Vote for Joe

Catching up on the rest of the month… For “Small Business Saturday,” I did a newspaper story on, well, small businesses in Bluffton. They are the backbone of our economy (some 70% of businesses are small businesses), and they are an integral part of our Economic Position Paper… Pictured her, his woman runs a “spirit wear” shop downtown. The high school mascot is, that’s right, a pirate. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but… I also did a story on a man from Ada, Ohio, who is a chaplain at a Mobile Chapel set up at a Pilot truck stop in Beaverdam, Ohio. It’s a converted 18-wheeler that has been converted to a chapel and sits as a beacon of hope, he said, for, often, lonely drivers who are continually tempted with drugs, gambling, prostitution… in some of these truck stops… I also interviewed the Ada Village Administrator for a story on local recycling. While there was a local focus, Jamie Hall explained the cost of recycling is going up because, in part, China has stopped taking the world’s recycling in order to ramp up badly needed pollution control in that country. China, for instance, used to take 40% of American recyclables to bolster their GDP… Our Environmental Position Paper outlines a series of measures we’d attempt to mobilize in America to work on our own pollution control… Instead of going to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays (although I realize Trump was stuck at the White House this time with the shutdown. I wish I was ‘stuck’ there…), I went to Steubenville, Ohio, for a family get together. One of our rituals is a family basketball game at the local gym. Our daughter Sarah was “Newcomer of the Year” in the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference a few years back, our son Joseph is starting point guard for Franciscan University, our son Jonathan is starting point guard for his high school JV basketball team… and I couldn’t get out of bed the day after the game. I think I’ve lost a step.

On March 18, 1942, four American Airacobra jets crashed together during a blinding snowstorm in a cluster of trees near a farmer’s field just southeast of the small town of Lafayette, Ohio. All four pilots were killed. I’d decided to do a “remembrance story” for one of the local papers. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky all day. But as I was taking pictures of the historical marker at sunset (on Dec. 7, no less) a small formation of clouds appeared in the western horizon. Almost everyone I’ve shown the photo to has immediately responded that the front cloud looks an awful lot like: a fighter jet. I have to believe that evening that God was doing some “art stuff.”

I recently did a newspaper article about Ohio Northern University’s “Mobile Health Clinic.”  Funded by federal and private grants (including money from ONU), university pharmacy students, and other volunteers, travel throughout a three county area giving flu shots, vitamins, cholesterol screenings, blood pressure checks… especially to people who otherwise couldn’t afford these.  Mobile Clinic Director Amy Fanous told me that she believes one of the biggest healthcare problems is that not everyone has access to quality healthcare and she said this Mobile Clinic, and other similar initiatives, would go a long way in impacting this — if it they were replicated all across the country.  Our healthcare position not only calls this as well, but we have traveled extensively researching these kinds of model healthcare projects across America.

I just did a newspaper story on Bluffton’s Allen and Diane Yoder.  Each year for the past nine years,  they have gone on “Road Scholar” learning vacations.  The tour guides are local historians, college professors, and such.  The Yoders just returned from Natchez, Mississippi, where they learned about various aspects of slavery, about trade on the Mississippi River, about antebellum-era mansions…  The Yoders consider themselves “life-long learners” and really enjoy these adventures.  In our travels, we came across Wilcox, Arizona (pop. 3,501).  The town has a historical society, offers regular “learning tours” through the town, and have, basically (and with some creative tourism smarts to boot), turned Wilcox into a tourist destination.

The other night our Wednesday Bible Study group volunteered at Youth for Christ’s “Rally Point” outreach in Lima.  The YFC building is situated in the heart of a quite hardscrabble neighborhood.  And kids here, many of them, are in tough situations amidst the poverty, drugs, gangs…  Rally Point provides a safe place for after-school tutoring, a nightly meal, recreation areas with pool tables, and such, an outdoor basketball court, and now, a new courtyard area as well. One of the staff people took me outside at one point to show me this area, complete with three quite nice, all- weather, picnic tables — with umbrellas — that had been subsidized with a grant from the city.  The next phase is to get some lighting for the area.  And that’s where my son Jonathan is going to come in, again.  Go to… *and scroll to the bottom of the page.