Features

A mural in Kenton, Ohio, of the famous Singing Cowboy Gene Autry

Whenever people ask Brian Phillips where his downtown Kenton business is located, the investment adviser replies, “Know that big mural of the singing cowboy? My office is on the other side of it.”  

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.  

A group of young fishermen at a fishing competition

Even though competitive bass fishing isn’t yet recognized as an official school sport in Ohio, it is catching on with young people here. 

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. 

A black and white photo of a person standing in front of a large boulder

Here’s a word lesson. Erratic: to lack a fixed course or uniformity; to wander or deviate from the ordinary. Now, let us apply that to Ohio’s geology, which is anything but ordinary. 

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.

A woman standing with a piece of her artwork

Like many during COVID, Lillian Cooper and her mother, Clarissa, searched and searched for activities to do at home — all the better if they came upon an art form they hadn’t tried before. 

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.”

A comic drawing of Superman overlooking a city.

“Up, up, and away!” Before Superman became a global icon, he was a glimmer of hope imagined in a Glenville bedroom.

“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.”

A man posing with a Lyman boat

The colors of the hull can vary — white, yellow, blue, turquoise — but just about anyone on Lake Erie knows the classic Lyman lines: a deep bow with lapstrake wood, a certain wave-busting flare, the captain’s easygoing air of pride. 

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. 

Korey and Abby Wimbiscus Black sitting on their front porch

They start showing up on West Lincoln Avenue in Delaware — folding chairs, blankets, and snacks in tow — around dinnertime on Fridays during the summer, setting up on both sides of the street near No.

“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. 

People paddle boarding and kayaking on a river

When we were young boys, my brother and I sometimes paddled a battered aluminum canoe on the Mohican River in north-central Ohio.

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.

Josh and Jen Bixler

Josh Bixler and his team once got a 3D printer to fly — while it was printing.

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.  

A group of people sitting in grass listening to a book reading

In 1957, humorist James Thurber wrote to Columbus Dispatch writer and artist Bill Arter to discuss the future of the house where Thurber had been born.

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.