39 Quotes About Ohio

It was late September in the Ohio River Valley, the dying days of summer when soaring temperatures fought autumn’s grasp. Here the sweat and sunshine lingered, a mocking presence as school began. Sullen waves of heat thickened under the claustrophobic press of low-lying clouds, while humidity amplified the temperatures into a fever dream of shimmering sidewalks and sunburnt noses.

The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.

I’ve never seen a skeleton army, but if they exist, I’m absolutely positive they’d be marching on Ohio. There’s nothing else to do in Ohio. It’s just corn, corn, skeleton army, possibly evil corn maze, football, corn.

We crossed the Mississippi and on to Illinois. At Starved Rock, 100 miles south of Chicago, we followed 40 or 50 bikers with ‘Bikers against Child Abuse’ as their colours. Next was Indiana, with foggy river towns and vast farmlands, Amish homes in Ohio with smoke curling from the chimneys, then 43 miles of unbroken forests and prime trout-water rivers in West Virginia. We stayed overnight and ate fresh game pie, although whether we were eating possum, rabbit or raccoon we never discovered.

A damp, gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin of a corpse.

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.' 

That's the thing about Ohio - winter drags on so long that once mid-March hits, if it's above forty degrees everyone's outside wearing shorts and t-shirts and dining on patios.

If you don't like the weather in southern Ohio, just wait fifteen minutes!!!". ~R. Alan Woods [2013]

There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta's mom will be deported too.