Martin joins Liberty Bank as investment specialist

Kevin Martin has recently joined Liberty Savings Bank as a Liberty Investment Specialist based out of the Oakwood Financial Center located at 2331 Far Hills Avenue. In his new role, Martin will be an investment consultant specializing in financial and retirement planning.

Martin graduated from NYACK College with a bachelors degree in Organizational Management. After college, he joined the U.S. Air Force where he served for 11 years. Before joining Liberty, he worked for Provident/National City Bank for 11 years.  

Martin is involved in the Bellbrook Eagles Basketball Select program, and leads a group at the First Baptist Church in Kettering called “Focus.”

Marian Schuster 
- A Life Remembered

A city thrives according to the quality of its leaders and their strong interest in the city’s cultural and economic strength. Dayton has been fortunate, in that it has had more than its fair share of beneficent givers. Many have passed on. And last week, Dayton lost another mighty pillar of this community we call Dayton.

Marian Schuster was an enormous support to our community. She lavished love on the many organizations that inspired her interest. One of her greatest contributions, of course, is a gift to the whole of our region - the Marian and Benjamin Schuster Center for the Performing Arts. It is only one of many other gifts she has made to the community.

But gifts don’t tell the whole story of her strength. She avidly believed in the value of a city’s cultural quality and so supported many of its cultural organizations. She also contributed her time and interest to many social charities as well.

It is sad to say goodbye, but the legacy that Marian Schuster has left, through her beneficence to all of us, will serve her in honored memory.

Dolores Wagner
Publisher
The Oakwood Register

Novel by Oakwood author hits bookstores

By Dolores Winkler Wagner

It’s a mystery with a local backdrop.

It all begins with the discovery of a dead body on the bike trail near Old Town outside Yellow Springs. The discoverer is curmudgeon type, Cliff Saunders. The victim is his friend, Sam Burkhoffer. A short wait before reporting the “find” puts Saunders under suspicion. That, plus the intertwined plot involving an effort to preserve a historic land parcel gives the book, titled Old Town, its fictional life.

It is written by real-life Oakwood resident Bill Vernon who has lived here for the past 30 years, currently on Wisteria Drive. A retired English professor, he taught mostly at Sinclair Community College, but also at University of Dayton and Wilberforce.

Vernon grew up in Lebanon, Ohio, but graduated from Chaminade, where he took a Greyhound Bus each day from Lebanon to school. It was in high school that he began writing, but “got serious as I went through college,” he said. He has written for years.

Old Town, the novel’s locale, is an actual town near the edge of Xenia; it was also the home to the Shawnee Indians and also where Tecumseh was raised. The idea for locating the novel there derived from his experience in the area and around Wilberforce. “It had a personality all its own,” Vernon said. Old Town was started in 1999 and was accepted for publication in 2001.

After 911, though, Vernon felt he make modifications; that the perception of his characters would need to reflect their  possible changed attitudes and beliefs. Final revisions were made during 2003.

Today Vernon lives on Wisteria with his wife, Rose, a retired Watts Middle School science teacher. They have one daughter, Laura Vernon Beteau, who graduated from Oakwood High School in 1993. She lives in Angers, France where she and her husband own a language school.

Four book signings are scheduled:  at the Blue Jacket Bookstore on Detroit Street in Yellow Springs on Saturday, July 28 at 1 p.m,.; at Borders at the Dayton Mall on Sunday, Aug. 5 at 2 p.m.; aat the Wright Library on Monday, Aug. 6 at 6:30 p.m..; Barnes & Noble in the Shoppes of Beavercreek on Saturday, Sept. 15 from 1 – 4 p.m.; and on Saturday, Sept 15 from 4 – 6 p.m. at the Epic Book Shop in Yellow Springs.

Wright Brothers book signing

Former Oakwood resident Jane Healy, and author of her newest book The Original Wrights: Orville and Wilbur’s Overwhelming Legacy, will be having a book-signing at Books & Co., 350 E. Stroop Rd. in the Town & Country Shopping Center on Thursday, July 26 from 7 to 8 p.m.

“The more we learn about the Wright brothers, the more in awe we are of their persistence, intelligence, courage and dignity,” Healy said.

Her book chronicles the difficult and ultimately triumphant events in their lives during the years of 1910 and 1911 when the brothers began building production models of the plane for the U.S. Army, started four flight training schools, and battled in the courts to protect the rights to the original flying machine patent.

For more information call 298-6540.

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July 24, 2007
Volume 16, No. 30

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