Features

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.

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.”

“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. 

“I was so frustrated that I couldn’t play,” he says. So he started calling up a few musician friends and they did some socially distanced sets in his backyard for a few neighbors who would “sit and be kind,” he says. Soon enough, the neighbors encouraged them to move the show to the front yard. 

One of those streams is the Mohican, and today’s paddlers can view the Mohican River Water Trail at the ODNR website or download a brochure to find information about access points (including Greer Landing), picnic areas, and points of interest, as well as  low-head dams and other hazards along the way.

Aviation has been a lifelong passion for Bixler, who grew up in the Alliance area on a farm with a grass airstrip. His father was a general aviation pilot who taught him to fly (“I soloed in a single-engine Taylorcraft monoplane,” he says proudly). Bixler also learned the basic principles of aircraft design and construction while he and his father built numerous RC model airplanes.  

Not a bad local legacy for a humor writer and cartoonist who frequently made his hometown and its inhabitants the butt of his jokes. In stories like “The Day the Dam Broke” and “University Days,” the good citizens of Columbus and its land grant college, Ohio State University, were often portrayed as naïve or foolish at best, bumpkins at worst. But overall, his portrayal was fond, says Leah Wharton, operations director at Thurber House.