The Lone Ranger

January 31, 1872: (Pearl) Zane Gray is born in Zanesville and after struggling as a writer, eventually penned Riders of the Purple Sage and Lone Star Ranger, which became The Lone Ranger. He was one of the nation’s first millionaire writers and eventually penned 90 books. An avid outdoorsman, he also invented The Teaser, a hookless bait used to attract big game fish.
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Marty Balin

January 30, 1942 - Martyn Jerel Buchwald is born in Cincinnati. He would change his name to Marty Balin and become a founding member and lead singer of the iconic San Francisco rock band Jefferson Airplane. He appeared with the group in Monterrey in 1967, Woodstock in 1969 and rock music will never be the same. Go ask Alice...
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Longest cold wave

January 28, 1977 – Man, oh, man, does Ohio get cold or what? Temperatures fall from 20 degrees to -10 as a cold snap grips the state with icy winds and drifting snow for the longest cold wave in modern Ohio history. Temperatures averaged 11.7 degrees this month this year.

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World’s Largest Lego collection

World’s Largest Lego collection is in Bellaire, where the Bellaire Toy Museum, features millions of tiny LEGO blocks at 4597 Noble Street. Call 740-671-8891 or visit www.brickmuseum.net.
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DAILY DOUBLE

DAILY DOUBLE

January 26, 1925: The azure eyes of Paul Newman look out at the world for the first time in Shaker Heights. In 2008, a horse camp for children with serious illnesses and funded by the actor’s line of Newman’s Own products opens in Mount Gilead.

January 26, 1937 – The deadliest flood in Ohio River history leaves 750,000 homeless statewide - 50,000 families are without homes in Cincinnati alone.
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Johnny Appleseed

January 25 – The former Swedenborgian Church in the Cincinnati suburb of Glendale, has a church pew that a now-aged Johnny Appleseed used during Pentecostal services in the 1820s, last visiting in 1844. It is now known as the Glendale New Church and the pew has a revered place outside the sanctuary.
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Play Doh

January 24, 1949: Irma McVicker hires her son, Joseph McVicker, and her son-in-law, Bill Rhodenbaugh, to head Kutol Products Co. in Cincinnati. The company produces soap and wallpaper cleaners but decides one product could work out as modeling clay for school children. Two billion cans of Play Doh later…
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Arthur Garford

January 23, 1933: Arthur Garford, an 1875 graduate of Elyria High School, dies. Garford, a cashier and bookkeeper, saves his money, becomes a banker and eventually the inventor of the padded bicycle seat. Known as the Garford Saddle, over 1 million were sold in the first few years of production and Garford never looked back to his dreary days as a store clerk.
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Guns N’ Roses

January 22, 1965 – Drummer Steven Adler is born in Cleveland. Adler’s family would soon move to Los Angeles, where budding musician Adler meets Saul Hudson in junior high school, a guitarist who would change his name to Slash and become a band mate in Guns N’ Roses.
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Heavy rains

January 21, 1959 – Heavy rain brings flooding that surpasses the flood of 1913. Mansfield streets are under four feet of water and one-third of Chillicothe is knee-deep with water.
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My Green Tambourine

January 20, 1999 – Lemon Piper Drummer Bill Albaugh, 53, dies. The band, formed in Oxford in 1966, recorded My Green Tambourine, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in February 1968 and became a global hit..."Drop your silver in my tambourine..."
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Johnny Appleseed Museum

The Johnny Appleseed Museum in Bailey Hall at Urban University in Urbana, contains the largest known collection of memorabilia about the early Ohio pioneer. Was last night cold? Johnny slept in hollow tree trunks on some January nights and usually gave away his shoes to pioneer children who had none.
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The Great Buck Howard

January 18, 2008: World premiere at the Sundance Film Festival of “The Great Buck Howard,” a Tom Hanks-produced movie – starring his son, Colin, John Malkovich and Emily Blunt – in which a has-been magician attempts a spectacular comeback in Cincinnati.
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Tillie the elephant

