I’m coming up on my ninth anniversary of moving to Ohio, and despite dedicating those years (minus one in Louisville) to understanding the state and its people, I still can’t wrap my head around one statewide trend: the tendency of Ohio natives to denigrate their home state.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Pollyanna, always looking on the bright side. Maybe it’s because I found my dream job and my husband here. Maybe it’s because I’m from Iowa, so anything with slightly more hills and slightly more people feels very “bright lights big city.” The fact is, I can’t help but think that the people who hate it here are just not looking hard enough.
My news team goes all over the state, past the Three Big Cs (Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati), to track down stories. And yes, some of them are less than flattering. But they’re always, at a minimum, interesting and sometimes they're very flattering. What other state has a billboard declaring a town’s dedicated “sorehead” and one that reminds you "Hell is Real?" What other state has a pawpaw festival and a Bigfoot festival and a washboard festival? What other state has a museum dedicated to the steel guitar and a golf-course-turned-UNESCO-heritage-site?
And while we covered the explosion of using “Ohio” as a synonym for uncool on social media, my favorite Ohio joke is almost exactly two decades old:
"Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?"
That's from a Stephen Colbert interview with then-congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones on Nov. 3, 2005.
According to a 2019 count-up of NASA bios by AdView, Texas, New York, and California actually beat us in the astronaut count. But at the time of publishing, Wikipedia lists 26 astronauts from Ohio, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Ohio’s history of flight is on its license plates for a reason (even if the plane was briefly flying backward). It’s easy to love the Wright brothers and John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. But there’s so much more to our contributions to flight.
That’s why Ohio Newsroom reporter Kendall Crawford came up with Buckeye Skies, a series on lesser-known Ohio aviation history.
You don’t have to make it all the way to outer space to make your mark. Akron-based Goodyear launched its first blimp, “The Pilgrim,” a hundred years ago this year.
The behemoth’s first flight marked a milestone in aviation history — during the World Wars, Goodyear manufactured blimps for the U.S. Navy as spy tech. In World War II, the attack on Pearl Harbor surged their production.
But not all aviation stories are as feel-good. September also marked a one hundredth anniversary – the wreck of the USS Shenandoah. The nearly 1000-foot-long Zeppelin was on a cross-country publicity tour when it got caught in a storm over Noble County.
The lighter-than-air airship crashed to earth in the city of Ava and locals rushed to help, and to gather souvenirs.
Now generations later, those scraps — broken bits of metal, fraying rope and compasses whose needles have long since moved — have been passed down like family heirlooms. They’re compiled in a mobile museum, commemorating the disaster and the community’s compassionate response.
It’s just one of a number of little-known aviation stories in the state, and every Wednesday this month on The Ohio Newsroom, starting yesterday, we’ll feature another. So, to paraphrase a Wicked lyric, if you care to find us, look to the Buckeye Skies.
"The Cut" is featured in Ideastream Public Media's weekly newsletter, The Frequency Week in Review. To get The Frequency Week in Review, The Daily Frequency or any of our newsletters, sign up on Ideastream's newsletter subscription page.
