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HANCOCK-WOOD ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE
MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT AND CEO Want to help make decisions at affect your co-op? Run for a position on the board of trustees
Being a member-consumer of an electric cooperative means you have a say in the matters that aff ect you and your community. HancockWood Electric is guided by a member-elected board of trustees that is responsible for making decisions related to the co-op’s fi nancial goals and other policies. If you’re someone who is interested in taking a more active role in your cooperative, we urge you to consider running for a seat on the board. A trustee should have the best interest of the cooperative at heart, without placing his or her own cooperative at heart, without placing his or her own interest or agenda fi rst — no one should serve on the board solely to assist the cooperative or for any personal gain. They should have the capability to guide the president and CEO through the formulation of sound policies that both protect the fi nancial and operating integrity of the cooperative and protect the rights of the membership. Members who live in districts 2, 7, or 9 are eligible to run for the board in 2023 (not sure which district you’re in? It’s noted on your bill on the top right; or you can call our o ce to verify). If you are a qualifi ed member in one of those districts, you can obtain a petition form from our o ce or at www.hwe.coop. After collecting the required signatures, return your petition form to the o ce by the deadline and your name will be placed on the election ballots sent to members in May. The results of our elections will be announced during our annual meeting. Any member can become a trustee on the board, and each district is designated by geographic area. In addition to completing the petition form, a member must:
• Have been a member for at least three (3) years. • Not have not been an employee for three (3) years prior. • Not be closely related to an employee. • Not be employed by a financially interested competing enterprise, or a business selling electric power or supplies to the cooperative. If you have any questions about the petition process or the election, please feel free to call our o ce at 800-445-4840 or email us at info@hwe.coop. Bill Barnhart
PRESIDENT & CEO
New district map
How to obtain the petition to run for our board
Members in districts 2, 7, and 9 can go to www.hwe.coop to download a petition, or stop by our o ce. The petition needs 20 signatures from members within the candidate’s district, and must be returned by March 15, 2023.
2023 election timeline
March 15
March 22
April 3-6
May 1
May 26
June 10 Director election petition deadline
Election committee to review petitions
President to contact director nominees
Mail director election ballots (voting opens)
Return date for director election ballots (voting ends)
Annual meeting
HWE staff member completes Leadership Edge program
Congratulations to Mary Casey on completing the Leadership Edge program! The one-year Cooperative Leadership Edge program was hosted by Hancock-Wood’s trade association, Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives, and required six courses, two assessments, and a capstone project. Coursework focused on coaching employees, managing conflict, adapting communication approaches, carrying out difficult conversations, and delivering results.
Pictured from left, President and CEO Bill Barnhart, HR Generalist Mary Casey, and COO Curt Croy.
HAPPY Valentine ’ s Day!
from Hancock-Wood Electric Cooperative
After 14 years working at Hancock-Wood Electric, Member Services Representative Teresa McIntyre retired on Dec. 16. We wish her the very best!
Think Energy $mart
with Bruce
An attached garage is not a conditioned space in your home, but how you care for that unconditioned area can have a direct effect on the comfort inside your home. Air temperatures always attempt to equalize, so a large temperature difference between your home and garage will induce a migration of heat to the cooler space. Spending some time looking around your garage and completing this checklist should help make your garage more comfortable — and therefore lower the demand on your home’s heating and cooling system. • Check the seal on the bottom and sides of your overhead garage door(s). A worn-out seal can allow unwanted air, moisture, and bugs and rodents into your garage. • Consider replacing your garage door if it’s uninsulated or has damage to the insulation. Even if you don’t heat your garage, an insulated door can keep it much warmer in the winter — reducing the temperature difference between the garage and home. • Inspect any pedestrian doors for problems with the seals and locking mechanisms. A badly sealed walkthrough door can create the same problems as a badly sealed overhead door. • If you have insulation above your garage, be sure the insulation has not been disturbed. Any voids in the insulation will significantly lower the R-value of that system. If you have attic access in your garage, be sure there is insulation above the access as well. • During the summer, parking a hot vehicle in a garage will raise the temperature significantly in that space.
If you park your vehicle in the garage on a hot day, create some ventilation to allow that hot air to escape — lowering the temperature in your garage. If you have any questions about how to make your home or garage more comfortable, please let me know. You can reach me at 419-257-5025 or bruce@hwe.coop.
