Three to be inducted into the Eastwood Eagle Way Hall of Fame

Three Eastwood alumni will be indicted into the newest class of the Eastwood Eagle Way Hall of Fame.

This year’s inductees include Janet Metzger Knape, Dennis Mock and Jan Oberhouse McLaughlin. 

The celebration honoring the new inductees will be held Saturday, March 7, from 6-9 p.m. in the Eastwood High School gymnasium, 4900 Sugar Ridge Rd., Pemberville. Light refreshments will be served.

Tickets are $15 per person and are available by contacting Marcia Cousino at 419-287-4078 or by PayPal @beardlmb (please include your phone number with PayPal payment).

Inductee bios

Dennis Mock

Dennis Mock was born on March 5, 1951, in Fremont, to Jake and Alice (Jacobs) Mock. He grew up in the village of Luckey, where he attended Eastwood Schools through graduation in 1969.

 Along with his lifelong friends, Dennis proudly counted himself as “one of the Luckey boys,” a bond that remained important throughout his life.

Mock earned his Bachelor of Education degree from BGSU in 1973, followed by a Master of Education in Administration from BGSU in 1984. These degrees laid the foundation for a distinguished career in education that spanned more than four decades.

On June 29, 1979, he married Tracy (Konesky). Together, they raised two children and are the proud grandparents of four grandchildren. Their son, Ryan (Alissa) Mock, is a school psychologist with Edison Local Schools, and they are the parents of daughters Isla and Adelyn. Their daughter, Emily (Kyle) Furderer, is employed by the Professional Golf Association (PGA) Headquarters in Florida, in Community and Public Engagement. They are the parents of daughter Palmer and son Tucker.

Mock began his teaching and coaching career at Holgate Local Schools from 1973 to 1979, where he coached football, basketball and baseball, and taught driver’s education.

He then taught physical education and coached basketball and baseball at Bettsville Local Schools from 1979 to 1983 before becoming principal in the Bettsville Local School District in 1984.

 In 1988, he accepted the position of assistant principal and athletic director at Woodmore Local Schools, serving until 1990. He was promoted to principal at Woodmore from 1990-1994, and in 1994, he accepted the superintendency at Genoa Area Local Schools, a role he held with distinction until his retirement in 2015.

 Following retirement, Mock continued to serve students and communities across Northwest Ohio through multiple interim superintendent positions, including Wellington Local (one year), Margaretta Local (four years), Gibsonburg Exempted Village (two years), Genoa Area (two years), and most recently, Woodmore Local Schools.

He has facilitated new school buildings and athletic enhancement projects in the districts he served. His career reflects a lifelong commitment to education, service, and the belief that schools thrive when students come first.

Janet Metzger Knape

Janet Metzger Knape was born to Paul and Eleanor Metzger in 1953 and grew up on Dowling Road, Luckey, with her sisters Barbara and Nancy.

A 1971 graduate of Eastwood and a 1978 graduate of BGSU, she obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design. She studied with Sandra Jacomini in high school and Ronald Jacomini at BGSU.

After working at Owens-Illinois for six years and then at Stahl Associates for three years, she started her own graphic design/marketing firm, Knape Designs, in 1982 when her daughter Ashley was born. Her work included developing brands, comprehensive writing, designing brochures, annual reports, catalogs, logos, and billboards, which were all done by hand until the early 1990s when Apple computers were just becoming available. She also created videos and trade show exhibits for national shows for her clients.

Her clients included manufacturing facilities, social service agencies, educational and governmental institutions, economic development and travel organizations, and entrepreneurs. For 12 years she was the creative director and publisher of BG Health Magazine, writing stories, determining content and layout, finding sponsors, dealing with printing companies – one of her most fulfilling projects.

 She mentored several employees over the years as they worked with her from her home office on South Main Street in Bowling Green, in her 1895 Victorian home where she has lived in since 1978. She officially retired in 2024.

Since the early 1980s, she has been involved in community service endeavors, whether through Rotary International, on drug addiction and mental health boards, community organization boards, or serving on the United Way of Greater Toledo Board for 12 years. Between Behavioral Connections and Harbor, she served on those boards for 23 years.

She was recognized in both Lucas and Wood counties for her volunteerism. Her awards include the YMCA Milestones Honor for Volunteerism, the Athena Award from the Bowling Green Chamber of Commerce, and the J.C. Penney Volunteerism Golden Rule Award.

She was inducted into the Bowling Green Rotary Club in 1991, and it has been a big part of her life ever since. She has traveled to other countries as a goodwill ambassador to see the work that Rotary is doing there, including St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Bowling Green chapter had sent pediatric medical supplies. She was a Group Study Exchange team leader to Australia in 2014, taking four young professionals with her and connecting with Rotarians there for a 30-day cultural exchange. She’s still active in Rotary, which meets every Thursday in BG.

Recently, she was part of the research team for 16 interpretive signs of historical buildings in the downtown Bowling Green area, which resulted in an award from Heritage Ohio for Best Historical Placemaking Signs in October 2025. She was instrumental in the design and organization of the sign information during the intensive 10-month project.

Knape was married to Tom Knape and they raised two daughters, Ashley and Alexandra. After working together on remodeling and updating their Victorian home for 11 years, and camping, boating and traveling the US with their family, the marriage ended in 2001. Tom passed away in 2018.

