(upbeat music) - Hey, Akronites.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Around Akron with Blue Green.

On this episode, I'm gonna meet up with North Hill Veterinarian Hospital who's been serving Akron for almost 100 years.

I'm gonna meet up with Beth Vild and learn all about permaculture.

I'm gonna visit a guy who made Stan Hywet out of Legos.

Now to kick this show off today, I'm gonna meet up with Michele Wilson, the executive director of Global Ties and learn all about their shop at the North side in downtown Akron.

Let's go see what they're all about.

- We have been around or over 40 years, almost 45 years in Akron and we are all about citizen diplomacy.

We do programs that we engage with the U.S. Department of State and with the U.S. Congress with high-level international exchanges that bring leaders that are at the top of their field in a number of fields from around the world.

They could be parliament members, they could be top medical leaders in their community.

They could be working on shared concerns that we have such as victims assistance or working on global education from around the world or conflict resolution and they come to visit us in our community and we put together a professional program for them.

They are here to look at concerns such as fake news that we all are concerned about.

How can we get the best possible information so that we're making the best possible decisions and operating in democracy around the world so that we can all benefit from the best principles of governance.

(inspiring music) It's amazing how hosting people here in Akron, Ohio, it's a shared information where we're learning as much from the visitors as they're learning from meeting with our leaders in our community and they're welcomed into homes from our volunteers.

We're always looking for community members that would like to be involved with Global Ties, Akron and welcome an international visitor around their dinner table.

We work with our local schools with global education programs and do everything from having our international speakers go into a classroom and share their own experience as a immigrant living in Akron, Ohio from another part of the world or being an international student and scholar studying at the University of Akron by sharing with our local students what it's like to grow up in a different country from around the world and what their culture and experience is as a national from another country but it's just building the concept of different cultures and different nationalities so that we can all learn from one another and have that understanding, mutual understanding of diversity, inclusion that is so necessary for all of us today.

(mellow music) Global Threads Fair Trade Boutique is the social enterprise of Global Ties, Akron.

It started as a pop-up shop many years ago as we were beginning to think about ways that we could build support for our global education programs and we had items such as my origami cranes that we were giving away as gifts to international visitors that were coming into town and realized that people may wanna purchase them and what a great way to be able to sell some items and gain support for our local programs.

It went over very well at local pop-up art shops, so we decided why not sell some other items that had global themes.

That was going well, so we continued to add to our array of items that we were selling and that included adding fair trade items to our mix.

(upbeat music) Our store itself is extremely colorful and global bizarre.

When you go into our store, you can't mistake it.

It's like walking into a moving work of art.

There's everything from Ghana.

We have these beautiful folding fans that literally look like their art and we had Safia, our artisan that we're working with make matching face masks to go with them.

We also had her make handbags with matching face masks.

She has beautiful headwear and scarfs with matching face mask and they're all made of beautiful African batik fabrics.

We have neckties that are globally themed and some of them are in African fabrics, some of them are in Guatemala fabrics.

We have items from Guatemala that are cute little animals.

We have from the Bhutanese women's group, there were saris, beautiful silk saris donated from the Indian and Nepalian Southeast Asian communities that have been remade into beautiful scarfs and handbags.

I have a lot of my origami art, the miniature origami that I've made into jewelry and then I've upcycled scarfs and blouses and skirts into beautiful button art jewelry.

I have that too.

There's a lot of items that have been upcycled.

A lot of our artisans and makers are women that are empowered to make items for sale that are from our refugee community or from global artisans around the world and many of them we know personally and it's really, not just empowering them but empowering others in their own communities here in Akron or globally.

(upbeat music) We are now at Northside Marketplace right in downtown Akron and it's a perfect location for us.

We love the idea to be able to be local and still be able to sell full time and what a great opportunity to feature our local community and also global communities that come to Akron as part of our international exchanges.

We're thrilled to be in Northside.

- Next up, we're gonna learn all about permaculture with Wildwoman Design and Consultation.

- I've been gardening since I was a little girl.

My mom, my grandma started teaching me how to garden when I was about three and I've always just loved gardening.

I never really thought of it much more than just, I like to grow my own stuff a little bit here and there.

When I first moved to Akron, I started helping to establish The Womb, which is a multicultural center on the East side of Akron that is black owned and operated.

I was helping to get their gardens started and I just really plunged into gardening and that's when I got my permaculture design certification.

(intense inspiring music) Permaculture design is a design with ethics which is earth care, fair share and people care and it is also based on indigenous knowledge from around the world.

It is a design methodology that creates closed loop systems or sustainable systems, systems that don't produce waste.

They use whatever waste is produced and create that ecosystem in circular economy.

(intense inspiring music) Last year was the first year that I started doing parks, the Akron City parks.

We're working on Boss' Park and Elizabeth Park.

Boss Park is in University Park neighborhood.

It is the one park in University Park and then there's Elizabeth Park, which is in Cascade Valley neighborhood and smacked in the middle of Cascade village.

