Location: Downtown Xenia, about one block from the Greene County Courthouse.
Provenance: Brothers George and Andrew Dodds, both of whom were stonemasons and immigrants from Scotland, started making memorials in Yellow Springs in 1859. Five years later, they relocated to a building on West Main Street in the railroad hub of Xenia. It’s now one of the nation’s largest monument companies.
Attractions across Ohio host dining events throughout the year that feature more than just food — the guests of honor include historic figures (actors, impersonators, or simply historians with a flair for the dramatic, most with Ohio ties) and make for enriching experiences that combine a dash of education with a huge helping of dinner theater.
For most Ohioans, the first sign that something unusual was happening on that night 40 years ago was the shriek of a fierce, unrelenting wind.
In the late evening of Jan. 25, 1978, a low-pressure system from Canada met another low-pressure system from Texas. Such storms approach from opposite directions several times each winter, according to the National Weather Service. Usually they miss each other. This time they collided, causing what has come to be widely known as “the storm of the century.”
No one ever went into the vintage toy business out of dreary obligation.
In fact, many of the people we met during our look at vintage toy stores around Ohio started as hobbyists collecting the memories of their own childhoods.
“A hobby turned into a business,” says Mike Patterson, owner of Mike’s Vintage Toys in Springboro, describing his career path.
The headlines in late 1950 looked grim for our boys on the front lines in the Korean War — and for the Ohio-based Lustron Corporation.
Literally, side by side, you could read newspaper columns across the country about Marines and soldiers facing the coldest winter imaginable as they sought to liberate South Korea from the Communist aggressors, and about the Lustron Corporation facing ruin as it was pushed out of the burgeoning post-World War II housing market. Both made national news.
Imagine being 13 years old and going home every day for the next six years — to jail.
Nelson Smith, chairman of the board of The Energy Cooperative in Newark, called the Licking County Jail home for nearly the entire span of his teenage years, but not because he had committed any crimes. Smith moved into the Licking County Jail when his mother was hired in the early 1960s to be the head cook and jail matron, the person in charge of the female prisoners.
Scaring children may seem like an odd way to make a living, but Goosebumps author R.L. Stine has a knack for it.
“You just sort of feel it,” says Stine, an Ohio native who grew up in Bexley. “In the beginning of writing a book, you have to decide how scary to go. If it’s not scary enough, the book is boring. If it’s too scary, it gets silly or ludicrous. It’s a fine line when you’re dealing with 7- to 11-year-olds.”
Aesculus is hardly a word that would strike fear into anyone’s heart. Yet Ohioans take pride in their Buckeyes — the traditional nickname for the sports teams at The Ohio State University that was formally adopted in 1950, but informally used before even the turn of the 20th century. The nickname was derived from the innocuous-looking native tree nuts that can be poisonous to Gophers, Badgers, Wolverines, and many other more fierce-sounding mascots across the country.
