By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

When Ohio Gov. Bob Taft delivers his State of the State message to the Ohio General Assembly on Wednesday, he may say a lot about where the state is in 2004 and where he wants it to go, but it's unlikely there will be much about what Ohio is. Here are a few facts that define the real state of the state.

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If, as author Shelby Foote said, to understand America, you must first understand the Civil War, Ohioans have their own formula:

To understand Ohio, you must understand Woody Hayes.

From 1951 through 1978, Wayne Woodrow Hayes prowled the sidelines at Ohio Stadium as head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Proud, defiant, aggressive, Coach Woody raised generations of players and coaches who would have walked through hell in a gasoline suit for The Old Man.

In Columbus, and in hundreds of small towns across Ohio, where Buckeye football reigns supreme, people who couldn't name the Ohio presidents can rattle off the numbers from Woody's reign: five national championships, 13 Big Ten titles, 11 bowl games.

Like all good Buckeyes, Hayes loathed Michigan, and not just the football Wolverines - the whole state, from the furthest reaches of the Upper Peninsula to the Ohio border.

Hayes loved to tell this story: One night the coach headed for a quick trip to Michigan to scout out a promising high school player. A coaching assistant was driving and noticed the car was running out of gas. The assistant told the coach he needed to pull off the highway and gas up; Woody told him to push on. The weather was getting bad, and the assistant told Hayes they had better gas up or they might get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

"No, we don't stop,'' Hayes barked. "I don't want to buy one drop of gas in the state of Michigan. We'll coast and push this car to the Ohio border before I give this state one nickel of my money."'

Outstanding in its field - and barns

Often, people from other parts of the country have a picture in their heads of Ohio as a vast, plain flatland of fields of corn dotted with tiny towns where the grain elevator is the tallest building.

These people haven't been to Ohio much.

But agriculture, although it isn't what it used to be, is still a powerhouse in Ohio's economy, with some 80,000 farms dotting the landscape.

Ohio is still in the top 10 among the 50 states in growing corn, oats, soybeans, winter wheat, strawberries, tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers, and grapes; and in raising chickens, hogs and pigs.

Round at the end, high in the middle, O-HI-O

Or so goes the song sung on many a fall afternoon in Columbus at Buckeyes games.

Actually, compared with Western-sized states, Ohio, with its 44,828 square miles, is fairly short and squat.

Draw a line from Ohio's extreme western edge to its extreme eastern border, and the distance is 230 miles. Draw a similar line from the extreme north to the extreme south, and it's 205 miles.

Either way, you can drive the length and breadth of Ohio on one tank of gas.

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Our lasting list of 'firsts'

Ohio has had more than its share of "firsts'' - some monumental, others of dubious value. Here's a sampling:

First American to orbit the Earth: Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. of New Concord, aboard Friendship 7. He circled the globe three times on Feb. 20, 1962. He returned to space 36 years later, at the age of 77, aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

First pregnant gorilla from in vitro fertilization: Cincinnati zoo, 1995.

First caramel color manufacturer in the United States: E. Berghausen Chemical Co. of Cincinnati, 1860s.

First state with a full-fledged trade office in Africa: Ohio, in Nigeria, 1987.

First city in America to ticket motorists talking on cell phones: Brooklyn, 1999.

First man on the moon: Astronaut Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta, July 21, 1969.

First skyscraper made of reinforced concrete: Ingalls Building (Fourth and Vine Streets), Cincinnati, 1903.

First train robbery: On a train near Anderson Ferry just west of Cincinnati, May 5, 1865.

Hey, we're Number (gasp, wheeze) One!

Ohioans can pat themselves on the back for ranking first among the 50 states in a number of categories: egg production, Swiss cheese, washing machine exports, convenience store national headquarters and paint exports.

But while we pat ourselves on the back, we also note that Ohio leads the nation in toxic wastes shipped out of state, toxic materials emitted into the air, and hazardous materials incidents.

Field of nightmares

In Ohio, the baseball equivalent of a geological fault line runs roughly along Interstate 70, which runs between the state's western and eastern borders.

On the northern tectonic plate reside fans of the Cleveland Indians; on the south the rooters of the Cincinnati Reds.

Both sets of fans had a rough year in 2003. Reds fans suffered through injuries and questionable trades to see their team sink to a 69-93 record and fifth place. Cleveland had a slightly worse record - 68-94 - and Tribe fans longed for the glory days of the 1990s.