Not only is it this great interaction and food source for people but we're also amending the soil, fixing erosion problems, making it a healthier environment for people within these neighborhoods.

(elated music) One acre of property, you could feed a family of four off of for a whole year if you were on your preservation game 'cause obviously winter becomes the... And making it last longer than it just gets rotten are the major issues there but it really can help subsidize communities' food access and that's part of why we're working on these city parks is because the city parks that we're working on in doing food forests and our food deserts or as I like to think of them more as food apartheid, where there are predominantly African-American communities and lower income communities that just do not have access to fresh food.

As the food forests develop and age and the trees get big enough to start providing us with pears and apples and all sorts of lovely things, we will be doing workshops in teaching people how to prep the food that's been grown there.

(lively music) This garden that we're in right now is entering its fourth year as a forest system.

We, I think are gonna probably have to work in it twice, maybe a total of five hours worth of work throughout the year and we will yield the most edible things per square foot that we possibly could in garden beds.

There's no grass here.

I completely got rid of the grass here.

Grass is my enemy.

It is the number one crop in the United States.

Environmentally, it's pretty useless.

It's pretty useless as far as feeding ourselves.

The benefits about permaculture is that you get that high quantity of food per square foot.

Within 10 years, the system is, no matter the system that you're in is fully matured and you really just do a little bit of work at the very beginning of the season and to put everything to bed and that's it.

It's an ecosystem that just fully creates itself and feeds and takes care of itself, which is really beautiful and wonderful to do and you can add annuals into that system if you want to that you're gonna, every year work on.

It's really, the first three to five years are intensive amounts of input and then after that, it's very little maintenance.

(cheerful piano music) We've actually had clients that we work on their homes have, after the first two years of them starting to get their food forests installed get news from their doctors that their blood pressure is far lower.

Their blood sugar levels are better, that generally, their labs are just coming back better and it's because they're eating fresher.

They're surrounded by green all the time.

They have this peaceful place.

They can listen to birds and watch chipmunks be silly and it just creates this oneness.

I think that the more that people realize that we are just a part of the ecosystem and that the ecosystem is here to serve us and we are here to serve the ecosystem, the more peaceful we feel in our lives in general.

- Next up, I'm gonna learn all about the history of the North Hill Veterinarian Hospital.

They've been around for almost 100 years.

Let's see what they're all about.

- To the best of our knowledge, it's the oldest privately owned veterinary facility in the state of Ohio, except for the Veterinary School in Columbus.

(gentle instrumental music) In junior high, I was always very good in the studies, especially math.

I was thinking about going into engineering but something happened.

I mean, we'd always had a cat at home, no dogs because, well, we tried to have a dog but it tried to bite our neighbor so we decided to stay with cats.

I became quite enthralled with them, I really like them.

I think was sort of a gift that I thought about dentistry, no, human medicine, maybe and then veterinary just seemed to be the right fit for me.

Everything came together and that's why I call it a gift because that's a lot of years.

You gotta make sure that you make a decision that you're gonna stay with the rest of your life.

(regal music) Dr. Barrett and Noonan started out downtown at The Case but that building I think, was subject to a fire.

They just got together as much money as they could 'cause I think they were young veterinarians, that's where they're doing their training and built this place.

Through the decades, I've had people call me and wanna know whether they could stop by because they worked here from some time in 1927 on, which I found very interesting.

They had 24-hour care here, they had empty rooms for people to sleep.

People brought horses, cows, sheep, goats, whatever if they had to be tr...

Otherwise, I'm sure they didn't (indistinct) ambulatory house calls.

They had quite a business going on.

I mean, two main veterinarians and then graduates.

(wistful music) This started when I was a kid.

I mean, if you had a dog who was usually in the backyard in a dog house and I guess if you were humane individual, you'd bring them in when it was really bad during the winter time or storms.

Have they changed?

Yes, goodness.

Decades and decades and decades ago, this is the first time I'd ever heard anyone say this.

She said to me, "Dr. Bingham, I love my animals more than most people," and that was, I thought wow, that's pretty out there but that's become very common.

They can confine in them.

Usually, the animal's loyal to them and they've truly become part of the, maybe more than part of the family.

The coronavirus has brought that out even more because the animals appear to be responding the way the human's doing.

In other words, if it's a good day, it's a good day.

If it's a stressful day, it's a stressful day.

(wistful music) Well, there's one here, the big one and then one that covers this window.

I went to see Don one day and explained to him what I wanted to do.

He came out, he saw what he had and I think he did an excellent job.

I mean, I don't really see this one off to side, the little one, much but this one, you can look at this for hours and see the different animals that he put into it and he did a great job.

I take care of his animals and he do work here and there and finish it.

Yeah, he's a good guy.

(wistful music) It was a young dog.

It had been hit by a car and its front limb, one of its front limbs, the injury was just too bad.

I had to amputate it.