 She and her daughters traveled extensively with the Hockettes Synchronized Ice Skating team from Ann Arbor during their high school years. They competed internationally in Milan, Italy, Rouen, France, and Zagreb, Croatia, on four assignments from the USFSA. She continues to travel when the opportunity arises, with recent trips to Portugal, Hawaii, and Tanzania on safari.

Jan's daughters both left Ohio for Denver, Colorado, after graduating from Miami University and Ohio University, where they began their successful careers. She is so pleased that her daughters and her five grandsons, along with their husbands, live about five miles apart in the mountain town of Steamboat Springs with a ski village within view of their homes. Madden and Milo both are National Champion ranked snowboarders at ages 10 and 9, and Theo has been on the slopes since he was 18 months old. River and Teller are beginning skiers now too. Jan enjoys her visits to Steamboat immensely.

Knape enjoys gardening decorating for the holidays, and entertaining friends for dinner parties. Always active, she recently joined the Valentine Theatre Board.

 “Wherever I travel, my claim to fame is ‘I’m a Luckey Girl’ and I try to live with gratitude and hope every day,” she said.

Jan Oberhouse McLaughlin

Jan Oberhouse McLaughlin grew up in Pemberville in a home where hard work and honesty were the most respected qualities one could have. Work was seen as a source of joy - not drudgery.

Her mom, Gussie Oberhouse, was the first woman school principal in the Eastwood district and first woman mayor of Pemberville. Her dad, Don Oberhouse, was a builder who averaged one house a year, since he believed in building the best quality home possible.

McLaughlin and her brother, Tom, grew up loved and motivated to do good. Tom found his joy planting trees and starting North Branch Nursery. McLaughlin found her joy writing stories about her community.

But McLaughlin says her greatest joy – far beyond writing a great story – is her husband, Frank, and their blended family of Anna and Hunter, Allie and Grant, Tom and Raquel, and Annie - spread out from Rhode Island to Kansas City to California.

        McLaughlin graduated from Eastwood High School in 1980, after being inspired by working on the school newspaper, the “Eagles Eye.” The newspaper adviser, Richard Heckman, instilled the values of journalism that she still holds today.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and photojournalism from Bowling Green State University. However,  her chosen career almost stopped before it started, when she convinced herself she didn’t have the qualities required to be a good reporter. She wasn’t aggressive, confident or worldly.

McLaughlin grew to realize that she didn’t need to be obnoxious to be a good journalist. Instead, she focused on being quietly persistent, committed to accuracy and perpetually curious. She has retained that curiosity and commitment to today.

 For nearly 30 years, McLaughlin taught journalism at BGSU as an adjunct professor. Often asked to teach the journalism program’s capstone class, she worked to show students that journalists wield a great deal of power, and must use it wisely.

        Writing for four decades

 For more than 40 years, McLaughlin has been covering local news in Bowling Green and Wood County. She writes about those making decisions – like city councils, county commissioners and school boards – and those affected by those decisions. Many of her stories give voice to those otherwise unheard.

McLaughlin believes that having a reporter in the room often makes it easier for elected and appointed officials to make the right decisions. She is motivated by the belief that a community functions best when its members know what is going on.

People have trusted her to share their stories about horrible times in their lives - like a series of stories on families facing layoffs when a local plant closed, families losing their homes during a rash of foreclosures in the county or people in hospice facing death.

While covering governmental meetings is important, journalism has given McLaughlin the opportunity to cover visits by every president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, rallies held by the KKK on the courthouse steps, and protests over political policies.

She has accompanied police officers when they shut down the Occupy camp in downtown Bowling Green, and sheriff’s deputies when they raided the booby-trapped house of a man facing eviction in his barricaded home. She raced alongside the “runaway train” that barreled through the region.

 McLaughlin offers a voice to the voiceless – a local migrant family, here legally, in which the father was deported, parents who struggle to feed their children, families who have lost members to suicide, and people with developmental disabilities who have to fight neighborhood resistance to their group home.

McLaughlin works hard to be a journalist who readers and sources can trust. During her career, she has received several prestigious recognitions.

After 31 years in print journalism, McLaughlin and fellow journalist David Dupont created the online Bowling Green Independent News, with the help of John and Elizabeth Zibbel and now Julie Carle.

They took a chance, and in the past 10 years BG Independent News has become a trusted member of the community.

 McLaughlin and Dupont have been committed to not putting a paywall on the news site, since both believe that people should be able to read stories about their community regardless of their ability to pay for them.

Though some of the BG Independent writers are of a younger generation, most of them have been in the business for decades. Despite that, the news site has been called “scrappy” and “nimble” – high praise for old news dogs.

        Community involvement

McLaughlin was named 2002 BG Woman of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce for her extensive service to organizations including Court Appointed Special Advocates, the Wood County Historical Society, the American Cancer Society, Wood Lane Human Rights Committee, the Kenwood PTO and the Wood County Family Literacy Board.

McLaughlin is a member of First Presbyterian Church, where she has served as deacon and trustee. She is also a member of Bowling Green Kiwanis Club and the Bowling Green Community Foundation.

She was recipient of the 2020 “I Love BG” Award, recognized for increasing the city’s visibility and enhancing quality of life for residents through advocacy and leadership.