The hardest-working state in show business

Everyone knows that Ohio (Cleveland, to be exact) is the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Musuem; some even know that Slovenian accordion whiz Frankie Yankovic turned Cleveland into the "Polka Capital of the World'' (sorry, Milwaukee).

But not as many know the whole story of Ohio's musical heritage:

Stephen Foster, working in an office on the Cincinnati riverfront in 1847, wrote America's first hit song, "O! Susanna," which sold more than 100,000 copies of sheet music.

Soul music had its day in Cincinnati, too - in the 1950s, James Brown recorded "Please Please Please" at King Records here. The Isley Brothers of Lincoln Heights gained national fame in 1959 with their hit "Shout!"

In 1971, Cincinnati-born James Levine, a child prodigy who debuted with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at age 10, became conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

And what other state do you know of that has, by act of the state legislature, an official state rock song? "Hang on Sloopy," the tune by a '60s one-hit wonder group from Dayton, the McCoys, was played so many times by the Ohio State University Marching Band that, in 1985, it was chosen by the Ohio General Assembly as the state's official rock song.

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Lots of people, lots of taxes

Ohio ranked seventh in the country in the 2000 census with 11,353,140 people.

Two of the largest subgroups among those 11 million-plus are persons of German descent (2,866,565) and persons who drive to work alone (4,392,059).

The amount of money an Ohio worker forks over to his or her state in the form of income taxes has skyrocketed over the past 20 years.

In 2000, the average Ohioan paid $1,411 in state income tax. Ten years before, the average was $842. In 1980, the average was $259.

But, in the same 20-year period, the federal adjusted income of the average Ohioan rose from $18,473 a year to $49,435.

A chestnut by any other name

If you are getting tired of people from out of state asking you why Ohioans are called "Buckeyes,'' it's a lot easier to explain than Tar Heel or Hoosier. It comes, of course, from the buckeye tree, once plentiful in these parts. The seed of the tree - a dark, shiny brown with a tan spot in the middle - resembles a buck's eye, or so Ohio's native Indians thought. In other parts of the country, people look at a buckeye and call it a horse chestnut.

By the numbers - Some quick Ohio facts

Ohio's median annual household income is nearly $44,000, a 20 percent rise since the mid-1980s. It is higher than the national median by about $1,700 and higher than all its surrounding states, except Michigan.

In Ohio, a family needs to use about 29 percent of its income to pay for an education at a four-year public college - 54 percent for a private college.

Even though Ohio has lost about 97,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, 20 percent of Ohioans work in the manufacturing sector, six percent more than the national average.

57.6 percent of Ohio households have computers; 50.9 percent have Internet access.

The life expectancy of the average Ohioan is 75.3 years.

Meteoric rise

"Buckeye'' as a description for an Ohioan seems to have taken hold first in the presidential campaign of 1840, when Ohioan William Henry Harrison made a log cabin made of buckeye wood the centerpiece of his campaign.

Speaking of Harrison, the frontier general who was the scourge of the Shawnees had held only one political office when he was elected president - Hamilton County Clerk of Courts.

The present clerk, Greg Hartmann, probably has not yet achieved the final stepping-stone to the presidency.

Cradle of 'limited' presidents

Chances are, there will never be another presidential election like the one of 1920. It was an all-Ohio contest - the Republicans nominated a U.S. senator from Ohio, Warren G. Harding. The Democrats countered with their own Buckeye - Gov. James M. Cox.

The two had something else in common, besides their Ohio-ness - both were newspaper publishers - Harding of the Marion Star, Cox of the Dayton Daily News.

Harding won, and served little more than half his term when he dropped dead in a San Francisco hotel room. His presidency can be summed up in one memorable quote: "I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don't seem to grasp that I am president."

Easy come, easy go

Here's how the typical Ohio household spends the money it earns:

Median pre-tax income: $44,649

Average annual expenses: $38,045

Housing: $12,527

Transportation: $7,568

Food: $5,435

Utilities: $2,487

Average family net worth: $395,000

Median credit card balance: $1,900

In 2001, the typical Ohio worker earned $12.81 an hour - 35 cents above the national average.

But race and sex make a difference in Ohio when it comes to earnings:

Average hourly wage for white men: $15

Black men: $12

Women: $11.17

St. X marks the spot

2003 was the third year in a row that Cincinnati's St. Xavier High School led Ohio in the production of National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists. The all-boys Catholic school had 28 last year.

And a pretty good football team.

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Sources: The Ohio Almanac, Third Edition, edited by John Baskin and Michael O'Bryant, Orange Frazier Press; The Ohio Public Library Information Network; The Ohio Department of Development; The U.S. Census Bureau