Journalist recounts path to citizenship

September 22, 2019

In his mind, Luis Sanchez Saturno has been an American since he was a teenager. After moving to Warren from Venezuela at age 13, he learned to speak broken English as an eighth-grader at Warren’s Western Reserve High School. Later, he attended Howland Local Schools, where he settled into his school work and American life. “I was pretty much ignorant to my immigration status,” Sanchez recounted to me last week. He initially had come to America on a tourist visa with his father and brother, leaving his mother and young sisters, just ages 5 and 2 at that time, behind in ...

Don’t take local military value for granted

September 15, 2019

Michael Dustman, director of constituent services for U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, was adamant last week that the Mahoning Valley should not “give up the fight” on the possibility that a local military installation still could be chosen as home for a proposed East Coast Missile Defense site. If that happens, it would mean a $4.5 billion investment, plus thousands of direct and indirect temporary and permanent jobs to our area. Dustman spoke as part of a panel discussion I moderated during the “Impact Ohio” conference Thursday in Youngstown. The event was sponsored by the Youngstown ...

Canfield Fair, newspapers are long tradition

August 31, 2019

Of course the Canfield Fair has been my family’s late-summer tradition every single year for all the decades I’ve lived in the Mahoning Valley. But this year, as I strolled past the grandstand, it felt different. That’s probably because this time I had come alone. And I wasn’t immediately in search of a lemon shake. Instead, I was heading toward my newspaper’s tent on the corner where The Vindicator tent has been located for as long as I could remember. I was going to spend some time there greeting our new readers and talking about the undertaking we were preparing to ...