[Bonus] Short - Remembering A.I. Root in Medina, Ohio

[Bonus] Short - Remembering A.I. Root in Medina, Ohio

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts. Your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

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Jeff: Jim, I'm really excited that you wanted to join me on this little walkabout, if you call them, Medina, Ohio.

Dr. Jim Tew: Yes.

Jeff: We're standing here in very hallowed ground in multiple ways.

Jim: It is hallowed. Jeff, I've wanted to do this as long as I've lived in Ohio and I just never thought it'd be on this cool day that we're doing it. We are standing here at the A.I. Root Family grave plot, and I'm looking at Amos Ives Root’s Grave, 1839 to 1923. I have intended to do this for almost 50 years.

Jeff: Oh, really?

Jim: Yes. I'd ask at the factory, go out and find his grave. Well, they're always busy and you got to lead traffic and we never did. There must be, what? 25 people of his family, 30 people of his family buried here?

Jeff: Yes. There's quite a few.

Jim: There's Huber, there's his wife, there's Ernest.

Jeff: Ernest down there,

Jim: His wife, Leland Root.

Jeff: Who's Samuel? Samuel, he has a big--

Jim: Samuel was apparently, I think that is Amos' parents.

Jeff: All right. Samuel born in 1810.

Jim: Samuel Root and Louisa Hart Root. They were born in 1810. That would be about right for him born in 1839. Louisa over there on that stone, she's the one who kept Amos at home because he was a sickly boy, born late in the family hierarchy. He was educated and was not required to go out in the field and do the hard work.

He got to stay home and stay with his mother and read and write and then become the man he became, I've been told. I'm not a Root historian, listeners, I've just read the same things that you people have read somewhere.

Jeff: You sit here and you look out across Medina and you think about all the beehives we've opened, the history that-- not the history, but our personal history with honey bees and spending time with them, and to think about from a North America, US standpoint, it really came to focus under A.I. Root. The whole US beekeeping industry really has its start right here with this man and this family.

Jim: Yes, it did. This is my opinion now, but apparently he got Bee fever up there on the town square when they had that little jewelry factory on the second floor. A swarm landed on a window there somewhere and Amos was intrigued by it, and somebody with no name took it down for him and took it to the ground.

Then from that point on, he began to read and explore it and seems to have just been overwhelmed with an interest in bees.

Jeff: They put it in a bucket or something, didn't they?

Jim: Yes, I thought they had a bucket or a box and just lowered it to the ground. I didn't want to get too dramatic, but I thought he said that if anybody could take those bees down, he would give them something like $1 and the rest of the day off. There was some story like that, but that person did it.

I'd like to know something about them. Who was this faceless person who, all those years ago, knew enough to go there and scrape that swarm off into some container and lower it to the ground? There's a plaque up there.

Jeff: Let me check.

Jim: I was an Alabama beekeeper a long way from here, and the first time I was up here and drove into Medina, I had almost a religious mentality about me that I'm in hallowed ground here. This is where this all began. I'm having little snatches of that here right now. This is the man, his mortal remains are here at our feet. A small man. He was only been beekeeping for something like 10 or 15 years before he moved on to cars and-

Jeff: Airplanes.

Jim: -airplanes and all the things he had an interest in. He built the company and it stayed, and his children kept it. It's not like he had decades and decades and decades in beekeeping.

Jeff: You think about his impact on the industry, though, he was really the Henry Ford of beekeeping equipment.

Jim: Yes, that's a good way of looking at it. I don't want to offend any other manufacturer, but the equipment that they used to make was just furniture grade quality. I just really hated to paint that white and put bees on it. You wanted to do something, to put some clear varnish on that and make a piece of furniture out of it.

Jeff: I know I've said this before in earlier episodes, but living near here, I used to come down to their factory seconds, the store. The lady behind the counter, I remember her name was Ellie.

Jim: Oh.

Jeff: She knew me by name because I was always there and I'd pick out factory seconds from the A.I. Root wooden wear and it was better than-

Jim: Careful.

