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Growing up in Clintonville, William Kuhn, the author of a much-anticipated new book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, first became aware of the former First Lady at the age of 6, when her husband’s 1963 death shocked the nation. “I have a very vivid memory of that being the first time I had ever seen my mother cry,” he recalls. “She was watching the funeral at which Jackie’s role was pretty prominent. I think that was the first time she lodged in my consciousness.” Kuhn’s book, Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books, published in December, focuses on Kennedy Onassis’s 19 years as a book editor in New York and how the 100 books she stewarded into print revealed her tastes, passion and personality. “I would claim these 100 books are as close to a memoir as we’re ever going to have from her,” Kuhn says. (Oddly, a similar book, Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, hit stores around the same time.) Kuhn, a historian who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the son of Albert Kuhn, a former Ohio State University provost and the namesake of the Kuhn Honors and Scholars House on campus. Meanwhile, Kuhn’s mother, Roberta Kuhn, who died in 1993, was a pioneer of the Short North, opening one of the first art galleries in the now thriving neighborhood.
Insider just happened to notice U.S. House Rep.-elect Steve Stivers grocery shopping at Giant Eagle in Victorian Village in mid December. Among the items on his list were lottery tickets. It’s not known what the nascent congressman would do with the money should he win, but perhaps he’d donate the windfall to help reduce Ohio’s nearly $8 billion budget gap.
Ohio Chief Justice Eric Brown didn’t have time to make much of an impression at the Ohio Supreme Court, but he won’t go down in the record books as the shortest serving justice or chief justice in history. Robert E. Leach, who spent just five months as Ohio’s top judge in 1978, beat out Brown, who was on the job for eight months. And Brown isn’t even close to being the shortest-serving jurist. That prize goes to Hocking H. Hunter, who was appointed and resigned on the same day in February 1864. Bret Crow, spokesman for the Supreme Court, says Hunter quit after he discovered he wouldn’t be allowed to keep operating his lucrative private law practice while serving as a justice.
So what will happen to the legions of Democratic staffers suddenly cut loose after the Republican takeover in Columbus? With the November losses of Gov. Ted Strickland, Attorney General Rich Cordray and Treasurer Kevin Boyce—as well as Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner stepping down and the changeover in the Ohio House—it’s hard to imagine a time when more Democratic working stiffs needed jobs. “At the senior level, we are really trying to get everybody else settled,” said Jan Allen, Strickland’s cabinet secretary, in December. There aren’t a lot of places for Democrats to land in government locally—Columbus Mayor Mike Coleman’s administration, perhaps, or Democratic-controlled Franklin County—and the job market in the private sector isn’t flourishing, either. Allen and other top Democratic staffers didn’t know—or perhaps weren’t revealing publicly yet in December—their next steps, though Strickland hinted at a possible landing place for some in an interview with the Huffington Post. He talked about starting a new progressive organization to provide policy ideas and communications to help Ohio Democrats reclaim lost ground in the 2012 general election.
