Remember your first roller-coaster ride?
Kilner, a chemistry teacher at Eastlake North High School, is president of the Great Ohio Coaster Club, where he says he’s formed lasting friendships with fellow coaster enthusiasts — whom he describes as “friendly people who want everyone to have fun.” But the relationships, he says, go deeper than a common admiration for corkscrews and loop-de-loops. “I lost my dad last year,” he says. “I didn’t publicize it, so I was amazed at how many people from the club reached out to me.”
Though they also raise corn, soybeans, and hay at Ayars Family Farm in Mechanicsburg, John and Bonnie Ayars are, at their core, dairy farmers.
But it’s not just milk or even the marketing of genetics from their purebred cattle that’s at the heart of the business. From the start, it’s the educational aspect of the farm that appealed to Bonnie and John, who are members of Piqua-based Pioneer Electric Cooperative. Each summer, the Ayarses welcome hundreds of local elementary school students to the education center they built on the farm. Visitors get to meet and touch famous cows like Buckeye Bessie, Honeybun, and Bravo. They feed calves, try to milk a cow, and sample ice cream made on the farm.
A deeply worn long wooden table, believed to date back more than 400 years, is the centerpiece of the Contraxx Furniture offices in McConnelsville.
Early in his career, Workman learned how the national furniture world works — through trade shows, corporate showrooms, and long days selling into a system built for scale. During his years at Taylor Woodcraft, a McConnelsville-based school furniture manufacturer, he built relationships with major retailers, including Williams-Sonoma. He began supplying consumer pieces — starting with stools — and saw how demand could push standardized production toward customization.
The violent windstorm that swept across Ohio and much of the rest of the Midwest on March 13 was a powerful reminder about how quickly the weather can change — and how much we all depend on electricity in our daily lives.
Gusts were strong enough to bring down trees, snap utility poles, peel shingles, and unceremoniously toss around just about anything that wasn’t tied down. In other words, it was the kind of weather that makes folks worry about whether or not their lights will stay on.
Steve Pollick, the former outdoors editor for The (Toledo) Blade, even after decades of international adventures and more awards than he can count, remains one of the most humble, unassuming, approachable, and genuinely friendly people anyone could ever meet.
Born in Cleveland and raised in Fremont, Pollick displayed early interests in both the outdoors and writing. He soon discovered, through his high school English teachers, that he had an innate ability to break down complex concepts and make them easy for people to understand.
He graduated from the University of Toledo and earned a master’s from Ohio State, then went to work as a general assignment reporter for The Blade. His editors noticed his well-researched, accurate stories, and offered him the coveted position of outdoors editor. He jumped at it.
When hikers on a specific path in Ohio — whether tackling miles on a through-hike or heading out for a shorter day trip — enter town, there’s a chance they’ll spot a simple sign: Buckeye Trail Town.
The Trail Town program, launched by the Buckeye Trail Association in 2012, has grown steadily to include communities across the state that can be accessed from the trail. The program is designed to support hikers, but the benefits run both ways. As interest in the Buckeye Trail continues to grow, with thousands of followers tracking and sharing their journeys, these towns are becoming destinations in their own right, drawing visitors who might not have otherwise found their way there.
Appropriately, spring’s swift, early arrival in Ohio this year came on a Friday the 13th. A fast‑moving low‑pressure system tore across the state this past March, unleashing widespread damaging winds.
11:52 a.m., March 13: Trouble begins
In Millersburg, in eastern Ohio, reports of outages started coming in to Holmes‑Wayne Electric Cooperative around noon. “The numbers escalated quickly through the afternoon,” says Robyn Tate, the co-op’s vice president and chief administrative officer, noting that the hardest-hit areas were also the most rural. Large trees came down and numerous poles snapped under their weight.
In the small Lake Erie waterfront town of Fairport Harbor, east of Cleveland, Sheila Consaul is a celebrity of sorts.
Consaul, a communications consultant, has painstakingly turned the lighthouse into her summer dream home in those 15 years since she ponied up $71,010 for it at a U.S. General Services Administration federal auction. She lives and works there from May to October, then returns to her winter home in Virginia for the remainder of the year. The following photos are a peek inside the historic light, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2025.
