Iva Walker

Mardi Gras, that is.  Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, beginning of the Lenten season.  Carnavale, Carnival, Carnaval, Karneval, Faschtnact/Fasching…whatever your ethnic background, if there’s a shot of Catholic in there anywhere (or even if there’s no Catholicism but a lot of fun-lovers), you may be acquainted with...

SANK!  The word is SANK!  The past  tense of “sink”  is “sank”…”sank”, not “sunk”.  “Sunk” is the perfect tense, which is either being shamefully abused or ignored most of the time by people who ought to know better.  If I have to listen to some talking head on a...

The ladies of the Twentieth Century Club of Garrettsville met with their guests on February 20 in the Garrettsville United Methodist Church for Guest Night and the advance through the Dewey Decimal System, the 600’s, the Arts. The evening’s program was presented by well-known local musician, Dale Lacan.  His repertoire...

Well, here we go again.  The Mayan “end of the world” didn’t pan out, so, now we can look forward to the Viking Apocalypse. It seems that in some enormously long poem in Norse mythology written in the 13th century by( Here’s a name to conjure with) Snorri Sturlson, the...

Garrettsville - The James A. Garfield Historical Society met at 7:30 p.m., February 17, 2014 in the historic Mott Building on Main St. in Garrettsville (The JAGHS meets on the third Monday of the month). Julie Thompson headlined the Old Business with her delineation of the anticipated program to observe...

Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians are moving on from their successful Family Week activity to support for Rachel Schwan, our local International Student Exchange adventurer for the coming year.  With the very helpful  encouragement and mentorship of Carol Donley, Rachel is looking at the likelihood of spending the 2014-2015 school year in...

Sometimes bon appetit, the 0h-so-upscale cooking magazine, is just too much. They just assume that everyone has access to—and a budget for—artisan cheeses and spirits, baby organic lettuces, at least four different varieties of milk…and we don’t mean simply whole, skim, 2% and buttermilk…oh no.  You’re deprived unless the shelves...

Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians are focusing on their next community outreach project, the Four-Way Speech Contest.  The premise of the competition is that the speakers are to choose a social, moral and/or ethical problem that they feel strongly about and have personal knowledge about. This confrontation should be bearing in mind...

Don’t you just every so often look out the window or open the door or read the weather forecast and feel like the little boy  on the  internet the other day?  The little guy must have been about four years old, bundled up to a fare-thee-well in mittens, hat...

Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians met on February 3, 20014 to look back with pride and a sense of accomplishment  on the 2014 incarnation of Family Week and its culmination in Family Fun Day ( see last week’s Villager) and to move on to planning a bigger and better event for next...

The Twentieth Century Club of Garrettsville met on February 6, 2014 in the Garrettsville branch of the Portage County District Library as part of the theme for the year, Through the Year with Dewey (Dewey Decimal System, that is).  The roll call was answered by proposing what members felt...

Hiram - Hear ye!  Hear ye!  Richard W. and Evelynne Troyer Spencer have been married for seventy-five years!  That’s 75 years…that’s LXXV years( as their fellow Romans would have noted)…that’s 1001011 ( in digital/binary notation, more or less)….  That’s a lot! That’s an accomplishment.  That’s going to be celebrated on...

Curse that groundhog! Well, it does depend on which groundhog you are going to believe.  The storied Punxsutawney Phil, of Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, according to his “handler” (like a sports agent, I guess) interrupted his long winter’s nap, peered out of his burrow and predicted six more weeks of winter. ...

Well, THAT was Fun! Garrettsville- Hiram Rotary’s annual Family Week ended with a bang, as all—or a lot, anyway—of  the folks who had been cooped up by the weather  for longer than  had been the case for quite a while came out to do a whole raft of things  on...

Garrettsville - The James A. Garfield Historical Society met on January20, 2014 in the historic Mott Building on Main St., Garrettsville for their regularly-scheduled (third Monday of each month) meeting…plenty to talk about. The mills of the gods grind slowly and so do the proceedings of the Ohio Historical Society. ...

