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The Adams Rural Electric office will be closed on Friday, April 7, to recognize Good Friday.

Energy Efficiency Tip of the Month

This planting season, include energy efficiency in your landscaping plans. Adding shade trees around your home can reduce surrounding air temperatures as much as 6 degrees. To block heat from the sun, plant deciduous trees around the south side of your home. Deciduous trees provide excellent shade during the summer and lose their leaves in the fall and winter months, allowing sunlight to warm your home.

Source: Energy.gov

CONTACT 937 -544 -2305 | 800 -283 -1846 www.adamsrec.com

OFFICE 4800 St. Rte. 125 P.O. Box 247 West Union, OH 45693

OFFICE HOURS

Mon.–Fri., 7 :30 a.m.–4 p.m.

OUTAGES

Report outages by calling the office or through your registered account on SmartHub. Do NOT report on Facebook as it is not monitored and could be missed.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Donald C. McCarty Sr. President

Charles L. Newman Vice President

Kenneth McCann Secretary

Stephen Huff

Blanchard Campbell

William Wylie

M. Dale Grooms

William Seaman

David Abbott

Manager

HIDDEN NUMBER BILL CREDIT

Each month, an account number is hidden in the local pages of the magazine. If you find your account number, please call the office by the end of the month for which it appeared. You will receive a $20 credit on your electric bill. Your call affirms permission to publish your name as a winner in an upcoming issue of Ohio Cooperative Living magazine.

BY CRAIG SPRINGER

Mildred Gillars wanted publicity and she craved attention; she got plenty of both. She also sought adoration, but she was universally reviled. She died destitute and lies in an unmarked grave in Columbus.

On March 15 , 1946 , 77 years ago last month, Ohioan Mildred Gillars was arrested by the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Berlin, Germany. Officers had trailed her for several months after the end of hostilities in World War II, as she was wanted for treason, a charge that could send her to the electric chair.

Gillars did not steal state secrets or reveal information to the enemy. She performed in a play, Vision of Invasion, on May 11, 1944, in the role of a distraught Ohio mother named Evelyn whose dead soldier son came to her in a dream as he perished in an invasion of Europe. Gillars performed the part in a radio studio in Berlin. Her audience numbered in the hundreds of thousands: members of the American military throughout Europe and North Africa and at sea — as well as radios in American homes in the eastern U.S.

Someone else was listening, too — and recording: the Federal Communications Commission in Maryland. The play was intended to break the morale of the Allied military might that the Germans knew was amassing to cross the English Channel. It was theater as psychological warfare. Mildred Gillars was born in Maine in 1900 and came of age in Ohio, the stepdaughter of an alcoholic dentist who once practiced in Bellevue. Home life was tumultuous.

She graduated high school in 1917 at Conneaut, near the extreme northeastern corner of the state, and attended Ohio Wesleyan University, where she majored in dramatic arts. Gillars, who went by the nickname “Milly,” took roles in plays and earned a reputation as an excellent orator, eccentric, and a bit of a coquette.

Her impetuous nature came into bloom her senior year, when she left Delaware before graduating college to pursue acting in New York City. She landed gigs in stock companies and played traveling vaudeville shows, and worked as a sculptor’s model on the side. But her acting career went flat and she headed to Europe in 1928, with stops in France and Algeria before she landed in Germany in 1934. She taught English at Berlitz School and wrote theater and movie reviews for Variety and the New York Times. Then, in 1940, she took a job with German state radio as “Midge at the Mike.”

The former Buckeye with a silky voice trained in drama was a perfect fit to amplify the Nazi propaganda to American listeners without a heavy German accent. Gillars’ work behind the microphone disparaging FDR, Jews, and the Allies would earn several nicknames: Berlin Betty, Berlin Bitch, Olga, and Axis Sally. The last stuck.

Gillars co-produced two regular radio shows, intended to taunt American servicemen and rattle Americans back home. She visited POW camps and hospitals and interviewed the captives, falsely representing herself as being with the International Red Cross. In GI Letterbox and Medical Reports , Gillars distorted and aired the interviews to make it appear as though the captives were treated well and sympathized with the Nazis. She broadcast names and serial numbers of men killed in combat. Several former POWs would show up at her eventual trial and confirm her seditious and licentious character.

