OHOhio Famous People

Wapakoneta, New Concord and the road to the moon

Neil Armstrong was born in 1930 on his grandparents' farm outside Wapakoneta in Auglaize County. He held a student pilot certificate before he held a driver's license, flew 78 combat missions off a carrier in Korea, and stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969. John Glenn was born at Cambridge in 1921 and raised at New Concord, thirty miles down the road. He circled the earth three times in Friendship 7 in February 1962, sat in the US Senate from 1974 to 1999, and flew again on the shuttle at 77. Jim Lovell, born in Cleveland in 1928, commanded Apollo 13. Judith Resnik, born in Akron in 1949, was the second American woman in space and died aboard Challenger in January 1986. Ohio plates read Birthplace of Aviation, a claim North Carolina answers with First in Flight.

Seven presidents born here, eight on the state's own count

• Ulysses S. Grant, born at Point Pleasant in 1822, president 1869 to 1877.
• Rutherford B. Hayes, born at Delaware in 1822, president 1877 to 1881 after the disputed count of 1876.
• James A. Garfield, born in a log cabin in Orange Township, now Moreland Hills, in 1831, president for six months in 1881, shot in July and dead by September.
• Benjamin Harrison, born at North Bend in 1833, president 1889 to 1893, grandson of the eighth man on this list.
• William McKinley, born at Niles in 1843, president 1897 to 1901, shot at the exposition in Buffalo.
• William Howard Taft, born in Cincinnati in 1857, president 1909 to 1913, then chief justice from 1921 to 1930, the only person to hold both jobs.
• Warren G. Harding, born at Blooming Grove in 1865, ran the 1920 campaign from his front porch in Marion, president 1921 to 1923, died in office in San Francisco.

The eighth is William Henry Harrison, born in Virginia but farming at North Bend when Ohio sent him to Congress and the country elected him in 1840. He served thirty one days. An Ohio born man held the office for roughly half the years between 1869 and 1923.

Dayton, where a surprising amount got invented

Wilbur Wright was born near Millville, Indiana, in 1867, but Orville was born in Dayton in 1871 and both grew up there. Their bicycle business on West Third Street paid for the gliders, and after Kitty Hawk they did their serious flying at Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture outside town, where in 1905 they finally flew circles for half an hour at a time. Charles Kettering, born at Loudonville in 1876, built the electric self starter at his Dayton engineering lab and got it into a Cadillac in 1912, which finished off the hand crank.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton in 1872 to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky, was the only Black student in his high school class, and edited a short lived paper, the Dayton Tattler, that Orville Wright printed. He was running an elevator for four dollars a week when he published his first collection in 1893. Elsewhere, Thomas Edison was born at Milan in 1847, Harvey Firestone at Columbiana in 1868 before he started his tire company in Akron in 1900, and Granville T. Woods of Columbus patented a way to telegraph between moving trains. Garrett Morgan of Cleveland walked into a collapsed tunnel under Lake Erie in 1916 wearing a smoke hood of his own design and later patented a three position traffic signal.

Writers from Lorain, Columbus and Camden

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain in 1931, the daughter of a shipyard welder, and set her first novel in the town. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. James Thurber was born in Columbus in 1894, lost an eye to an arrow in a childhood game, and wrote the city into My Life and Hard Times. Sherwood Anderson was born at Camden in 1876, walked out of his Elyria paint factory in 1912 and never went back, then published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. Rita Dove was born in Akron in 1952, won the Pulitzer for Thomas and Beulah in 1987, and became US poet laureate in 1993. Zane Grey was born in Zanesville in 1872, a town his mother's family founded, and pulled teeth in New York before Riders of the Purple Sage.

Hollywood's Ohio imports, and one sharpshooter

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati in 1946. Clark Gable was born at Cadiz in 1901 and was working in the Akron tire plants when he found a theatre company. Paul Newman was born in Shaker Heights in 1925, where his father ran a sporting goods store. Dean Martin was born Dino Crocetti in Steubenville in 1917, spoke only Italian until he started school, and boxed as a welterweight. Doris Day was born in Cincinnati in 1922 and turned to singing after a train hit the car she was riding in and shattered her leg. Halle Berry was born in Cleveland in 1966. Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Ann Mosey in Darke County in 1860, shot game for a Greenville shopkeeper to clear the mortgage on her mother's farm, and beat the touring marksman Frank Butler in a match near Cincinnati before she married him.

Athletes, and four world records in forty five minutes

Jesse Owens was born in Alabama in 1913 and moved to Cleveland at nine, where a teacher misheard his initials J. C. and wrote down Jesse. Running for Ohio State at Ann Arbor on May 25, 1935, he set three world records and tied a fourth inside three quarters of an hour, then won four golds in Berlin the next summer. Cy Young was born at Gilmore in 1867 and won 511 games. Jack Nicklaus was born in Columbus in 1940 and won eighteen professional majors. LeBron James was born in Akron in 1984 and played his high school ball a few miles from where he grew up.

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