Twins turn 90 years old

OSGOOD - For 90 years, Gilbert and Wilbert Rutschilling have lived different, yet similar, lives.

The twins began life in Osgood, and each made his own way through hardships, misfortune and hard work. The two celebrated their birthdays Sunday afternoon with a party at Osgood Park.

Gilbert was injured in an automobile accident at age 5, leaving him blind. He attended the Ohio State School for the Blind in Columbus. After school, he moved back to Osgood where he lived with his parents and ran a chicken farm from which he sold eggs. He eventually held jobs in Columbus and Cincinnati and went back to school to study business administration.

While planning for the birthday party, Gil said he was looking forward to the event but noted he and his brother were warned that they had to be on good behavior for three whole hours. Gil stated that despite being sightless for most of his life, he has never let that keep him from living a full life.     "Just do it," he said. "If you listen to people you're not going to do anything but just sit in the rocking chair."

Gil ran a snack bar in downtown Cincinnati for about eight years during the 1970s and 1980s.

"I could operate it myself, I didn't have to hire somebody," he said. However being a sightless man running a shop, Gil was vulnerable to those wanting to take advantage of him. A street dweller would often come into his shop when no one else was around and fill up a bag of merchandise.

"Then he'd just walk out, say. 'Thank you' real snotty, and I was getting madder and madder," Gil said. The shoplifter knew that Gil couldn't get outside to summon police before the man got away, so Gil decided to find a way to catch the thief. When he smelled the man's familiar odor, Gil walked away from the cash drawer to another part of the shop.

"Of course you can't pull a cash drawer open without it going 'ding,' and when it did, I didn't run for the cash, I ran for the door." Gil said. He crashed into the thief at the door, and the two wrestled around until Gil got a grip on him.

"Eventually I got in a position where I could grab him with my left hand and grab him in the back of the belt and lift him up, put my right arm across his back, and I slammed him down face down on the lobby floor," Gil said. A lady passing by ducked into the bank and called 9-1-1, which brought about 50 police officers to the scene. Gil said he had thrown the man to the floor and then sat on him, but he found out later he would have had more help catching the robber.

"He wasn't going to go anywhere anyway, I found out afterwards. As I threw him on the floor, Cincinnati Bengals football player Joe Walters stepped off of one of the elevators across the hall. I don't think he would have got out of the grips of a 355-pound football tackle," he said laughing.

Wilbert "Bill" worked at various sawmills and became the head sawyer at St. Henry's sawmill. He and his brother Leroy owned the mill for many years, and Bill was also active with the St. Henry Fire Department.

While responding to a fire at the New Idea guesthouse in Coldwater in 1975, Bill was struck and pinned between two automobiles. The incident left him disabled. He spent two months in a Lima hospital and six months with a cast on his leg.

"When I got to Lima, the doctor said, 'Well there's no need to mess around with him.' In other words he said, 'He's going to pass away.' But I fooled him," Bill recalled.

Both Gil and Bill excelled in sports and loved to play. Despite being sightless, Gil played football for the Ohio School for the Blind in the 1940s.

"I loved football. That's when I could get all my meanness out," Gil said, smiling. "We tackled anything that moved." The school would play sightless teams from other states when he was in school. In later years, Gil took up bowling and a sport called beeper ball in which an electronic beeper is placed inside a softball.

"I had a .350 average in beeper ball when I was in Cincinnati," Gil said.

Bill played baseball and then softball.

"The last year I played with the softball team, we played over 100 games, and I batted over .500 for a team in Egypt, Ohio," recalled Bill, leafing through pictures of his former teammates in a scrapbook. The surviving team members still gather for a meal once a month.

The invitation to their 90th birthday party displays a picture of the twins fishing together. Fishing has always been a part of their lives. Bill still spends a lot of time fishing.

"Bill could always catch fish when the rest of us were just hoping," said Gil, although he also remembered a time when he went fishing with brother Elmer and his uncle. "I can always remember that, because I had 17 fish, and they didn't have any. They didn't have a one, and I was fishing right between the two of them. The fish just seemed to come to my hook instead of theirs."

After his accident, Bill was still able to hunt, traveling by cart. He has a collection of hunting trophies from his time hunting coyotes, deer and wild turkeys.

Gilbert and Wilbert were two of nine children, and now Bill and his wife, Norma Jean (Stucke), have nine children of their own, as well as 25 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren and two more great-grandchildren on the way. He lives in St. Henry.

Gil lives with his nephew, Ben Huelskamp and family in Maria Stein, and most days makes the mile-and-a-half walk down Jefferson Street to the Korner Kafe. The family invites those who know Gil to honk twice at him as he makes the trip.

Reflecting on the past 90 years, neither seemed ready to give up on the lives they love with family and friends accumulated over the years. When asked if the family has started planning the twins' 100th birthday party yet, Bill answered, "They're going to start on that Monday."