Features

A lineworker stands in a bucket truck.

Electric cooperatives across Ohio join the nation this month in honoring veterans of the U.S. armed forces — America’s courageous protectors, defenders, and heroes. Not only do the co-ops acknowledge veterans’ dedication to our country, but we are truly grateful for the unique strengths and noble characteristics they bring to the co-op family.

We recognize all of our veteran-employees, and here, we talk to a few of them.

Ohioans face some significant choices as they enter the voting booth next month — not the least of which are whom to elect as the next governor and which candidate will best represent the state in the U.S. Senate.

Knowing the importance of electric cooperative voters in the campaigns, the major-party candidates for the two offices took some time recently to answer questions that are crucial to Ohio Cooperative Living readers.

A picture of the arboretum including trees, an archway, and flowers.

Successful individuals often amass museum-worthy collections reflecting their interests — works of art, luxury cars, fine wines, even historic structures. While Libbey’s glass earnings launched the Toledo Museum of Art and Ford’s automobile funds built Greenfield Village, Pure Oil Company President Beman Dawes pursued a more down-to-earth passion: He collected trees.

The inside of Bishop's Bicycles, containing multiple bikes, bags, and shirts.

Location: Historic downtown Milford near the Little Miami Scenic biking trail.

Provenance: After customers kept asking him to make bicycle parts and repairs, blacksmith John Bishop founded Bishop’s Bicycles in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1890. The shop moved to Cincinnati in 1910, subsequently relocated to Norwood and Silverton, then finally planted on Milford’s Main Street in 1971. Bruce Bishop sold the business in 2006, and now it’s owned by Greg and Lisa Linfert.

The Buckeye Bullet sits idle.

Farm life often is seen by outsiders as slow, easy-paced, even leisurely. Actual farmers, of course, know that’s not the case, as the nearly endless to-do list almost always seems to require 26 hours in a day to complete, even at top speed.

So perhaps folks will be inspired by some of the work going on at Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research — a piece of which will be on display in the Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives Education Center at this year’s Farm Science Review, Sept. 18–20 at the Molly Caren Agricultural Center just outside London, Ohio.

A crowd stands around the crashed ship staring at the wreckage.

The notion seems so fanciful: A U.S. Navy ship sinks in Ohio, not in Lake Erie or the Ohio River, but over the Appalachian piedmont of Noble County. It was a rural, bucolic setting — a patchwork of woodlots and farm fields split by fence lines and hedgerows and narrow roads with curves that followed the contours of the hillsides.

And the sky! An ocean blue that seemed meant for sailing — this, after all, is not a maritime tale, but rather, an aviation story.