Homesick? Or just miss Snowball?

January 17, 2017

It seems that dogs and their tragic demise marked the passage of time when I was a kid. When we lived on York Avenue here in Warren, Snowball, a beautiful white Eskimo spitz, was our family dog. I spent many hours as a 3 and 4 year old crawling around on the floor and napping with him under the stove that stood on 4 high legs in the kitchen. One day, Snowball limped home with his usually spritely tail bent down and his head hanging very low. He crawled up the porch steps and lay at my feet. It turned out that he had really mixed it up with that dreaded purple-tongued chow down at the ...

Valley living comes with perks

January 6, 2017

As I write this column on the eighth night of our nine days back in the Valley for the holidays, I want to remind people this Youngstown-Warren metro is one of the best places to live in the U.S. The reason is simple ä the people. An example is my new friend, Hitch, that I met this week. Last January a sad event took place for me - Youngstown demolished the vacated Krakusy Hall on the Southside. My great-grandfather Ignatz Chiemeski was a founder of the Polish club. When my high school friend Bob texted that the demolition occurred, many of us joined in prodding Bob to pull a ...

State’s insurance fund for injured workers reflects on 2016

January 1, 2017

At its core, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation is about people. We’re about the 750,000 injured workers with a claim in our system, and we’re about the 243,000 private and public employers we cover through the state insurance fund. And in 2016, we accomplished a number of measures to serve those people better, from creating savings for businesses to making the workplace safer so people can go home to their families at the end of their shift free of injury. Over the past year, we continued on a path we started in 2011 with Gov. John Kasich to create a more ...

Here’s the secret story of a boat that never sailed

December 27, 2016

This is a story that starts off with a stuffed fish — a northern pike to be exact. But, it’s not a fish story. It is the story of the S.S. Blub — a boat that never sailed. Dad had caught a 3-foot-long northern pike in Canada in August of 1942. He was so proud of it that he sent it to a taxidermist in Toronto so it would be memorialized in perpetuity and be stuck on an oak board. It was to have arrived before Christmas. Of course, he bragged about it to his Warren friends and neighbors who were a bit dubious. A photograph would have helped Dad’s cause. Where was it? In ...

Youth offenders continue to harm victims when given second chance

December 20, 2016

As the juvenile judge responsible for the decision to try T.J. Lane as an adult for shooting six students at Chardon High School in 2012, I was well aware of the shifting views of the U.S. Supreme Court with respect to the sentencing of juvenile offenders as adults for committing serious crimes such as murder. For that reason, I ordered a thorough and comprehensive mental health and competency evaluation of T.J. Lane by one of Ohio’s top forensic psychiatrists. I then fully considered Lane’s age (17) and mental development, along with all of the other evidence submitted, ...

Clear voice, leadership critical

December 16, 2016

Since the election, passions and tensions are running high on university campuses and in the general public. Part of this, of course, is that there were two candidates, both unpopular, and in theory, the more disliked candidate won. But here we are, a new president-elect, a Republican Party firmly in control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and firmly in control of the vast majority of the states. Indeed, of the 50 states, there are only five that have a Democratic governor and Democratic-controlled legislature. Just a month ago, some were writing an obituary for the ...