Garrettsville - James A. Garfield Middle School was the site of the recent district competition for Power of the Pen, a program to encourage the development of young adolescents’ writing skills through  practice and competition, in much  the same vein as sport, with many of the same components, such...

Hiram - After an unexpectedly long Christmas break, the members of the Garrettsville-Hiram Rotary met in the Dining Hall at Hiram College on January 13 to get moving on upcoming events and programs. Members were happy and proud to hear that Rachel Schwan has been selected for participation in the...

Garrettsville - The Twentieth Century Club of Garrettsville held its annual Christmas party at the home of Maureen See on Garfield Dr.  Ms See was assisted by Leah Schultz in offering hospitality.  The colorful and warming refreshments were a joint production. The evening was mostly given over to celebration of...

File under “Sorry we missed this one.” New Years celebrators in London this New Year’s Eve were treated to  an interesting array of flavored fun-type  festivity-promoters.  Indeed! There was banana-flavored confetti, there were orange-scented bubbles, peach-flavored snow, for starters.  Mercy!  So who first checked out this stuff?   Somebody just stuck...

Here’s your chance to investigate the Mpemba Effect.  There’s a video of some Canadian dude on the internet performing this interesting experiment.  He takes a hard plastic water gun (A Nerf weapon would probably not work; you’ll see why)sucks up boiling water into it (That’s why you use hard...

Sports Illustrated reports that there is now a “Smart Sensor” basketball(94Fifty) full of God-only-knows what kind of sensors, nine of  ‘em, complete with circuit board, battery pack and Bluetooth relay—don’t ask—which will  do amazing things for your mastery of the game.  These sensors are processing whatever it is that’s...

Now that the clock tower lights are lit, Santa has made the first of his (many) local appearances…for lunch, for breakfast, for pizza, etc….it’s time to get down to some serious shopping—preferably local, but wandering off into the exotic every so often. So, in pursuit of exotica (Try looking that...

Taken in any combination—singing because you rejoice, rejoicing because you’re singing, rejoicing to hear the singing, singing to spread the rejoicing—this is a prescription for a lighter heart  for the holiday season.  You can get a maintenance dose by attending the Hiram Community Choir concert at 7:30p.m. on Friday,...

Garrettsville-Hiram Rotary met on November 18, 2013 to gain a final accounting of the success of the November Reverse Raffle and to air their thoughts on additions and corrections for next year…the tradition continues!  Thank you’s will be going out to all donors and contributors.  The club also agreed to...

I love the Old Farmer’s Almanac…I don’t necessarily take it as gospel but I do love the miscellany of STUFF that is in it.  It is a veritable FOUNT of KNOWLEDGE of various off-beat and semi-useful pieces of information.  I say semi-useful because some of the wisdom that this...

Garrettsville - The James A. Garfield Historical Society met on November 18, 2013 in the historic Mott Building for their regular monthly meeting to conduct the following business : The historical marker grant commemorating the 1935 train robbery in Garrettsville has been approved by the Ohio Historical Society.  Julie Thompson,...

AND…just in case you’ve been obsessing about the Comet ISON(International Scientific Optical Network—used by some Russian astronomers to first locate this fast-moving wonder) the one thing that most astronomers actually agree on is that it is highly unlikely to slam into the Earth, smashing us all to smithereens…that and...

There ARE drawbacks to having a warm spell this late in the year.  Yes, indeed. So…I’m sitting in the living room reading the paper; it’s a breezy, balmy (for November, anyway)fifty-something, sixty-something outside.  The room is pleasantly warm enough.  It’s evening, getting dark, I’m thinking about getting to bed early...

Elf Helpers, sign up for your Santa delivery of Christmas gifts ASAP.  Garrettsville-Hiram Rotarians are co-ordinating the personal visits by the “right jolly old elf” again this year.  For many families, it is a tradition  stretching across generations, so you’ll want to make sure that you  sign up and...

The James A. Garfield Historical Society met on Monday, October 21 in the historic Mott Building, Main St. , Garrettsville to pursue its usual business.  This included : • Enthusiastic thanks to Damaris Peters Pike for the contribution resulting from her recent presentation (with Jack Warren) “The Garfields—An Ohio Presidential...