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Nancy Murray’s legacy lives on

Letters To The Editor

To the editor: It’s been said that true leaders plant seeds for trees they’ll never sit under. In Wellsville, Ohio, the roots of recovery and resilience bear the unmistakable mark of Nancy Murray—a determined public servant whose impact still echoes through the streets of our village. I’ll never forget the moment I walked into her office in East Liverpool, petition for councilman in hand, asking her to be the first to sign after I decided to drop out of the mayor’s race. Without hesitation, she did. What followed was a long, hot summer filled with strategy talks and hopes ...

Buy my wife a building. Please.

Community News

It’s not for her personally, it’s for the used book store she manages, the Second Chance Book Nook. It keeps running out of space for more books. In a roundabout way It would be for me, because when my wife has no other place to store donated books they end up in our barn. In the east half of the barn there are pathways, corridors, through stacked boxes of books, books from estate sales, yard sales, liquidated school libraries. Book store customers bring boxes of books and leave with boxes of books, like pack rats. “There’s a building on Fifth Steet. It’s only $250,000,” ...

Officials need to make dip in fertility rates part of plan

Editorial

As Ohio’s elected officials continue to hope for economic growth, there’s a factor some may not have considered. According to a report by the Ohio Capital Journal, the state’s fertility rates are dropping — standing at 56.2 births per 1,000 women in 2023. That’s an 8.9% decrease from the state’s average of 61.9 per 1,000 between 2011 and 2020. Interestingly, births to mothers younger than 20 and ages 20 to 24 both fell dramatically compared with 2007 data. “Historically, fertility rates have dipped during economic downturns but tended to recover as conditions improved,” ...

Speaker of Ohio House endorsing Ramaswamy

Local Columns

In 2012, I was invited to a conference held by the Milton Friedman Institute in Indianapolis. The Institute invited 20 or so legislators from around the country to discuss school choice issues and how much progress had been made to that point. Like most conferences we heard from a variety of speakers, one of whom was Tony Bennett (not the singer and not the basketball coach), the Superintendent of Education from the State of Indiana. Bennett oversaw the institution of educational reforms including expanding School Choice options for then Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. Bennett made ...

Preventing falls

Editorial

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column was originally published Sept. 11, 2021. Thanks to breakthroughs in medicine and nutrition in recent years, we are living longer than ever before. But this increase in life expectancy also brings an increase in the number of diseases, injuries and impairments that affect older adults. With this in mind, we at the local Visiting Angels office in Salem have created this series of articles to keep our older population and their families informed and to offer some practical advice for meeting the challenges faced by seniors and those who care for ...

Stay vigilant in avoiding threat of West Nile Virus

Editorial

We all know that mosquitoes can, well, bug the heck out of us. If you are outdoors regularly and it is muggy and hot, they are likely buzzing around licking their chops. But some are more than mere nuisances. Some carry serious diseases. Such as the West Nile Virus. Public health agencies diligently monitor this, utilizing mosquito surveillance traps. In our area, there have been several recent reports of mosquitos detected with the West Nile Virus. If there are a few around, you can be sure there are many around. We know of no human infections yet. But the virus has infected humans ...