Read an Excerpt
Central Ohio
The First Traffic Light
Ashville
The next time you zip through a red light, you might remember a couple of Ohioans who were responsible for that signal.
Garrett A. Morgan, of Cleveland, was the first person to apply to the U.S. Patent Office for a patent on such a device. Morgan’s worked this way. It was a T-shaped pole unit that featured three positions: stop, go, and an all-directional stop position. The third position was used to allow pedestrians to cross safely. While technically not a light, this traffic signal led to further inventions.
Teddy Boor, of Ashville, invented and built the nation’s oldest working traffic light. It was installed in downtown Ashville, south of Columbus. This odd-looking unit offered red and green lights with a slowly rotating hand that would sweep across each bulb, letting drivers know how much time was left before the light would change. The bullet-shaped light hung at the corner of Main Street and Long Street for more than 50 years, until finally the state transportation department made the community take it down and replace it with a more modern signal.
The village obeyed, but saved their piece of history in the Ashville Museum (34 Long St., Ashville; 740-983-9864), where it still stops and starts visitors.
The Chicken Who Bought His Own Lunch
Ashville
In Ashville, they still talk about the chicken who bought his own lunch. His name was Chic-Chic, and as chickens go he was pretty small. Actually, he was a bantam rooster, which means that even full grown he barely topped six inches from his feet to the top of his rooster comb. But Chic-Chic was a giant in his own mind.
He belonged to a local widow, who lived just around the corner from a restaurant. Every day the woman would put a dime in Chic-Chic’s beak and tell him to go to the restaurant and get his food.
The little bird, dime clenched tightly in his beak, would strut down to the corner, make a left on Long Street, and continue strutting right down the middle of the sidewalk, forcing humans to give way as he made his way to the front step of the restaurant. There he would deposit the dime and stand, clucking, until the owner brought out a Ball jar cap filled with corn and set it down for Chic-Chic to eat from.
Jack Lemon, a volunteer at the Ashville Museum, remembers Chic-Chic well. “That little bird would make that trip every day, winter or summer, rain or shine,” he said.
And when he was done eating, Chic-Chic would wander over to the bus stop to greet visitors from other towns. No one knew how he did it, but he always seemed to know just when a bus was due, and he would be there to cluck at the arrivals.
“He just thought he owned this town” former mayor and now museum curator Charlie Morrison told me. “Everybody knew him, everybody loved him.”
Today Chic-Chic and his owner are gone. (Chic-Chic died back in the 1950s), but there’s a model of the little guy, with a dime in his beak, in the Ashville Museum (34 Long St., Ashville; 740-983-9864).
Bloodletting and Barbering
Canal Winchester
Barbering has come a long way in the last two centuries. Even into the 1800s, barbers doubled as doctors, doing surgery and also bloodletting with leeches and knives. In fact, the gaily striped barber pole that symbolizes barbering today originally represented the bandages and blood and served as a sign of the barber’s ability to do bloodletting. You can learn all the bloody, fascinating history in Canal Winchester, where Ed Jeffers started a barber museum and hall of fame. It’s located upstairs from Zeke’s Barber Shop (Ed Jeffers Barber Museum, 21/2 S. High St., Canal Winchester; 614-833-9931). Here you’ll find 58 different kinds of barber poles and barber chairs from six generations of barbers. In all, the exhibit covers 150 years of barbering. It’s open by appointment only, but if Ed’s around you’ll get a fascinating tour and learn a whole lot about the field of barbering.
A Painting Comes to Life
Columbus
Is it a garden or a picture? Life imitates art imitating life at a park in Columbus, where sculptor James T. Mason created a living replica of Georges Seurat’s famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from plants.
Mason got the idea while visiting a botanical garden in Philadelphia where, he said, the gardens and topiaries reminded him of an impressionist painting.
He came back to Columbus and turned the Old Deaf School Park at East Town and Washington Avenue into a living copy of Seurat’s masterpiece.
The park now contains 80 life-size topiaries that depict Parisians dressed in their Victorian-era clothing looking at the river Seine.
Mason has created art with yew trees that he trims and shapes to match life-size molds of the figures he wants. The garden painting includes human figures, a boat being rowed on a pond, and three dogs, a cat, and a monkey.
Admission to the park, located only blocks from the Ohio Statehouse, is free.
The Accounting Hall of Fame
Columbus
Who can forget the glory days of Joel Stanley Demski, Shaun Fenton O’Malley, or Ross Macgregor Skinner?
These and other greats are enshrined at Ohio State University. Are they football players, you ask. Baseball stars? Nope. Accountants.
Yes, OSU is home to the Accounting Hall of Fame (Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Ave., Columbus; 614-292-9368). It was established in 1950 “for the purpose of honoring accountants who have made, or are making, significant contributions to the advancement of accounting since the beginning of the 20th century.”
More than 60 number crunchers have been enshrined. No parades or big hoopla when new members enter, though: just the presentation of a certificate at the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association.
I think the Accounting Hall of Fame should have a gift shop where visitors and accounting fans could go to buy, say, T-shirts with a picture of a ledger book on them, or perhaps with some snappy columnar entries as a graphic. Coffee mugs with . . . well you get the idea.
Which Came First, the Whistle or the Pea?
Columbus
The last of its breed, the American Whistle Corporation (6540 Huntley Rd., Columbus; 877-876-2380) is the only maker of metal whistles in the United States.
Whistles. You know. Those things that policemen use. Referees and coaches clench them tightly in their jaws. Majorettes and drum majors use them to command bands and flag corps. In fact, the company makes the official NFL referee whistles for the annual Super Bowl game.
If you want to see how they make whistles (the big moment is when they squeeze in the little ball of cork), they’ll show you around for a fee that includes a whistle when you leave. (They’ll then trot you through the company store, where you can buy a commemorative bronze, gold, or silver whistle to present to your favorite coach or policeman.)
[Excerpted from Ohio Oddities 2nd Edition, © Neil Zurcher. All rights reserved. Gray & Company, Publishers.]
