18th birthday comes with new responsibilities

September 27, 2020

Today, I’m the mother of two adult children. Yep, it’s the day my youngest son turns 18. We will celebrate with dinner, and he will be showered with love, plus the usual gifts, cards and cash. At some point very soon, my husband and I will have the same talk with him that we had with his older brother at this crossroads. We’ll remind him that, as a legal adult, he now is solely responsible for all his actions. Suddenly, with one tick of the clock, any stupid youthful exuberance — planned or spontaneous — now has the very real likelihood of following him for the rest of ...

Shouldn’t we be making voting easier?

September 20, 2020

With just under 50 days until Election Day, nearly 1.4 million absentee ballot applications have been received by county boards of elections in Ohio. Ballots requested by military and overseas voters — about 15,800 of them — were to begin being mailed out Friday. All other ballots will be mailed to voters requesting them beginning Oct. 6. Undoubtedly, all these requests — with many, many more to come — are going to tax the U.S. Postal Service. We’ve all read and heard the debate over whether the new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has intentionally attempted to slow the ...

Player provides inspiration during pandemic

September 13, 2020

It’s depressing to acknowledge that it’s been nearly a year since I last attended a professional sporting event. My son and I took in a division rivalry Monday Night Football game at Heinz Field — Steelers vs. the Bengals — Sept. 30, 2019. Steelers won, 27-3. Not bad, I guess, for my last game in a year. Since the end of football season, there has been no opportunity to attend any Cleveland Indians games this summer, despite the fact that my husband and I thought we were all set at Christmas when I gave him his usual gift (that really is a gift to myself, too) — two seats ...

Drilling success in area only matter of time

September 6, 2020

I used to cover the business beat here, writing countless stories about growing high hopes for new local riches expected to come from the vast natural gas resources located in the Utica Shale. The shale play, of course, is a massive reserve encased in layers of rock miles beneath the Mahoning Valley earth’s surface. Many of us remember the huge commitment BP, Consol, Halcon Energy and other big-name oil and gas companies made here in the form of mineral rights lease contracts with cash “signing bonuses” for many property owners in Trumbull, Mahoning and Columbiana counties. ...

Marking year of Vindy publication, other challenges

August 30, 2020

Things were a little more hectic than usual in my newspaper building one year ago this week. That’s when we were spending inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to devise our plan of just how we would handle taking over production and publication of The Vindicator — more than doubling our then-circulation, coverage area and distribution of the Tribune Chronicle. If you’re a subscriber or longtime Vindy reader, you probably already have heard the story. It was June 2019 when The Vindicator announced it would close its doors, permanently ceasing production. After the ...

Assorted football and election ramblings

August 23, 2020

Today I offer some assorted ramblings from my world. Are you ready for some football? If things continue along the same path, high school football — and many other sports and extracurricular activities — will be starting soon. High school football is set to begin this week, with some teams even kicking off on Thursday. Undoubtedly, the season will be atypical, but that won’t keep away our sports coverage team. Inside today’s newspaper you’ll find this year’s “High School Football” preview, which includes dozens of pages of indepth coverage of teams. It includes ...