Jay area is anything but ordinary

Bob Schmit likes to collect aphorisms and slogans.
Last year’s Jay County Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year has the ones he likes embroidered onto bath towels he gives to 10-year 4-H members heading off to college.
One of those aphorisms could be Bob’s own personal motto, and you can make a case that it ought to be Jay County’s as well.
The motto: “Refuse to be ordinary.”
Bob’s not sure where he got it. Maybe it was a bumper sticker. Maybe it was something he saw on a sign outside a church.
But it adds up to four words of good advice.
And in many ways, it describes how this community continues to set itself apart from the pack.
For example, it is not ordinary for a rural farming community to have such a richly diverse manufacturing base.
It is not ordinary for a community this size to have a foundation with more than $22 million in assets.
It is not ordinary for a rural community to have an arts facility with gallery space, workshops, a performance series and music education programs in multiple instruments.
It is not ordinary to have an A-rated school corporation or to have every school in that corporation earn an A rating.
It is not ordinary for a rural community to have a hospital providing first-rate medical care.
John Jay Center for Learning, anything but ordinary.
The Jay Community Center and the West Jay Community Center, envied by others and certainly not ordinary.
The Dunkirk investment group’s efforts to restore downtown properties with private dollars, extraordinary.
Locally-owned media, far from normal these days and increasingly rare.
Efforts to nurture web-based businesses like MyFarms in a rural setting, hard to find.
Local companies with a global reach — think IOM Grains or Brigade Electronics or FCC Indiana — anything but ordinary.
Environmental efforts that now have several hundred acres of wetlands under protection and open to the public, not something you’d expect to find.
Manufacturers and their employees who continue to set a global standard for quality control — think Verallia — not ordinary at all.
A tradition of working together as a countywide community of 21,000 people rather than parochial duchies, so rare you’d be surprised.
A history of entrepreneurial companies growing out of garage operations — think Moser Engineering or TLS By Design or Hazlett Roofing — not as commonplace as you might think.
The list could go on and on. And that’s the point.
This community — stretching from Dunkirk to Fort Recovery, from Geneva to Ridgeville, not just Jay County but spilling beyond its borders — decided long ago that it would “refuse to be ordinary.”
For most of us, this has happened so gradually and so naturally that we don’t even notice it. We take it for granted. We assume it’s ordinary.
But it’s not.
It’s something special.
That’s what you get when you refuse to be ordinary. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]