With its pointed crest and for its striking cardinal-red color alone, the northern cardinal is not only easy to notice, but also to remember and to appreciate. Lucky for us, it never leaves the home place.
The colorful northern cardinal lives over the entirety of Ohio, and that alone is reason enough for the state legislative assembly to name it the official state bird. There are other meritorious reasons that call forth warm approval and high regard.
Got someone on your list who’s seemingly impossible to buy for?
Make shopping simple this season with our tally of treasures sure to be a treat for even the trickiest members of your tribe.
A stay in Utopia
An Airbnb gift card could translate into a stay in the luxurious Utopia cabin at Paradise Lake, a private lake near New Philadelphia in Amish country. Utopia promises a relaxing haven for nature lovers, with peaceful water views as well as opportunities for kayaking, fishing, or simply relaxing by the shore. Utopia boasts two bedrooms, a full kitchen, and a hot tub. Other Paradise Lake cabins sleep as many as 14 or as few as two. All are available year-round.
John Herzig was quite pleased with the latest addition to his ever-so-slightly notorious collection.
Higgins later gained fame as the movie mutt, “Benji,” and to Herzig, Inn’s story of a lifetime of rescuing dogs from euthanasia and boarding them until he could find them homes is one that deserves to be remembered. “He supported at least 2,000 animals,” Herzig says. When Higgins eventually died after a long and fulfilling life, Inn gave her funeral, and Herzig has the program.
Editor’s note: Port Clinton-based photographer and writer James Proffitt traveled hundreds of miles between countless railroad crossings on Ohio’s highways and back ro
To be certain, spray-painting railcars is illegal and dangerous. Most graffiti is born near rail yards in larger cities, like the Queensgate yard in Cincinnati, where the cars are plentiful and often don’t move for long periods of time.
Most college football fans in the Buckeye State hear the word “Heisman” and think immediately of the six Ohio State University players who have won the sport’s most prestigious award — most notably, perhaps, of Archie Griffin, still the only player to win the Heisman Trophy
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.
For Abbey Garland, the combination of agriculture and electric cooperatives has shaped not just her interests, but also her future.
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.
The 1980s were tough economic times for Cleveland, the Buckeye State’s second-largest city.
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.
Organizers went all-out for what was dubbed Balloonfest ’86. They hired noted Los Angeles businessman Treb Heining and his company, Balloonart by Treb — still fresh from the successful release he had put on for the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A. — to put on the event.
Marblehead resident Cathy Bertovich has been driving Ohio roads for more than 50 years, so when she talks about new roundabouts recently constructed in Ottawa County, hers is certainly a voice of experience.
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.”
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.
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.