Jeff: -some manufacturers. [laughs Their hobbyist grade or whatever. It was just so fabulous. No one has ever made a frame like Root did. Those self-spacing frames with the pointed corners on one side. They'd line up and it was really a nice piece of wooden wear to have experienced. I wish I had some of that equipment.

Jim: My father was two years old when A.I. died. Dad was born in '21, here's '23. I'm trying to find some connectivity here. This man whose stone I'm looking at has gone a long way toward giving me a life's focus for the last 55 or so years, when I've been obsessed by bees and the satisfaction that I've gotten.

Ironically, the bees have not been satisfied with me at all, [laughs] but I've really been satisfied with them. I've said time and again, mine's been a one-sided relationship. I didn't know that his wife died before he did. Susan died in '21 and he died in '23.

Jeff: Died in '23.

Jim: He had to limp along for two years without his mate. I've really enjoyed the whole bee experience. This has been sobering. I guess, I want you to take my picture here somewhere, but I don't know what I'd ever do with it. This is a sobering event for me.

Jeff: We'll put it in the show notes.

Jim: Put it in the show notes that I'm here looking like I'm wearing a coronation with this recording device you've got on me.

Jeff: Is that a comment on the color choice I have for the microphones?

Jim: No, it's not. It's appropriate since we're here at the cemetery. We shouldn't be so jovial. We should be showing respect. You've got me wearing a colorful mic. I've had a nice time. This has been worth the wait. I'm glad you pushed me into doing it.

Jeff: Let's go down and take a look at the plaque on the Root-

Jim: Let's do it.

Jeff: -family stone.

Jim: They had a lot they wanted to say. You want to read it?

Jeff: I'll read the first paragraph. You read the second.

Jim: All right, go ahead.

Jeff: "A.I. Root was one of the most remarkable men of the past two generations. Remarkable not in one way, but in many ways. He was a many sided character if any man ever had one. Inventor, writer, manufacturer, publisher, thinker, philanthropist, reformer, moralist, agriculturalist, Christian, and all of these, his character was marked and he was a leader. In most of them he loomed large."

Jim: "But what was best about him and his works and his life was that whatever he put his hand on or his mind to, it was with the idea of benefiting humanity, and it can be truly said of him that the world was better for his having lived in it. He did not live for himself alone, or he would not have lived as he did, but unselfishly and wholeheartedly he lived for others and his family, for his friends, for his employees, and for his neighbors, fellow townshipmen, for humanity, and he did much to make them all better and happier." Medina County Gazette, May 4th, 1923.

Jeff: That's really nice.

Jim: Yes.

Jeff: A lot of history right here.

Jim: There's a lot of history right here.

Jeff: Jim, we'll have to do this again. We'll get in the car and go all around Ohio.

Jim: We'll just make them find all the beekeeper cemeteries of the country. Somewhere in Ohio, there's a beekeeper who's stone is a beehive, a granite beehive. It's perfectly done. Anyway, we're getting off the subject now. This is A.I. Root's time and we shouldn't be-- Been to the factory when they still had all the drives up in the ceiling and the place smelled good and everything was beeswax foundation.

I bought lumber from them to be a woodworker. I bought clear maple, but they were going to make rulers and yardsticks out of. I made my daughter a remarkably ugly corner table, but she still got it, has a secret compartment in it. I always take pleasure in telling her that that was maple that I bought from the A.I. Root Company that was destined to become rulers for grade school kids.

And then I spent all these time with these other editors, with Larry Goltz, Mark Brunner, and all the people have come and gone, and then, of course, Kim, who came to that position, Kim Flottum, and just held it down for decades and decades. I'm the last man standing, not counting you, I'm the last man standing here for a while. [laughs] It's not about me, but I'm having a moment here.

Jeff: It's a reflective place.

Jim: It's a reflective place. It's a nice cemetery, if cemeteries can be nice. It's a nice cemetery.

Jeff: If you're on the road somewhere and you pass through Medina and you're a beekeeper, this is a place you, I think, would be drawn to. I know we were.

Jim: Yes. All right. Take my picture, and then I'm finished.

Jeff: All right. [laughs]

Jim: You want to use your phone or mine?

Jeff: Yes, I'll send it to you.

[00:11:21] [END OF AUDIO]