Iva Walker

Garrettsville - The James A. Garfield High School Quiz Bowl team finished their competition season strong, sort of like the basketball teams and the wrestling team,... “Close, but no cigar.”  Like any good team, regular practice across a variety of topics, is necessary for improvement and success.  Contests with...

I started with a dog, you know. Her name was Samantha, which rapidly became “Sammie”; her mother was a purebred apricot poodle   and her father was a traveling salesman of some sort...whatever he was selling, she bought it.  Anyway, Sammie was a nice dog, a good dog...and not much...

Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians bid a fond farewell to February, 2016 on Leap Day, February29, the likes of which will not be seen again for four years (In a less-contentious election year, let us hope). President Tom Collins urged members to make their opinions known on a pending agreement between the Sierra...

Speaking of winter storms....  This whole naming thing apparently started with the Weather Channel and a Latin class somewhere.  This was apparently so that the on-screen prognosticators could get us all to focus on a particular weather event at a particular time and to nudge us toward acknowledging the...

What Dave Barry always calls “an alert reader” stopped me the other day in the PCDL and asked if I wasn’t going to write  some more stuff drawing on the abovementioned publication and it seemed like a good idea, so here we are.  The Old Farmer speaks : (Freely...

Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians opened their meeting on January 18, 2016 with Happy Dollars celebrating outstanding scholastic achievement, a 15-year anniversary, good business news, safe family, gifts and general, all-around good life—a nice start for any day. Speaker for the day was Ralph Price, pastor of the Streetsboro Church of Christ, who...

Well, here we go again.  ”Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme.” As you, no doubt recognized, the above aphorism attributed to Jean-Baptist Alphonse Karr, means “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”  (You might also be aware that albums by the groups Cinderella, Machine Head and...

Working at Garrettsville’s Precinct A  for thirteen hours on Election Day—with a fairly steady stream of citizens exercising their rights, good for them—was enough to occupy my time; I had no occasion to commit mayhem on the Portage County Board of Elections computer system, though I’m sure there are...

The  October 19, 2015 meeting of the James A. Garfield Historical Society, held at  the Mott Building on Main Street, Garrettsville, covered a wide range of topics including : The warm reception of the organization’s display at the recent Chamber of Commerce Business Showcase and the coming presentation to be...

Well, that was interesting...and informative...and fun too. The Ohio Turnpike had an Open House on Saturday, October 24, celebrating its 60th Anniversary; it officially opened on October 1, 1955, all 241 miles of it.  The construction took 38 months, in sections, employed some 10,000 workers—and 2300 bulldozers—at a cost of...

The October 19, 2015 meeting of the Garrettsville-Hiram Rotary Club was a series of short takes.  Here’s what got tooken : For Friday, Bob Evans restaurants will be joining the Polio Plus campaign of worldwide Rotary International by contributing 15% of receipts collected from contributing diners to the fight to...

Women of the Twentieth Century Club of Garrettsville met on October 15 at the home of Joyce Fashing on Eagle Creek Drive. The roll call response, as befits the season of Halloween, was to tell of a favorite costume or item of apparel.  Resulting tales ranged from dressy occasions to...

Garrettsville - And a fine display it was, of all sorts of things, including—this being an event that takes place before Election Day on November 3—various individuals running for various offices, people on the ballot, people hoping to be written in, supporters of ballot issues for townships, county services...

Everybody is writing memoirs lately.   It’s the literary style du jour in all of the magazines and reviews.  So I’m thinking, hey, my memories are as good as anybody’s, why not hop to it and make the big bucks? One reason may be that my memories are certainly just...

T’was business as usual at the October 4 2015 meeting of the Rotary Club of Garrettsville-Hiram.  Action on and discussion   of the following were on the agenda : Kyle Collins is alive and doing well as a Rotary Exchange Student in Japan.  He’s noticing differences in social interactions as...

The ladies of the Twentieth Century Club of Garrettsville spent their  meeting of October 1, 2015 “horsing around”.  The subject of the evening’s roll call was experiences with horses and the tales sometime rivaled “The Perils of Pauline.” Business was conducted by President Mary Furillo and the group voted...

It’s awards season just about all of the time now.  There are awards in television, for the theatre, for movies, for sports of every stripe and description, for just about every genre of music that one can think of( and some that I don’t really classify as music, but,...

Read Big! It’s not too late to participate in the BIG READ, a program  sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest being offered by Hiram College’s Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature and the libraries of the Portage County Library District.  There will be authors, speakers,...

Well, I seem to have hit my quota again this year.  A little shy, perhaps, but got the basics done.  I am speaking, of course, of fair attendance.  I really like going to fairs.  It’s the food, mostly.  Nothing like hot grease wafting through the air to set the...

The August 31, 2015 meeting of the Garrettsville-Hiram Rotary Club heard from a rock-star of the world of extreme rowers, Katie Spotz, who in a marathon 70-day adventure rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, from Africa to South America—alone!  There were 30 ft. waves, there were freighters, there were scary...

Ever since  that piece about plastic surgery and the aestheticians who keep having the gall to send me email about how they can get me a “Facelift Miracle”(as if I needed such a thing), I’ve been noticing a number of items in the news about occasions where the focus...

At one time, there were, give or take, six—yes, six—cats in this house.  That was, so to speak, the high water mark, but the tide seems to have receded rather precipitously lately. See, I started out, innocently enough, with just one, chosen from a litter just out of town advertised...

Recovering after their bang-up steak fry on August 3, the members of the Garrettsville-Hiram Rotary club got down to business on August 10.  To wit : • The August 17 meeting will feature Cheryl Warren, District Governor, with a board meeting at 11:00 • The incoming exchange student will arrive on...

Park Cemetery?  Most popular place in Garrettsville!  People are just dying to get in. Old/bad joke, but a fine place for a tour of local history led by Kit Younker Semplak on Monday, July 20 for the education and enlightenment of a goodly crowd of interested listeners and history buffs. ...

The Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians discovered that they had a “Rivergod” in their midst, as member Mike Keas gave an outline of his varied and interesting career(s) at the July 13, 2015 meeting. A Jack-of-all-trades and , clearly, master of quite a lot ,he traced his progress through meatcutting, the rafting business,...

The final June meeting of the Garrettsville-Hiram Rotary Club was a busy one. It saw the installation of the new 2015-2016 club president, Thomas Collins (Installing officer, Jim Irwin, Tom’s family in attendance),  and other club officers : Amy Crawford—treasurer, Mike Keas—sergeant–at-arms, Delores McCumbers—immediate past president (Secretary Ted Lysiak  will...