Recently I came to the riverbank to eat lunch and I happened to see an osprey in
the trees. I've never seen one here before and so when I walked up to get a
better look at the osprey it flew away and I was watching my footing and in
doing so I looked into the river and as I looked into the river I saw I said wow
there's a tire I said now there's two there's three
there's seven there's 14 there's 21. So I start counting these tires.
Being an avid outdoorsman and a bit of a conservationist I thought I just can't
let this go on so I started calling friends and so as I called my friends
everybody started saying that they wanted to be a part of it in some way
My goal in doing this was to take at least a hundred tires out of the river.
I didn't know how many was there. In all honesty I think there's more than 100
here but I wanted to get a hundred tires out
My name is Jon Deitz we are at the Tuscarawas River in Massillon Ohio.
I've always been involved in my community wherever it's been and I'd like to take
some pride in my community and when I looked at this river it made me sad I
wasn't proud I was sad. Why people would feel that they could do this and get
away with it, I'm not sure but I wanted to least attempt to do my part to just help
my community help the river help the fish help the birds help the ducks just to help
At one point I called an old dear friend of mine Nan MacKenzie at Ventrac
and I explained my story to her and I just said Nan do you think you guys
would want to be a part of it in any way and she said not only do we want to be a
part of it we can bring six Ventrac if you like and I said uh huh I was
hoping for one. Two would be more than enough and so they agreed and was
gracious to bring it out and work miracles because this place that we're
at it's very difficult because of the steepness of the levee and so it's very
difficult to get for access and egress and when the Ventrac showed up they were
able to save a ton of man-hours back-breaking just because of what was
it was able to do which was impossible but it did it.
One of the friends that I called was a friend of mine that's a judge, Judge Elum.
The Elum family has been integral in Massillon for a hundred years and they
too are very proud of their town and so when I called him and I told him the the
situation because he's a judge he was able to offer community service workers
and so they came out and worked hard and did a great job and got dirty and muddy
and wet and all that stuff and pulled the tires you know out of the river and
up to the bank where the Ventrac you get to it.
And then there was Boy Scouts here and there was just citizens just people
who wanted to help. My wife and kids were here. There again even Nan MacKenzie came
out and worked and got dirty and tried to do her part too so it was just a
culmination of a lot of people that just came together to try to do something.
I coined a phrase some years ago that goes like this "There's nothing wrong with
what's right" I believe it I live by it and I think all that happened today was
a bunch of people that was just trying to do what was right