CONTACT
800-445-4840 FAX: 419-257-3024
WEBSITE
www.hwe.coop
OFFICE
1399 Business Park Drive South P.O. Box 190 North Baltimore, Ohio 45872-0190
BOARD OF TRUSTEES Gene Barker
Chairman
William Kale
Vice Chairman
Tom Kagy
Secretary/Treasurer
Lee Anne Dierksheide
Assistant Secretary
Tim Phillips Ed Crawford Duane Fry Charles Beagle Ron Riegle Brian Terry Bill Barnhart
President and CEO
PAYMENT OPTIONS
online, dropbox, o ce, by phone, or automatic bill pay
HAVE A STORY SUGGESTION?
Email your ideas to: leslie.guisinger@hwe.coop
Pee Pee Creek?
Each of Ohio’s unique place names is a chapter in the state’s story.
BY CRAIG SPRINGER
An Ohio map reads like an autobiography. The names pinned to places — the towns, counties, watercourses, and junctures that you may have never even heard of — tell stories of experience, chance encounters, longings for a better future, or the wistful wishing for a place left behind. Some pay tribute to heroes of the past. Others are curious and comical, leaving one to wonder, “Uh, what were they thinking?” The gouging push and soggy pull of glaciers and the long steady movement of water shaped the land we see today, and strongly influenced names given the sinuous blue-line waters draining north to Lake Erie or south toward the Ohio River. Then there’s the spilling of blood — the clash of cultures and struggle to possess what Native Americans, the British, and a fledgling United States of America all wanted to call their own. Let’s consider the latter first.
Four Mile Creek, for example, rises in the uplands along the Indiana-Ohio state line, picking up the waters of small rills and runs and seeps. It bumps into glacial moraines and purls through pastoral farmsteads on its downhill destiny with the Great Miami River — by which time it has become a substantial stream. Its placid form and lyrical name belie the fact it was born from warfare. In October 1791, the entirety of the U.S. Army set out from a freshly built Fort Hamilton (named to honor Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton) and nested on a bench of land above the Great Miami River. The autumn foray would become a march to massacre. The soldiers, in a slow slog north, cut a road in a wide swath through virgin forest. Four miles from the fort’s gate, the army camped for a night along a stream. The next day, three miles on, they crossed Seven Mile Creek. A month later, on the headwaters of the Wabash River, they met a confederation of Indian tribes and suffered a crushing defeat. It became known as St. Clair’s Defeat. The battle site where upwards of 800 soldiers exhaled their last is today’s Fort Recovery. Those vanquished under the command of the Miami leader, Little Turtle, or the Shawnee leader, Blue Jacket — such as Arthur St. Clair, Richard Butler, and William Darke — live on in stream, county, and township names. Of course, Native American place names also persist in Ohio. The difference is that they tend to be descriptive, rather than tributes to people or commemorative of experiences. “Miami,” of course, lives large in Ohio. According to linguist David Costa of the Myaamia Project at Miami University in Oxford, the Great and Little Miami river names include an adopted English use of the original Myaamia, meaning “downstream person.” According to Costa, Miami Indians knew the Great Miami River as ahseni siipiiwi, literally “Rock River.” Lake Erie was known as ciinkwihtanwi kihcikami, literally “sea of the falls,” referring to Niagara Falls downstream. St. Mary’s River on the Indiana-Ohio state line was nameewa siipiiwi, literally “sturgeon river.” You won’t find any of those on a map, though you will find numerous Anglicized versions of Algonquin and Iroquois words — Coshocton, for example, comes from the Lenape/Delaware word goschachgunk, which simply signified a river crossing. Ohio has a fair number of communities with stilted names that speak to high aims of its early settlers. Akron derives from Greek for “high place.” Gallipolis evokes a sense of the Greek city-state self-governance. Xenia reflects the hospitality expected in the home in classical Greece. Alert Station is a curious hamlet near Ross (formerly Venice, corrupted from Venus), northwest of Cincinnati (so-named after the Roman soldier-farmer Cincinnatus). Alert was and remains a crossroads. But those pioneer settlers valued literature and ensured early on they had a library populated with the classics, and the folks there were considered “alert,” as in “intellectual.” Ohio had no shortage of volunteers answering President Polk’s call to action against Mexico in 1846. A good many Ohioans served in the Mexican War, and the effect of their return in 1848 was certainly felt in new place names. The soldiers may have desired to memorialize those killed in action, or they romanticized the places and people they had met in what is now New Mexico, California, and interior Mexico. Most prominent is Rio Grande,
Ohio, pronounced “RYE-O Grand.” And there are the Buckeye burgs of Vera Cruz, Monterey, and Montezuma, as well as the City of Holy Faith: Santa Fe, Ohio. One cannot consider the topic of Ohio’s place names without addressing those that leave you scratching your head. Ever heard of No Name, Knockemstiff, or Pee Pee Creek? All three exist in southern Ohio, and it’s the origin of the last that’s well-documented. Pee Pee Creek trickles through Pebble Township in Pike County, which had been named by Peter Patrick — who had carved his initials in a stream-side tree circa 1785. Ohio’s place names run the spectrum from commonplace to implausible. One can go to Russia, visit Rome, London and Paris, and take a drive through Mesopotamia — without ever leaving the state. Every place name relates to desires, experience and perception. And what they have in common across that spectrum is enchantment in the spirit of their origins.
