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LOCAL PAGES
MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
Members play an important role in cooperative success
Ron Salyer
PRESIDENT & CEO
In a not-for-profit electric cooperative, there are certain roles only members can play. Among those roles are filling board-elected positions and voting for those members running for the board. In the early 1930s, when electric companies didn’t believe serving rural areas could be profitable and only 10% of the rural population had electricity, the people in those areas, with the help of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), came together to find a solution — they created their own electric cooperative. On Nov. 14, 1935, a crowd of 500 farmers, businessmen, and state and national officials gathered to see the first REA pole in the nation set in Piqua. The pole was constructed to bring electricity to nearly 700 farms in Miami County. The electric cooperative was formed by the people we serve, for the people we serve, and was governed by the people it served. Still today, more than 87 years later, Pioneer is controlled by its members, who actively participate in setting policies and making decisions. As an active member of Pioneer Electric Cooperative, you can have a voice in the co-op by voting for members who will represent you on the board of trustees and county nominating boards. This voting process ensures democratic member control, one of the Seven Cooperative Principles. Elected representatives, known as trustees, are nominated by our county boards to be elected by the membership, to represent the membership. There are no out-of-state stockholders setting policies. The individuals nominated for trustee positions are members of Pioneer, just like you and me, and are affected by many of the same issues we face every day. Although Pioneer provides electric power to its members, it is the membership that powers the cooperative. We value your participation in the annual election process, and in turn, you receive that value back when you elect fellow members who have your best interest at heart. In 2022, nearly 13% of cooperative members voted in the annual election process. I would like to challenge you to help increase that percentage in 2023, because it’s important all members be involved in the board selection process. It’s your vote and engagement in the co-op that continues to ensure that Pioneer runs smoothly now and in the future. Participating in the election is one of the easiest ways to participate in the cooperative. I encourage each member of Pioneer to take a moment to review the candidates on the ballot you should receive in the mail later this month and select who you believe will best represent you and the rest of the membership in the coming years. After all, without member participation, our electric cooperative wouldn’t exist at all.
Wintrow completes Leadership Edge program
Pioneer Electric District Member Service Supervisor Deanna Wintrow has graduated from the statewide Cooperative Leadership Edge program, an education and training opportunity that aims to hone the skills of the next generation of electric cooperative leaders. The one-year program was hosted by Pioneer’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. The program encourages open and candid discussions with peers throughout the state of Ohio. Deanna was hired in 1994 as a general office clerk, and in 2009 was promoted to senior member service representative. In 2021, she was promoted to district member service supervisor. She works out of Pioneer’s Urbana location.
Pioneer Electric invests in training and development with the goal of serving consumer-members with top talent and skills. After evaluating options for training and education, the Cooperative Leadership Edge program was found to be a good fit for Deanna, particularly given her recent promotion to supervisor. “Deanna has done a tremendous job in her role as the new district member service supervisor. Her willingness to grow in this position makes her a great asset to Pioneer, the member service team, and our members,” says Lisa Benanzer, Pioneer’s member service manager. “Deanna embraced the program by being open-minded to the concepts discussed, and she constantly looked for ways to incorporate them with her team.”
Pioneer provides safety demonstration to City of Troy
Pioneer Electric Cooperative performs electrical safety demonstrations for local organizations and schools throughout the cooperative’s service territory. At Pioneer, safety is our No. 1 priority — and this is just one way we spread that message throughout the communities we serve. Pioneer was recently invited to educate employees of the City of Troy about electrical hazards they may encounter on the job. To have Pioneer conduct a safety demonstration for your organization or school or for additional information, please contact us at marketing@pioneerec.com or 800-762-0997.
Student art contest
Students K–8th grade are invited to submit original artwork depicting one of Pioneer’s Seven Cooperative Principles.
DEADLINE: FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2023
The art contest is open to children K–8th grade. Categories: K–2, 3–5, and 6–8 grades. Submissions should depict one of Pioneer’s Seven Cooperative Principles. Artwork should be completed on an 11 x 14-inch or smaller sheet of white paper. Entries will be judged on creativity and overall artistic ability according to the student’s age category. Winners will be announced at Pioneer’s annual meeting and published in our May issue of Ohio Cooperative Living magazine. Please include: name, grade, parent’s name(s), Pioneer account number, city, and phone number on the back of the submission.
All entries will be showcased at the annual meeting. Entries will not be returned. Winners of each category will receive a $25 Walmart gift card, with an overall winner receiving a $50 gift card. One entry per person; entrants must be the son or daughter of a Pioneer member. Return your entry to our Urbana or Piqua office. Please do not fold entries.
1. Open and Voluntary Membership 2. Democratic Member Control 3. Members’ Economic Participation 4. Autonomy and Independence
75. Education, Training, and Information Cooperative Principles 6. Cooperation Among Cooperatives 7. Concern for Community
SAY HELLO.
to the new pioneerec.com
PIONEER RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE, INC.
CONTACT
800-762-0997 www.pioneerec.com
MAIN OFFICE
344 West U.S. Route 36 Piqua, Ohio 45356
DISTRICT OFFICE
767 Three Mile Road Urbana, Ohio 43078
OFFICE HOURS
8:00 a.m.– 4:00 p.m.
BOARD OF TRUSTEES Terrence A. Householder
Chair Colleen R. Eidemiller
First Vice Chair Roger J. Bertke
Second Vice Chair John I. Goettemoeller
Secretary Mark A. Bailey
Treasurer Robert Billings Ted R. Black John H. Vulgamore Wade H. Wilhelm Ron L. Bair Orville J. Bensman Ronald P. Clark Harold T. Covault Donald D. DeWeese Duane L. Engel Dwain E. Hollingsworth Douglas A. Hurst Edward P. Sanders Paul R. Workman
Trustees Emeritus
Ronald P. Salyer
President/CEO
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.”