Her daily show Home Sweet Home Hour opened with the sound of a lonesome train whistling in the distance. In a girl-to-girl tone, Gillars would lead off with, “This is Berlin calling the American mothers, wives, and sweethearts. And I would just like to say, girls, when Berlin calls it pays to listen.” To sow seeds of doubt and play on homesickness, Gillars taunted the servicemen in a sultry voice about their unfaithful wives and girlfriends cavorting with boys in convertibles. In between the taunts, she spun big-band records — Glen Miller, Benny Goodman — and brought in live orchestras.

Gillars stayed at it until two days before Germany surrendered in May 1945. She purposely melded into anonymity in a ravaged Berlin, knowing American authorities were after her. Upon her arrest, she was held in a prison camp at Frankfurt until turned over to the FBI in January 1949. A criminal complaint read, “From Dec. 11, 1941, through May 6, 1945, from the German Reich she did unlawfully, willfully and treasonably adhere to the government of the German Reich, an enemy of the United States, and did give to the said enemy aid and comfort.”

She was charged with eight counts of treason. Her trial in Washington, D.C., lasted 102 days and included hours of listening to her broadcasts as well as testimony from former POWs. On March 11, 1949, 74 years ago last month, she was acquitted on seven of those counts, but convicted of the last one: performing in Vision of Invasion

Gillars’ defense that she swore allegiance to Hitler under duress and that she was merely a paid performer and not a party propagandist did not hold up. She did, however, escape the electric chair and instead was sentenced to 10 to 30 years as a “tier-2 traitor.”

While in prison she converted to Catholicism, and upon her parole in 1961, she came to Columbus and landed paid work as a teacher at Our Lady of Bethlehem convent and its attendant grade school. She eventually returned to Ohio Wesleyan and earned her college degree in speech after a 51-year hiatus.

Noted biographer Richard Lucas wrote that she may have outlived her troubled and seditious past. Mildred Gillars died of cancer — destitute and without heirs — in 1988, and at her passing, her friends and associates were stunned to learn through local and national media coverage that the elderly lady they had known as “Miss Mildred” was the reviled Axis Sally. She lies at rest in an unmarked grave in St. Joseph Cemetery, south of Columbus.

To check out the complete FBI file on Mildred Gillars, go to https://archive.org/details/ MildredGillars/page/n643/mode/2up?q=ohio.

BY RANDY EDWARDS

In April of 2020, we were just beginning to wrap our heads around the notion that the coronavirus pandemic would not simply disappear after the weather turned warm. We began to accept that, for a while at least, our days would mostly be spent within the walls of our home and the boundaries of our neighborhoods. Schools were shuttered, office workers were learning to Zoom, and spring travel plans shifted to staycations.

Suddenly, everyone was developing a hobby: baking sourdough bread, knitting sweaters, learning to speak French, or playing the piano. Animal shelters were overrun with requests for dogs.

My family dug a hole in the ground and let it fill with water.

If that seems like a modest aspiration, understand that I’ve coveted a rain garden for many years. Designed to temporarily capture and slow the flow of water off your property, rain gardens are a practical and beautiful landscape feature that is becoming popular, especially for those looking to lighten their footprint on the Earth.

It’s a given that in a rainy environment like Ohio’s, we can’t let water simply pool wherever it wants. Because most of our homes have subterranean foundations, we need to keep rainwater away from the house if we want to keep our basements dry and protect our foundations. So, in keeping with building codes, homebuilders install drainage tile and sump pumps to keep the water routed toward a stormwater collection system, which could be a storm sewer in an urban area or a drainage ditch out in the country.

This approach works (usually), but the long-term effects of our collective rush to drain can be hard on rivers and creeks and the aquatic critters that live therein. Storm water management systems can cause rivers to be “flashy” — meaning the water rises and falls quickly, scouring that river-bottom habitat, causing erosion, and leading to flooding downstream. Storm drainage systems also carry sediment and trash from city streets, grease and oil from cars, and fertilizers and pesticides from yards and fields.

