Jennings teen is really cookin’

FORT JENNINGS - Some would say Joe Gable is quite the Showman. He has been with the Fort Jennings Showmen 10 years and serves as vice president of the 4-H club. This year, he is a member of the Putnam County Fair court.

Gable, a 2008 graduate of Fort Jennings High School, also serves as vice president of the Putnam County Junior Fair Board, president of the Junior Leaders and volunteers as a counselor at 4-H camp and the Northwest Ohio Conservation Camp with the Soil and Water Conservation District.

"I just like helping people out. It's been a lot of hard work, but I've had some great experiences, and it's helped me with leadership skills, team-building skills and communication," Gable said. "I also like meeting new people. I've met so many people from places I've never seen or heard of before. It's pretty cool."

In 4-H, Gable has shown hogs since 2001 and goats since 2005 at the Putnam County Fair. Before that, he showed cattle. He also takes a cooking project to the fair every year.

"I can cook anything there's a recipe for," Gable said with a chuckle. "You learn a lot by cooking."

He said his favorite food to cook is meat, especially steak and sausage from his family's livestock.

Gable works part time on his family's farm. They grow wheat, corn and soybeans. He also works on a neighbor's farm.

"I've been helping around the farm since the day I was born, almost," he said. "I do anything and everything. I've driven a tractor since I was 5 years old."

At Fort Jennings High School, Gable served on Student Council two years and was a committee chairman for the Ohio Association of Student Councils state conference held at the school in 2007.

"There were so many people, we doubled the size of the town in about three hours," he said. "It was big."

Gable also attended Vantage Career Center his junior and senior years to study industrial mechanics.

"We learned to do a little bit of everything from welding, machining, fabricating, electronics, hydraulics and pneumatics to programmable logic controllers for robotics," he said.

At Vantage, Gable served as class secretary and was a member of the VECA club.

He said he will attend ITT Technical Institute in the fall to study electrical engineering.

"I've always wondered how things work. It's something that's always fascinated me," Gable said. "When I was a little kid, I'd take old junk alarm clocks and other stuff and tear them apart to see how they work."

In his spare time, Gable likes to hunt and trapshoot. He hunts deer, raccoon, rabbit and squirrel. He said he sells the raccoon for its fur and eats the deer, rabbit and squirrel meat.

"Squirrel is really good, actually," he said. "I like to slow cook them over a fire or cook them in a Crock-Pot."