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October 26, 2007

Area residents recall encounters with ‘Green Man’

By DEBBIE WACHTER MORRIS

dmorris@ncnewsonline.com



Ray Robinson will never know the number of friends he accumulated in his life.

He’ll never know someone wrote a song about him or that he would become the subject of a movie.

Interest in Robinson was rejuvenated recently when a Studio City, Calif., movie team, “Ivory Seam Productions” set its sights on making a movie about the scarred Ellwood City-area man who had spent much of his life in the dark.

Tisha York, formerly of Ellwood, is a producer and screenwriter for the film about Robinson, who morphed into the legendary “Green Man” after being nearly electrocuted by a high tension wire. He was 8 years old when the incident happened in 1919 near Beaver Falls.

As an adult, Robinson would walk at night along Route 351, away from the ridiculing society. But people found him, and stories sprung up about “The Green Man” or “Charlie No-Face” — the scary creature in the woods.

People would go in troops to look for him. Some were scared and some played mean tricks, but others befriended him and found him to be a genuinely nice person.

The real Ray Robinson, who died in 1985 at age 74, is who York hopes to capture as the camera zooms in on his life.

Auditions in mid-October attracted 70 local acting hopefuls, including Gene Quinn, 64, of Beaver County.

“This is about 20 years too late,” he said. “It’s going to be a big seller. I felt sorry for him.”

While Andy Zelesnak’s daughter auditioned, the 70-year-old Koppel man told his stories about seeing Robinson seven or eight times, when they discussed weather and the miles Robinson had walked.

Robinson was called the Green Man because his damaged face had a greenish hue, “especially when light shone on it,” Zelesnak said. “He was wonderful guy, having a hardship like that ...”

Zelesnak’s friend, Joe Nanni, was fleet-footed and “scared to death” of Robinson. One day while the two were riding bikes, they saw Robinson walking on the road and Nanni “got off his bicycle and ran like a deer.”

Zelesnak also remembers hunting one day when a man ran out of the woods in panic, saying, “Don’t go in the woods, there’s a monster in there.”

“I said, ‘It’s probably just Ray,’” Zelesnak said. He found Robinson sitting under an apple tree and engaged him in conversation.

“Those were the few times I saw him in daylight,” he said.

Eugene DiSimone, 90, of Ellwood City remembers looking for Charlie No-Face with his friends as a teen.

“Kids were curious,” DiSimone said, adding ruefully, “If that accident happened to him today, he would have had a better life.”

Frank Secich of Sharon plays in the rock band “Deadbeat Poets” that features a song, “The Green Man” on a compact disc. Secich said the song, being played in Japan, is about Robinson.

Secich and his friends drove to Koppel in the late 1960s to find Robinson after hearing the Green Man lore, he said.

They would stop at a Halloween haunted house in Mahoningtown, where a character named “Doc” carried a pitchfork, and Doc’s assistant, “The Count,” had a club foot and looked like Dracula.

“From there we would go to find Ray,” Secich recalled. “We found him on Route 351, and he would sit up on a hill. The first time I saw him I talked to him. He was a real friendly guy.”

After that, they said, they took him Stroh’s beer and cigarettes, which he would hide in the woods because he wasn’t supposed to have them.

“I wrote the song about him,” Secich said. “It’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written, actually.”

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