toothSweet
Harry Birt’s store has it all — but that candy section keeps the doors open.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY MARGIE WUEBKER
Afaded sign inside this Darke County institution proudly proclaims the store motto: “A balanced diet is chocolate in both hands.” Sweetness certainly comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and flavors at Birt’s Store in the village of New Weston. The rustic shop typically stocks 350 varieties of candy as Valentine’s Day approaches. Decisions are even tougher at Christmastime, as the shelves get stocked with more than 525 varieties, according to third-generation owner Brad Birt. Double-dipped chocolate peanuts, maple-filled chocolate peanut clusters, chocolate-covered caramels, and chocolate drops top the list of favorites. After all, the love of chocolate spans all seasons. Birt’s grandfather, Harry Birt Sr., unwittingly started a family tradition in the 1920s when he added five cases of white peppermint lozenges, orange slices, and chocolate drops to his general store shelves. The candy arrived via caboose at a nearby train depot, but it was evident that crew members had sampled plenty along the way. Harry Birt Jr., who came on board after World War II, recognized the importance of establishing a niche market in the form of more candy, fresh fruits and vegetables, and deli meats and cheeses. He initially used the family
Brad Birt, representing the third generation of his family to sell candy from the Darke County store, displays some of the sweet treats available in the candy aisle
station wagon to pick up orders directly from suppliers. Trucks came later.
“My dad believed people would come if you offered a great product at a reasonable price,” Brad Birt says. “We have built a reputation over decades, and you don’t try to fix something that isn’t broke.” The store deals with dozens of suppliers who share a commitment to quality, requiring regular trips covering Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. Holiday shoppers grab silver scoops and white paper sacks to make their bulk selections — though chocolates and other specialties are prepackaged at other times of the year. “Tastes change with age,” Birt says. “Kids are into sour candies and gummy anything these days. Everybody else wants chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, or the candy they grew up with. Folks do a lot of reminiscing up and down the aisles.” Tiered shelves offer a smorgasbord of chocolates: flavored creams, assorted fruits, nuts, fudge clusters, and even coated animal crackers and sandwich cookies. Tenpound slabs of chocolate and 5-pound chunks of caramel are popular with at-home candymakers. Individually wrapped candies like Tootsie Rolls, taffy, and Bit-O-Honey vie for space with flavored jelly beans, jumbo malted milk balls, divinity, old-fashioned hard tack candy, and 1-pound jawbreakers. “My grandfather dealt with candy by the pound,” Birt says. “We deal with candy by the ton. Candy is our niche. It’s what keeps the doors open.”
Harry Birt’s Store, 501 Main St., New Weston. Open seven days a week. www.harybirtsstore.com, www.facebook.com/HarryBirtsStore; 937-338-3111.
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MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN
Ohio’s largest ski resort turns 70 this year.
BY RANDY EDWARDS; PHOTOS COURTESY OF MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN
Staff members at Mad River Mountain (left) work to ensure a great skiing and tubing experience for all who visit. John Buchenroth (right) fell in love with skiing as a child, after he took his first lesson at Mad River. He now supervises the resort’s Ski and Ride School.
When he was 12, John Buchenroth received a Christmas gift of $10, which was a considerable sum in 1962. It turned out to be a life-changing gift for the Bellefontaine youngster. Three days later, he put on warm clothes and took his money to the area’s new Alpine ski resort, which had opened for its first season a few days before Christmas that year.
“It was my first day of skiing,” recalls Buchenroth, 73. “The lift ticket was a dollar-fifty, rental was a buck, my first lesson was a buck-fifty. And I fell in love with the sport.”
