EP282: The Small Town Theater Company Making a Big Difference and Overcoming Addiction by Letting Others Help Me
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Don Arthurs and Erich Offenburg tell the story of their special needs program that won Columbiana the title of "Nicest Place in America. Ryan Stewart struggled with addiction for most of his early life... until meeting people who would help him and want nothing in return.
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Time Codes:
00:00 - The Small Town Theater Company Making a Big Difference
38:00 - Overcoming Addiction by Letting Others Help Me
Support the show: https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. |
| 0:14.3 | And we tell stories about everything on this show, including yours. |
| 0:17.0 | Send them to OurAmerican Stories.com. |
| 0:19.7 | They're some of our favorites. |
| 0:21.4 | And now we bring you one of our regular occurring segments brought to you by the help |
| 0:25.9 | of our friends at Reader's Digest. |
| 0:28.5 | Every year they host a competition where folks submit stories about why they consider their |
| 0:33.7 | town to be the nicest place in America. |
| 0:37.1 | Here's Robbie with our latest story from Reader's Digest, and it comes from |
| 0:41.7 | Columbiaana, Ohio. |
| 0:46.6 | Don Arthur's was born and raised in Columbiana, Ohio. |
| 0:50.4 | Although his primary interest laid in music and performance, he realized that probably wasn't |
| 0:55.1 | going to pay the bills. After a few years off after high school, and some prompting from a friend, |
| 1:00.8 | Don enrolled at Youngstown State University and received his degree in computer information systems |
| 1:06.0 | and naturally started applying for jobs. Sent 35 resumes out and got two offers because Youngstown, Ohio was not really known for |
| 1:17.1 | being a tech corridor or anything like that at the time. |
| 1:20.7 | I ended up taking a job with a company that did audience response systems. |
| 1:26.1 | It was a really interesting concept and I really enjoyed that. |
| 1:30.5 | I worked for that company for about a year and a half. The year was 2001 whenever the 9-11 attacks |
| 1:38.3 | occurred. My position, since it was so heavily reliant on travel after 9-11 happened, it hurt that business quite a bit. |
| 1:47.0 | So within the course of, you know, just a week or so, after those attacks occurred, they lost a large percentage of their clients. |
| 1:57.0 | They had to make some cuts to the staff and I was one of the cuts. And I was pretty devastated. |
... |
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