Jill Moorhead

Ohio State Parks earned the National Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Park and Recreation Management in 2025 — essentially the top honor a park system can earn — but Mertz knows there’s always room for improvement, and she says restroom facilities are low-hanging fruit.

“We want people to want to be in the outdoors,” Mertz says. “Fifty years ago [when many of the facilities were built], people’s expectations were different. Today, people have come to expect a higher level of accommodation.”

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.

Bender keeps his favorites; they’re a regular part of his wardrobe. But he also gives them away: to neighbors who can’t donate anymore, to friends, to anyone who might wear one out into the world and make someone else think twice about passing by the next blood drive. 

He doesn’t give blood for the shirts. He does it for what happens inside St. Michael Hall, the recurring home to Fort Loramie’s drives.

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.

Separate and unequal

In its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” schools to be unconstitutional. 

“Superman is one of Cleveland’s greatest exports,” says Valentino Zullo, assistant professor of English at Ursuline College and co-director of the Rustbelt Humanities Lab. “We’re not exporting steel; we’re exporting culture. The superhero genre was created here.”

The murals are more than just public art; they’re a symbol of resilience. Once a bustling center for steel and shoe manufacturing, Portsmouth saw its fortunes plummet with the collapse of those industries. The floodwall, built after a 1937 flood that devastated the city, stood for decades as a bleak reminder of what was lost. 

Launched in Akron in 1935, AA is a fellowship dedicated to overcoming alcohol addiction, extensively documented in its publications such as Alcoholics Anonymous (known as “The Big Book”), Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, and AA Grapevine.

The idea for the program arose organically, says Harrison, owner and operator of Harrison Farm. (Her secondary title, she says, is “chief minion” to the goats.) She met yoga instructor Dana Bernstein in 2016 while she was planning Bernstein’s wedding, and the two hit it off.