln, McKinley and Trump.

Wilson said people enjoy his stories, whether it is how “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” children’s book by L.Frank Baum is based on the McKinley-Bryan election to how that 1896 election was similar to the just-completed 2016 vote that elected Trump.

“It shows that history always repeats itself so much. The issues were pretty much the same. There was immigration, jobs and the anti-Wall Street crowds,” he said.

Wilson said McKinley, like Trump, was not a favorite of the Republican Party leadership for the nomination. The Ohioan also had a distinct electoral college strategy for beating the Democratic populist candidate at the time, William Jennings Bryan.

McKinley got the attention of big-business interest of the industrial North and East because of his wanting to establish the gold standard.

“He had financial and political backing from Mark Hanna, a shipping magnate from Cleveland, and the Rockefellers,” Wilson said.

This made McKinley unpopular in the Western “silver states,” like the Dakotas and Colorado. And like Trump, Wilson said it was “the working people who pushed McKinley into the presidency.”

Wilson said the 1896 race even had a woman candidate, populist Leslie Kelsey, nicknamed “the Kansas Tornado,” but she was pushed aside by at wave that favored Bryan, whom Wilson called “the Bernie Sanders of 1896.”

“Another wrinkle was that McKinley didn’t travel to campaign because his wife Ida was too ill. They came to him at his home in Canton. Often when the people came, he would step out from behind the curtain,” Wilson said, adding that McKinley spent about $4 million — a lot of money at the time — to create large 7-by-10-foot campaign posters, one of which is on display on the second floor of the Niles museum.

“That particular one stood in the middle of Washington Court House, Ohio,” Wilson said.

Some of the first-time visitors to the museum Monday were Ginger Koupal of Newton Falls and her son, Nick.

“I love all the presidents, except maybe the guy who is in the White House now,” said Ginger Koupal, as she noted that her first presidential vote was in 1972 for a guy named George McGovern, who lost in a landslide to the 39th president, Richard M. Nixon. “Not too many people ended up liking the guy either.”

Nick Koupal, who was born during Ronald Reagan’s first term, said he likes Bill Clinton the best, probably because “he wasn’t a guy named Bush.”

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