Features

Bertovich notes that the approaches to the new Ottawa County roundabouts — at an exit ramp from Ohio Route 2/53 and an adjacent one at the intersection of Route 53 and East State Road — are posted 15 mph, but some drivers speed through, which throws off the rhythm for incoming traffic. “And then sometimes people come to a complete stop when someone’s coming around or even when there’s no traffic coming,” she says. “I’ve seen four or five cars backed up coming off Route 2 where people have stopped at the roundabout when they didn’t need to.”   

John W. Heisman himself, the renowned innovator and Hall of Fame coach — the award’s namesake — was born in Cleveland in 1859. And though he grew up in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and played football for Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania, his first coaching jobs were at Oberlin College in 1892 (a season in which the Yeomen beat Ohio State not once but twice, by a combined score of 90–0) and Buchtel College, which is now the University of Akron.

Abbey has spent much of her life discovering, through an agricultural lens, how leadership and service can work together, and she says the co-op has been instrumental in her personal and educational development.

They ultimately decided on a balloon release. But not just any balloon release; they wanted an event on a grand scale. The aggressive goal was to simultaneously release 1.5 million helium-filled latex ballons, setting a new world record that would be recorded in The Guinness Book of World Records.  

Riding his sorrel horse, Champion, in scores of cowboy musicals, Autry helped to popularize country-western music with ballads like “Back in the Saddle Again,” the 1939 gold record that became his theme song. Autry’s prolific recordings also included two Christmas classics: “Here Comes Santa Claus,” which he cowrote in 1947, and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which debuted in 1949, has sold more than 25 million copies, and remains his bestselling single.  

Competitive bass fishing is strictly catch and release. Teams of two, using only artificial baits that look like worms or crawdads, drop their lines in a specified area. Each competitor catches a maximum of five fish, which must be kept alive in water-filled wells on the boats. As soon as the fish are quickly weighed and photographed, they are released back into the lake. The winning team is determined by the total weight of the fish caught.

For safety, every boat is operated by an adult so that the two young competitors can concentrate on their fishing. 

If you need a reminder that the world is held together by stone, then consider Ohio’s basement. You cannot see it except in the long strands of bored-out cores that have been extracted from hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. The basement is composed of sedimentary rock, settled and compressed at the bottom of what was once a deep ocean. That bedrock dates to about 570 million years ago, geologists say. It’s called Cambrian period stone, named after Cambria (which is now called Wales), where the stone type was first described and given a name around 1835.

“Superman is one of Cleveland’s greatest exports,” says Valentino Zullo, assistant professor of English at Ursuline College and co-director of the Rustbelt Humanities Lab. “We’re not exporting steel; we’re exporting culture. The superhero genre was created here.”

Perhaps the fiercest is Tom Korokney, a.k.a. “Doc Lyman.” He purchased the tooling, jigs, fixtures, and archived records from then-defunct Lyman during bankruptcy and moved it all to Lexington in Richland County. 

“I’ve used the tooling to duplicate parts through the years,” he says. “And the documentation — I’ve got all the original hull records.” Those records, Korokney says, are sought after by folks who desire historical papers, including certificates of authenticity, for their boats. 

Terri Riddle of Loveland, a painter who works mostly in oils and acrylics, got interested in quilling after her husband gave her a Cricut machine, which can cut paper in custom, specialized ways. Riddle had a project in mind, but realized she needed to learn quilling to finish the parts that the Cricut couldn’t handle — so she taught herself.     

She finds quilling both satisfying and relaxing. “It’s a very beginner-friendly craft,” she says. “You can do it while watching TV, and the designs can be simple or more complex.”