Like the song almost says, “Hank's a lumberjack and he's OK.”

        Like the song never says, Hank's 85 years old and still throwing a 10-pound ax at a target 20-something feet away. After the canoe joust in which opponents swing poles trying to knock each other into the water.

Hank Peters, founder of the Hank Peters Lumberjack Show. (Enquirer photo) | ZOOM |

        Hank is Hank Peters, namesake and founder of the Cincinnati-based Hank Peters Lumberjack Show, a troupe of five to eight lumberjacks who travel the country putting on shows at fairs and outdoor festivals.

        Log rolling, rail splitting, ax throwing, log sawing, canoe jousting, they do it all.

        Mr. Peters competed for years and has won in each major event, but at 85 he now limits himself to canoes and axes. He'll do both today at the annual Bob Evans Farm Festival in Rio Grande, Ohio.

        When he's finished competing, he'll fire up his chain saw and carve tiny wooden chairs from unsplit logs.

        “Kids love that,” he says, looking every inch the lumberjack as he sits in the living room of his Bevis home in a red flannel shirt and crisp blue jeans. Pictures of his and wife Ann's five kids (none a lumberjack) crowd tabletops; country froufrou from Bob Evans gift shops line kitchen walls and counters.

        He limits himself to shows in Ohio and only does those “because they write it into the contract that I'll be there.” He sold controlling interest in the show but remains the general manager. “I sign contracts and assemble troops.”

        Oh. And where does one find lumberjacks in Greater Cincinnati?

        “You don't. You go to the northern border states and Canada. I have a network assembled there.”

        Well he should. Born and reared in Nova Scotia, he began working as a lumberjack at age 16, chopping trees by day, learning the competitive events by night.

        “You go into the woods for weeks, even months, and there's not much to do. But you learn that the shortest way to town is the river, so you spend a lot of time rowing canoes and balancing on logs.

        “In 1934, the Boston Bruins missed the playoffs, so they flooded the hockey rink at Boston Gardens and had a competition. I've been doing shows ever since.”

        Which is what brought him here. “That was '46. I was at Music Hall for a sports show. It was the infant version of the show the Hart family still does today. I've been with that show since the beginning.”

        At some point he met Ann — “I was looking for a wife in Cincinnati. Good German stock, and big enough to handle me.”

        “He found me,” Ann says. “He was the dumbest person that ever was. He had no idea how to hand a girl a line. But he was a non-drinker and so was I, and I liked him. I just wish he'd drop that line about a woman big enough to handle him.”

        The couple moved here in 1953. “Our family was growing, Ann's family was here, and this seemed like a great place to raise kids,” Hank says.

        Except there is limited demand for lumberjacks.

        Enter the show circuit. “I knew I could do that, and I knew I could be a producer. I had been competing for 20 years.”

        A serious accident at age 64 slowed him down. It was the Spring Board Chop, during which a lumberjack chops a notch in a tree, inserts a board, climbs on the board, chops a notch a few feet higher, inserts another board (which is tossed up to him from below), climbs on that one and so on, up the tree.

        Unless he falls: “I fell 12 feet and broke my pelvis.”

        “I told him no more,” Ann says. “I wasn't finished with him yet. He said OK.”

        Sure. That's why at age 81 he set a record at a competition in Webster Springs, W.Va., as the oldest competitor to swing an ax in the log chop.

        “People ask me, "Hank, how much longer can this go on?' and I tell them I'm phasing out, but it's in the blood. Once you roll a log ... ”

        The log roll is one of his favorites. “It began as a necessity. Back then, in river drives, you'd get thousands of logs jamming the river. Somebody had to go out to the one jamming them and free it up. You do that by standing on it and rolling it in the middle of the river. I started when I was 11. By the time I was 17, I was good.”

        Today, the log roll is a sporting event set in a portable tank with a log (12 feet long, 15 inches in diameter) at midcurrent. A competitor balances atop and starts running, the idea being to stay on as long as possible. If he does that, he moves onto the next log and the next with each new log shrinking in diameter down to 12 inches. “The smaller the log, the faster it goes,” Mr. Peters says. “At 12 inches, it's so fast you see white water.

        “I've seen plenty of it, but not anymore. I'm 85, you know.”

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