Chelsey Keiser vividly remembers growing up in western Ohio and helping her parents, Darke Rural Electric Cooperative members Mike and Debbie Keiser, raise thoroughbreds at their North Star-area farm.
“I’ve loved horses forever,” she says, noting that she learned to ride even before she learned to walk.
As she got a little older, Keiser started helping out by galloping the family’s thoroughbreds as part of their training regimen. “I really enjoyed that aspect of working with horses,” she says. “The hard part was handing the reins off to a jockey at the track.”
She also took up barrel racing — a fast-paced sport pitting horse and rider against the clock on a cloverleaf-shaped course, where the fastest finisher wins.
Ohio seems to have a bit of a thing with flags. It’s not just that our state flag is the only one out of the 50 that is not a rectangle (an interesting story in its own right).
You might have seen a service flag: a blue star (or stars) on a field of white, surrounded by a red border — hanging in the picture window of a seemingly random home in the neighborhood or in a shop window of a downtown building. But many folks might be unaware, or at least unsure, of its significance.
Sitting beside a small campfire, its woodsmoke scenting the cool air of a perfect autumn afternoon, I could almost see the scene as vividly as the man seated across from me described it.
The “my people” he speaks of — and traces his lineage to through one of his grandfathers, a full-blooded Native American — were a mixed-race group (modern-day anthropologists term it a “tri-racial isolate”) known as the Carmel Indians. They lived in Ohio’s Highland and Meigs counties until as recently as the early 1900s.
Cherish Harrell first started collecting oddities (and later selling them) when she attended huge conventions like Cincinnati’s HorrorHound or one of the giant regional Days of the Dead events.
The Secret Chamber is not just a store; it’s a hub of creativity and community.
“We host art shows based on themes like Friday the 13th or cryptids,” says Harrell. “We also host themed classes that include making spell kits, crystals, or spooky terrariums.”
Among the events that draw the biggest crowds are the photo shoots with Krampus, a half-goat, half-demon monster from central European folklore that punishes misbehaving children at Christmastime; and the evil bunny during Easter.
Our nation’s workforce has experienced significant shifts these past few years as a new generation of workers and leaders has started taking the place of aging baby boomers like myself. Now, as I prepare for my upcoming retirement in early January, I’m in the process of turning over the leadership of Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives and Buckeye Power to our next president and CEO.
It’s a good kind of problem for farmers to have: After an unexpectedly seasonable winter and growing season, the Champaign Berry Farm in Urbana produced an unexpected bumper crop of one of its mainstays this year.
“We saved a certain section of the orchard for the gleaners,” she says. “I told the [professional] pickers not to pick those peaches. We like to give back to the community and to those in need. That’s one of our purposes in life.”
On just about any night of the week, though certainly on almost every Friday and Saturday, there’s bound to be a square dance happening somewhere in Ohio.
The Crows got into square dancing by chance. They went to dinner late one summer evening to a restaurant where many of the other patrons were wearing what they later learned to be traditional square-dancing attire: the women in ruffled skirts worn over fluffy crinolines, and men in western-style shirts that matched or complemented their partners’ outfits.
Dorothy Montgomery is old enough to remember when the men from “the REA” (in this case, Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative) started digging holes, by hand, to set electric poles along her country road after the creation of the Ru
Montgomery recalls the excitement that spread among her family and neighbors as more and more signed up to join the co-op to bring electricity to their homes and farms — which had previously been lit by oil lamps or “Aladdin lamps.”
There’s one detail in particular, however, that is still fresh in her mind to this day. “I remember the shock if you stuck your finger in the socket,” she says. She’d been told doing that would hurt — “and it did,” she confirms. “Oil lamps never shocked you.”