That went fine and after we let him go, stitches out, everything, the dog would arrive, they lived locally here, on the front porch and Russell, the kennel man would of course let him in anyway and this happened three or four times before.

Luckily, the dog didn't injure him, I guess after being hit by one car, he had to be pretty careful not to be hit by another.

That was an enjoyable case and he came back several times until they moved and luckily he was far enough away that he couldn't find us.

Hopefully, there'll be a book someday and there'll be many more stories like that.

- I'm gonna wrap this show up today with something near and dear to my heart, Legos.

Let's go meet up with Todd Wolf and see what he's all about.

- There was a fire station set and there was also a monorail set that I had, a space monorail and those were probably my two favorite sets growing up as a child before I started getting into some of the castle sets.

I've never stopped.

A lot of kids go through what adult legal builders call their dark ages of when they stop building.

They're 13, 14, 15, and then they pick it up again in their 20s and 30s, I've built continually since probably three or four years old.

(upbeat music) In the Lego world, we call those MOCs or my own creations, M-O-C and I started doing those probably about 13, 14 years old.

I can remember in my parents' basement just starting to build just structures, skyscrapers.

My dad's an architect.

I've always had the architecture in me and that's what I started doing was just building my own city and it's just continually grown ever since.

(upbeat music) It's a lot of work.

It starts off with going around the actual structure that I wanna recreate, taking photos, making some sketches and I've kind of trained my mind to look at it in Lego size.

I base a lot of the size off of windows 'cause windows are kind of a set size.

If I can set the window, then I can set the rest of the building in terms of scale and then I'll just start to build.

I don't really draw a whole lot out.

I don't compute or animate any of it.

I'll just trial and error, I'll start building.

If I like it, I'll continue.

If I don't, I'll tear it down and start again.

Having the internet now is a great thing.

I can go online and I can order.

If I need 5,000 of these little brick-shaped pieces, I can go online and order 5,000 of them in whatever color I need just as long as I got the money for it, it's getting too expensive though.

(gentle music) I don't do any interiors for any of my buildings yet.

This scale for Stan Hywet here would have been too small to even do any kind of interior.

They're pretty hollow of every other color.

I mean, this particular model slides apart into eight pieces and if you looked inside, you'd see yellow and blue and green and orange and every other color under the sun just to build the interior supports a little bit and the support of the roof.

(upbeat music) This is the fifth version of the house.

First one was built just bright red because Lego hadn't come out with this darker red color yet and it was all one big solid piece, you couldn't move it.

I had cardboard roofs because they didn't have all the slopes and things that weren't created yet and over the years, I've rebuilt it several times coming out with the dark red and then they came out with this profile brick that actually looks like a real brick.

I had to rebuild it again into version five to get that real brick design.

Yeah, I mean, there's probably 50,000 pieces here.

A lot of it just to build up the landscape and everything, to get the slope of the land and try to get as much detail in as I can into that scale.

(upbeat music) I became a tour guide there.

I went there for a field trip in sixth grade in elementary school and then went back as soon as I could drive to go through the training program and I've been volunteering there as a tour guide since 1999.

This particular model I wanted to get done, I started it Super Bowl Sunday of 2017 and I needed to get it done by September, 2017 to have it on display at the Brick Universe Convention in Cleveland so I got it done.

It took about 800 hours.

Every night when the kids went to bed, just go build a little bit more and a little bit more and I got it done about two days before the convention in Cleveland in September of that year.

(mellow music) Other area landmarks, I've done the Steamship William G. Mather, I've done the original City of Solon School that was built in 1908, I've done the Old West Junior High School in Maple Heights where I grew up.

I'm trying to think of some of the other area landmarks I've done over the years.

They've been many, a couple Chicago skyscrapers.

(gentle music) There's these conventions all over the country.

This one was called Brick Universe, Cleveland 2017 and I'd wanted to display Stan Hywet here at the convention and people travel from all over the country and they host these all over the country and they bring their models and their MOCs.

There are some judging and some competitions involved and this one, particularly won best historical creation which I was very honored to receive 'cause again, I thought there were some other very amazing historical builds that people from all over the country had contributed to the convention that year.

(gentle music) Yeah, it's been a fun toy.

It's been something that I've enjoyed and I will continue to enjoy for my entire adult life.

I mean, it's been something that I have fun memories of as a kid with my parents as I have, making memories with my children doing Lego bricks and sets with them and just watching them grow into it too.

I think it keeps me mobile and it keeps me active and it keeps everything moving and it keeps me going.

I love just sitting down there and putting the pieces together or tearing them apart and resorting them out into something else.

The kids have gotten involved in it and they love doing it too.

It's become a family love affair.

(calm music) - Thank you once again for watching this episode of Around Akron with Blue Green.

Now, if you have any questions, comments or just wanna drop me an email, you can reach me at www.AroundAkronWithBlueGreen.com or you can catch me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.

Thank you and have an amazing day.

(upbeat electronic music)