In a small upstairs room of a Toledo church, Del Ray Grace is preserving a sacred piece of his Pentecostal upbringing. It isn't an altar or a cross – it's a steel guitar.
Starting in the 1930s, the instrument became the sound of worship in branches of the Church of the Living God, shaping a gospel tradition known as "sacred steel."
The small town of Urbana, in west central Ohio, looks a lot different than it did when Beth Macy grew up there.
Employers left in droves. Truancy rates skyrocketed. Rates of suicide and addiction soared. Access to local news dwindled. Suddenly, she saw confederate flags waving in her hometown that was once an important stop on the Underground Railroad.
Macedonia, OH native Brandon Saraniti grew up thinking he didn't have an accent. But that all changed back in 2018, when he moved to Washington, D.C. for college. He was at a party and struck up a conversation with a girl named Amber. When he said her name, she winced.
Picture this, if you will, a young man from Binghamton, New York marches off to war. He enlists as a paratrooper in WWII. He leaves the conflict with psychological scars that time will not erase.
What follows isn't an episode out of "The Twilight Zone", but the origin of the man who dreamed it up: Rod Serling.
Middletown resident Donna Ballinger said she can't leave her windows open.
"There's usually smells — chemical smells, rotten egg smells — that burns your eyes and gets in your throat," she said. "It doesn't go away."
Toward the end of each month, you may hear people who are pulled over complain about police officers needing to meet a ticket quota.
As of today, that practice is illegal in the state.
The Village of Alger in west central Ohio is small: Just about 800 people call the community home.
"We have nothing. We have nothing to hang our hat on," said Village Administrator Paul Osborne. "We're surrounded by what they call the muck around here."
That muck was once good for onion farming, but these days, the village is gaining notoriety for something else.
Before Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, pitcher Ray Brown was making a name for himself in the Negro Leagues.
Today, he's one of just a few dozen Negro League players recognized in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Space is dirty. Filthy. It's littered with asteroids, and rocks, and dust. Some of that material falls to the earth. When it enters the atmosphere, we call it a meteor. If it lands, it's a meteorite.
John Ventre usually keeps his meteorites locked away in a safety deposit box. This weekend, he'll put them on display for other collectors and the public.
The James M. Gavin Power Plant in southeast Ohio is one of the largest coal-fired electricity plants in the country. It's also one of the nation's top emitters of greenhouse gases, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