Rain gardens are shallow depressions in the ground that collect rainwater and allow it to slowly percolate into the soil instead of rushing off into the street. These features filter stormwater and prevent flooding as well as providing habitat for birds and butterflies and natural beauty that lasts throughout the year.

After a consultation with our local soil and water conservation district, we staked out a section of yard on the side of the house near two downspouts and began to dig. This led to plenty of curious questions from passing neighbors out walking (6 feet apart at the time, of course). Spurious speculation about our efforts included a small swimming pool, a large bird bath, even one suggestion of a hole to bury a body. We smiled grimly at their jokes and kept digging, by hand, until one more-helpful neighbor let us know that Home Depot rents excavating equipment and offered his truck to help fetch an earth-mover.

This was a game-changer, and in one day we had the rough outlines of the garden in place. After several bags of soil amendments and placement of carefully selected plantings, we routed the water from the downspouts into the rain garden.

Early on, I’ll admit, it looked like a muddy hole in the ground with a few scrawny shrubs. But later in the season, and especially by the next season, we were delighted by how lovely it looked, with wetland vegetation like buttonbush and queen of the prairie jostling for sunlight with black-eyed Susans and swamp milkweed.

There are many resources available to help homeowners plan, build, and maintain a rain garden. The Central Ohio Rain Garden Initiative has a complete building guide and a list of suitable native plants. The Toledo-Lucas County Rain Garden Initiative also has a step-by-step guide. But first check in with your local soil and water conservation district, as some offer classes and advice. Because rain gardens help relieve stress on municipal storm drainage systems, some communities even have cost-share programs that reimburse homeowners for plants, mulch, compost, and other rain garden materials.

A final thought: We surrounded our garden with solarpowered lights, both to add nocturnal beauty and to keep our guests from toppling into the garden while leaving one of our backyard parties. It’s kind of hard to miss, with its shrubbery and tall grasses, but your family and friends will thank you.

• Consider the size but be flexible. There’s a formula for measuring how large your rain garden needs to be, based on the size of your roof and other factors. We didn’t have quite enough room, but our smaller rain garden captures the water from most rain events. In serious downpours, the garden overflows into a swale and into the storm sewer. If you want, you can add a downstream drain and route the overflow directly into the storm sewer.

• Be realistic about what you can do by hand. In my neighborhood, at least, it doesn’t take long to get past the topsoil and into clay, which doesn’t come up easily. The rented excavator cost a bit but was worth every cent.

• Follow the directions to test the drainage. Dig a hole, fill it with water, and see how much it drains in 24 hours. That’s how deep you want your rain garden to be, and that’s important because the water needs to disappear within 24 hours of the rain event. Otherwise, you’re making a place for mosquitos to breed, and nobody wants that.

• Accept that your neighbors may look at you strangely at first, but will be impressed when the plants begin to grow and blossom.

You can’t always lie down in bed and sleep. Heartburn, cardiac problems, hip or back aches – and dozens of other ailments and worries. Those are the nights you’d give anything for a comfortable chair to sleep in: one that reclines to exactly the right degree, raises your feet and legs just where you want them, supports your head and shoulders properly, and operates at the touch of a button.

Our Perfect Sleep Chair® does all that and more. More than a chair or recliner, it’s designed to provide total comfort. Choose your preferred heat and massage settings, for hours of soothing relaxation. Reading or watching TV? Our chair’s recline technology allows you to pause the chair in an infinite number of settings. And best of all, it features a powerful lift mechanism that tilts the entire chair forward, making it easy to stand. You’ll love the other benefits, too. It helps with correct spinal alignment and promotes back pressure relief, to prevent back and muscle pain. The overstuffed, oversized biscuit style back and unique seat design will cradle you

OVER 100,000 SOLD

OVER 100,000 SOLD in comfort. Generously filled, wide armrests provide enhanced arm support when sitting or reclining. It even has a battery backup in case of a power outage.

White glove delivery included in shipping charge. Professionals will deliver the chair to the exact spot in your home where you want it, unpack it, inspect it, test it, position it, and even carry the packaging away! You get your choice of Luxurious and Lasting Miralux, Genuine Leather, stain and liquid repellent Duralux with the classic leather look, or plush MicroLux microfiber, all handcrafted in a variety of colors to fit any decor. Call now!

1-888-731-3911