Variety Show Rehearsal Begins for "It's Summertime"

"It's Summertime" reports director Ben Cahoon. The rehearsals for the 36th Annual Lions Variety Show begin Sunday January 25th at 1:30 to 3:00 PM. Rehearsals are held in the fellowship hall of the First Baptist Chuch 136 E 8th St. Cambridge OH (link to map). The Chorus is open to anyone wishing to participate in our annual fundraiser. Come join us and find out how much fun we have.

Joel Losego enlightens the Lions

If you think this year’s light show at the Guernsey County courthouse was a delight, just wait until next year! “We plan to include more features for kids,” said Joel Losego, general manager of AVC Communications to the Cambridge Lions Club. “We may include Rudolf and other songs or characters that appeal to children.”

“It took over a year to design the light display,” Losego said. “Everything had to be made from scratch. None of this came out of a box. Actually, it came out of a lot of boxes. Integrating all the parts was a challenge.”

“Grant (Hafley) wanted to give something back to the community,” Losego said. “He wanted something the community could have fun with. Grant would sit down and start working on something and new ideas would come out. It was fun to make the lights dance.”

“It was a challenge getting wires to all of the lights. The courthouse is a really old building with thick walls and places that couldn’t be reached by ladders and lifts. You might have seen county employees hanging from ropes to reach some of the places.”

“All the windows in the courthouse are different sizes,” Losego said. “They look the same from the sidewalk, but they are all different. Each window display had to be custom built. We used re-bar frames and had to attach all of the lights to them.”

The light display uses over twenty-five thousand individual lights. There are three hundred sixty-four different circuits with a little electricity on each circuit. We used new LED lights. All of these new lights combined use less power than the old lights used at Christmas time.

“It took two guys working for two and a half month to install all of the frameworks for the lights,” Losego said. “It took three men a month to wire the lights. It took a week to get them all controlled from one location.”

“We took pictures of the courthouse and used them as a canvas to design the light displays. We programmed the music and lights in one-tenth-second intervals. It took six months to program the music and the light sequences before the lights went up. One of the songs was a saxophone number played by Gordon Hough.”

“A two minute song took eighteen hours of programming to coordinate the lights and the music. Every circuit had to be programmed. Some circuits include red, blue, and green lights so that we can combine them to get orange and purple and other colors.”

“The light show was tested on a laptop computer,” Losego said. “Grant was the one who got all of the lights to be controlled from one location. The whole thing is now run from a memory card no bigger than the one that goes into a digital camera. We monitor the light show from the radio station with a remote camera.”

Plan for next year’s light show include additional lights on the courthouse lawn and lights on all four sides of the upper levels of the courthouse. A low frequency radio may be installed so people can listen to the music on their car radios.

In other club business Dave Conrath reported that rehearsals for the March Lions Variety Show will begin on Sunday, January 26^th, at 1:30 P.M. Tickets for the show will go on sale on February 23rd. Patron ads can be purchased by contacting any Lion.

Funds raised by the Lions Club help the local diabetes support group and assist those in need with the costs of eye care and eye glasses. The Lions Club recycles eye glasses that are no longer needed.

Holly Hartzler gives lions heart

“Cancer has surpassed heart disease as the number on cause of death,” said Holly Hartzler to the Cambridge Lions Club. “So we need to pay attention to both. We need to be as proactive as we can and take preventative measures.” Hartzler is a registered dietitian at Southeastern Med.

“February is heart health month so I am here to talk about how you can improve you heart health. We all have room to improve,” Harzler said. “Find out your baseline and take small steps everyday to improve it.”

“Be aware that family history can have an impact on your health. Be aware that if you have siblings who have heart health problems you, too, may have problems. You need to keep an eye on your risk factors.”

“I know that the Lions Club helps the diabetes support group at the hospital,” Hartzler said. “If you have diabetes it nearly doubles your risk of having heart disease. You need to keep an eye on your diabetes and do other things to prevent heart problems.”

Hartzler recommended five strategies to prevent heart disease. Don’t smoke or use tobacco products. Become more active. Eat a heart healthy diet. Maintain a healthy weight. Get regular health screenings.

