WALBRIDGE, Ohio — A local business in the village of Walbridge is serving up dishes of ice cream to help local art education.
Every Thursday, David Overholt hosts two art classes in Walbridge through his non-profit Northwestern Ohio Rural Arts. But he needed to find a way to fund the art initiatives.
So, he landed on opening a locally owned ice cream shop in the heart of Walbridge: Pinky's Scoop Schack.
"We have a little Rockwell-esque town that needed something like that," Overholt said. "We've got a little dinner, we've got a couple of bars, we've got the VFW, we just needed a good ice cream shop."
Pinky's is open five days a week year-round and exclusively serves hard-serve ice cream from Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream out of Madison, Wisconsin, filling a sweet treat vacancy in the small Wood County village.
"People want to come for a walk in the evening," said Charlotte "Pinky" Overholt. "You can stop by and have an ice cream cone and walk the rest of the way home and walk off all that ice cream."
The current initiative's goal is to raise about $2,000 to hire local mural artist Chilly Rodriguez to paint a mural celebrating Walbridge on the current Pinky's building.
The overall goal is to eventually raise enough funding to purchase a permanent home for NORA and be able to offer more art education programming for the northwest Ohio community.
"There are a few people from Walbridge, but I've got people from Temperance, Michigan, I've got Swanton, I've got Sylvania. I have people from all over the place that come to this class," David said. "It's a great way to de-stress, you can zone out and de-stress for hours just by concentrating on a painting. Dexterity, your mind, it gets your mind just moving, so it's a good thing."