Every little while some veteran Blade reader communicates and asks if anybody remembers when an eagle with wings full spread perched on top of the Wheeler Opera house, St. Clair and Monroe sts. Some then deny that any such thing ever happened.

Here is a picture of the Wheeler, taken in 1887, which plainly shows that some of the rememberers were right, and that some of them were wrong.

The corner of Monroe and St. Clair sts,. where the Wheeler opera house stood till burned in the spring of 1893 is a different secrtion from that day, with a different environment. There surely were no street cars operated by electric power; no automobiles. Along St. Clair st. betweenb the Wheeler and the Congregational church, there were what we'd now call "ramshackle" buildings, which long ago disappeared.

Had this picture been taken at night by a newspaper photographer with his modern equipment, carriages might have been seen, with drivers and lackeys. And the people of the town, dressed in their best, might have been disembarking for a go at Booth & Barrett, or the or the best opera - for in the Wheeler days, Toledo got the best of the traveling companies.

To thousands of Toleodans, the Wheeler, as it appears here, lives in memory - either with or without the zinc eagle on its roof.