“Everyday you have the opportunity to make a little change,” Hartzler said. If you usually just sit around, get up and take a little walk. Each day you can increase the length of your walk. Walk up and down the aisles of the grocery store. Look for foods that are heart healthy and foods that are low in sodium. Little changes can make a big difference.”

“Know your LDL and HDL cholesterol levels and work to keep your HDL levels lower. Know your body mass index (BMI), the ratio of weight to height. A BMI over 25 may show that you need to work on lowering your weight.”

“There are things you can do to help improve your heart health,” Hartzler said. “Have regular health screenings. Enroll in the free smoking cessation programs at the hospital. Get regular exercise. Change your diet by trying things from the grocery store. Get antioxidants by eating brightly colored vegetables.”

Lion Bill Wagner Earns Award

Lion Ron Guthrie presented an appreciation award and plaque to Bill Wagner citing Wagner’s efforts to sort and pack used eyeglasses for reconditioning and reuse for those in need. “Bill has sorted more than ten thousand pairs of glasses,” Guthrie said. (Pictured left to right: Lion Bill Wagner and Lion Ron Guthrie.)

Steve Stolarik takes the Lions for a train ride.

“What was it like for our dads and our granddads to work in a deep coal mine?” asked Steve Stolarik, guest speaker at the Cambridge Lions Club. “We are reliving their history when we act as coal miners on the Byesville Scenic Railway. It’s surprising how many people have never touched a lump of coal.” (Pictured left, Lion Matt Dolan and Steve Stolarik.)

Stolarik, recently retired from the highway patrol, spoke of the effect that the train ride’s volunteers often have on people who ride the train. “One older lady came up to me after riding the train and asked me for a hug. She was all dressed up. I told her it wouldn’t be a good idea since I had black coal dust all over me and on my face.”

“I don’t care,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I never new what my dad and my granddad did for us by going into the mines. They never talked much about what it was like.”

“We are reliving that history for our ancestors,” Stolarik said. “We don’t know what it was like to work with a four foot top. My dad told of how miners would sometimes sew old inner tubes together to keep from getting their backs cut up. They cut up old tires to use as kneepads as they used their picks to get the coal out.”

“We know we are getting that message across when we have school children draw accurate pictures from our descriptions,” Stolarik said. “We can’t show them the actual mines because they are all closed up and the buildings are gone. We can show them where the foundations were.”

“We show them pictures of a train wreck that happened just outside of Byesville,” said Stolarik. “You can’t fool the laws of momentum. If you go too fast the train will wreck. That’s why the train goes so slowly.”

“We try to educate people and make the train ride fun. We try to get them involved. We have one of them put on an engineer’s shirt, a red bandana, and a hat. I wear my dad’s carbide light and hat and carry his lunch bucket.”

Coal mining in Guernsey County was hazardous work. Many miners were injured or killed in area mines. “What would it have been like for the wives of those miners?” Stolarik asked. “They would never know if their husbands would come back at the end of the day.”

“The miners contributed to the war effort with a pick instead of a gun,” Stolarik said. “The coal would be used to make the steel that went into the tanks and the guns. Without them there would have been no way to wage a war.”

“I got started doing this one day when the train first started running. I dressed up like a miner and stood next to the track. When the train got back to Byesville the people were all talking about seeing the coal miner. The train crew didn’t know what they were talking about because they said there were no more coal mines operating.”

“The next time the train went by I hopped on and started to talk about the miners. I’ve been doing that ever since,” Stolarik said. “In the last few years I haven’t even put my boat in the water.”

“We are trying to raise funds to put up a bronze statue of a coal miner,” Stolarik said. “There is no monument to the miners in Ohio. We want to make sure those guys are not forgotten.”

The Byesville Scenic Railway is a not for profit organization dedicated to presenting the life, heritage and culture of the coal miners who worked in the underground deep mines. For more information go to http://www.bsrw.org/.

Lions Welcome New Member Dave Piatt

We are pleased to introduce our newest member Dave Piatt. Dave was sponsored by Lew Prine and was inducted by DDG Tom Cahoon.