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.”
Larry Kelly remembers a time, from the late 1990s into the mid-2010s, when any strong wind could cause him to lose power at his home near Graysville for a couple of hours — or longer.
Kelly knew that personnel from his co-op, Marietta-based Washington Electric Cooperative, were doing everything they could to provide reliable power for him and all of his neighbors in that area of Monroe County. The problem was that many of the outages were occurring before electricity even reached the co-op’s substations.
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.
Brad Bussard and his team are accustomed to working almost invisibly.
It was the end of May, the time of year when ospreys return to Ohio from their winter home in Mexico, and a breeding pair had decided that one of the utility poles in the training yard next to the co-op’s office was a good spot to build a nest. The population of ospreys, once nearly wiped out in the Buckeye State, has been steadily growing here since the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reintroduced them in 1996, to the point where the Division of Wildlife no longer even bothers to count them.
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.
Rachel LaRue grew up in the suburbs of Columbus, an area not generally thought of as “farm country.” Despite that, she says, she was involved in 4-H and “I always wanted to have a homestead with animals.”
That organization, based in Pittsboro, North Carolina, keeps track of rare breeds of sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, and other types of livestock — researching populations of dozens of breeds and rating their viability from “critical” (fewer than 100 annual U.S. registrations) to “recovering” (over 2,500 annual U.S. registrations, but still in need of monitoring).
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.