January 17, 1932 – Terrace Park – Tillie the elephant dies. She once stopped a rampaging elephant in Charlotte, in another episode supported train cars from tipping during a wreck. Beloved for rushing into the circus ring in a nurse’s hat while carrying a giant thermometer to tend to a clown with a belly-ache, she received an obit upon her passing.
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Newark Earthworks

The Newark Earthworks, the largest set of geometric earthen enclosures in the world and built by prehistoric Hopewell people between 100 BC and AD 500, is an Ohio Prehistoric Monument.
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Cleveland Hopkins

The first radio-equipped airport control tower comes to Cleveland Municipal Airport in 1930. Now known as Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the airport also became the first in the world to have a tower with 360 degree visibility, two-way radio communication and regular weather reports. The tower was invented and installed by Clevelander Claude King.
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Ed Burke

January 13, 1909 - Jazzman Ed Burke is born in Fulton, learns to play violin and trombone and finds a career in the bands of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. He dies in April 1988.
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Cold weather

January 12, 1918 – Cold weather blows up from Texas and by the time it hits Ohio and mixes with Artic air from the north, temperatures fall from 30 to -15 in eight hours. Snow drifts reach 15 feet and cover houses.
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Adrian Smith

January 11, 1966: In what may be the best performance of any NBA All-Star Game, Cincinnati Royal guard Adrian Smith scores 24 points in 26 minutes to help his East team blow out the West, 137-97, in Cincinnati. As MVP, he wins a Ford Galaxie 500 convertible.
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Howard Chandler Christy

January 10, 1873 - Howard Chandler Christy, born in Morgan Township, drew cheesecake portraits of women that became known as Christy Girls. He was the sole judge of the first Miss America pageant and a later work, The Signing of the Constitution, still hangs in the U.S. Capitol Building.
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Joseph Baermann Strauss

January 9, 1870 – Joseph Baermann Strauss, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon president and University of Cincinnati grad, is born. Strauss was a sickly child and spent months staring out a hospital window from downtown Cincinnati at the Roebling Suspension Bridge to Kentucky. He designed the Golden Gate Bridge, and before concrete was poured, Strauss placed a brick from UC’s demolished McMicken Hall into the south anchorage.
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Buckeye

The number of companies trademarked or named Buckeye in Ohio? 6,164, according to the Ohio Secretary of State.
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John Balsley

January 7, 1862 – John Balsley, a Dayton woodworker, invents the first wooden step-ladder with flat steps. Now there's a place for a painter to put the brush while pausing to admire a newly painted wall.
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Ban Johnson

January 6, 1863 – Ban Johnson is born in Norwalk but his family soon moves to Avondale in Cincinnati. Johnson would co-found Major League Baseball’s American League. His pressure on Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee to create a better team would lead Frazee to sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 and bring a century-long curse upon the Red Sox.
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Brian Hugh Warner

January 5, 1969 – Brian Hugh Warner is born in Canton. He attended Heritage Christian School, moved to Florida, changed his name to Marilyn Manson, donned eye make-up and Gothic clothing and became the bane of conservative politicians everywhere.
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Cleveland temperature

The average Cleveland temperature in January is 18 degrees to 32 degrees F – in other words, no wonder it’s so cold in Cleveland in January: it’s always freezing outside.
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Frank Dicopoulos

January 3, 1957 - Frank Dicopoulos is born in Akron. He graduates from Kenyon College in Gambier, works for a while in a tire store in Houston before finding a gig as a model and then moving to Los Angeles, where he lands a role as Frank Achilles Cooper Jr. on the Soap Opera Guiding Light.
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Sentenced

January 2, 1833 - Prisoners convicted of adultery, rioting or larceny are sentenced to a stone vault dungeon 11-feet high, 5-feet wide and 12-feet long in McConnelsville in Morgan County.
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Hank Williams

January 1, 1953 – Hank Williams, 29, is in route to a concert in Canton when he is found dead in the backseat of a baby blue 1952 Cadillac after his driver stops at Burdette’s Pure Oil Station near Oak Hill, W.Va. Cause of death is unknown but was believed to be a combination of sedatives and alcohol.
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