Sixty ski seasons later, Buchenroth is still in love — and he’s passed along his enthusiasm for skiing to thousands of beginners who have strapped on their first pair of skis at the Logan County resort now known as Mad River Mountain. Buchenroth is supervisor of the Ski and Ride School at Mad River, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this season.
Mad River has been owned by Vail Resorts since 2019, when the Colorado-based company purchased all 17 properties previously owned by Peak Resorts, Inc., including three other Ohio resorts. Mad River isn’t the oldest resort in Ohio — Snow Trails in Mansfield opened a year earlier — but it lays claim to being the largest in the Buckeye State, covering 144 acres, with a peak elevation of 1,460 feet above sea level. The vertical drop is just 300 feet, a molehill compared to ski mountains out West (Vail, the flagship of Mad River’s corporate owner, boasts a vertical drop of 3,450 feet), but this humble Ohio ski hill has been the resort where generations of central Ohioans have learned to ski, either on their own or with their school ski clubs. Olympic and X Games snowboarder Louie Vito, who learned to ski at Mad River, went on to be a superstar. Most others simply move on to bigger mountains but bring their kids back to Mad River to get their start.
“We’re teaching kids and grandkids of people we have had in our programs,” Buchenroth says.
Located in the tiny village of Valley Hi, just outside of Bellefontaine, Mad River Mountain offers 20 ski runs, from the beginner area at the base of the hill to steeper, more challenging slopes and one wooded glade. There is a terrain park for Alpine acrobatics and a tubing park touted as Ohio’s largest. With Ohio winters unpredictable for snow, snowmaking is a must at all Ohio ski resorts, and Mad River has 128 snow guns, capable of covering all 144 skiable acres.
The resort’s new-ish lodge opened in 2016 after a fire destroyed the original lodge in 2015. The new lodge has increased capacity, seating 800 hungry skiers in the cafeteria and about 200 in The Loft bar.
Children have been learning to ski on the slopes at Mad River Mountain since 1962. Today, families enjoy skiing and snowboarding on the resort’s 20 trails and snow tubing on the runs of Ohio’s largest tubing park.
The first couple of years have been a bit rocky for the new owners. The ski industry nationwide took a big hit during the pandemic, and operations during the 2021–22 season at Mad River were curtailed due to labor shortages and warm weather in December, which delayed the resort’s opening until Jan. 6, says Larry Kuebler, general manager of Mad River. “We got a late start [and] we took away some operating hours, and people were not thrilled with that,” he says. “I don’t blame them one bit.”
Kuebler was optimistic as he was preparing for the opening of the 2022–23 season. Vail Resorts promised a $20-an-hour minimum wage for all positions, and Mad River started the season fully staffed, which has allowed a return to normal operating hours. Plans for the 60th anniversary season include weekly events, expanded menu offerings in the lodge, and a return to live music in the bar.
Vail Resorts considers attendance figures to be proprietary, Kuebler said. Prior to the pandemic, the resort’s previous owners said publicly that the ski hill sees about 150,000 skier visits and 40,000 tuber visits per season. Most come from Columbus, Dayton, and other mid-Ohio locations.
“We have so many passionate skiers who have been skiing here for so long, and they’re proud to call it home,” Kuebler says. Over the past couple of decades, downhill skiing has witnessed a participation slump as Baby Boomers are aging out of the sport and not as many younger people are picking it up. Keubler said Mad River’s response has been to focus on recruiting new skiers and getting them involved in the ski school.
“If we’re going to help the overall industry, we have to focus on getting them to love the sport as we do,” he says. School groups can be found at Mad River every night of the week. Many young skiers learn the sport through their school ski clubs, including Brady Whiteside, 18, a graduate of Hilliard Davidson High School who started snowboarding at Mad River in the seventh grade. He learned to ski from Mad River instructors, who “taught us the basics” and inspired self-assurance, Whiteside says, so that later, when he began traveling to ski the much longer and steeper runs at Colorado resorts like Winter Park and Arapahoe Basin, he had confidence in his ability. “You can only prepare so much for those crazy trails [in Colorado], but they took me as far as I could [at a hill the size of Mad River].” Now a freshman at Ohio State University, Whiteside says Mad River can seem small, after skiing the big western mountains, but he will be going back to the local hill this winter.
“It’s close, and when I go to Mad River, I’m going to snowboard with friends,” he says. “We make our own fun.”
