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.
Most people who casually drive past the (mostly) nondescript white barn along U.S. 40 in rural Miami County have no idea about the automotive history displayed inside.
In truth, Halderman never envisioned a full-blown museum on the family farm near Tipp City where he grew up, says Karen Koenig, Halderman’s daughter, who is now the curator. After he retired from the Ford Motor Company in 1994, he merely wanted to display some Mustang and other Ford memorabilia in his man cave at one end of the barn. He enjoyed greeting visitors there and sharing stories about his career designing cars until the day he died in 2020.
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.
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.
On Aug. 30, 1892 (133 years ago this month), the steel freighter Western Reserve went down during a furious gale on the Great Lakes, taking 27 souls with her.
Though the tragedy happened on Lake Superior, the most northerly, largest, and deepest of the Five Sisters, the story has many ties to the Buckeye State.
Whenever people ask Brian Phillips where his downtown Kenton business is located, the investment adviser replies, “Know that big mural of the singing cowboy? My office is on the other side of it.”
Riding his sorrel horse, Champion, in scores of cowboy musicals, Autry helped to popularize country-western music with ballads like “Back in the Saddle Again,” the 1939 gold record that became his theme song. Autry’s prolific recordings also included two Christmas classics: “Here Comes Santa Claus,” which he cowrote in 1947, and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which debuted in 1949, has sold more than 25 million copies, and remains his bestselling single.
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.
