Museum open house

Museum open house

YOUNGSTOWN

The Youngstown Steel Heritage Museum will have its annual spring open house from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at the facility’s exhibition hall at 2261 Hubbard Road. The open house is free.

David Tod, descendent of the Mahoning Valley’s pioneer Tod family, which operated the William Tod Co., will be present to answer questions on the museum’s legendary 250-ton Tod Engine. The YSHM will celebrate the engine’s 100th anniversary.

Rick Rowlands, founder and director of the Youngstown Steel Heritage Foundation, will give presentations on the museum’s collections. A new fully operational solar-energy system also will be displayed.

Museum officials also will unveil preliminary capital-campaign plans for the museum’s expansion, which includes a visitor orientation area, additional exhibit space, classroom/learning stations, gift shop and administrative/volunteer offices.

9th-most affordable

YOUNGSTOWN

Nerdwallet.com, which creates user-friendly tools, crunches numbers across banking, credit cards, education, health care, insurance, investments, mortgages, shopping and travel, recently named the Youngstown-Warren area America’s ninth-most affordable city in which to live based on data from the council for community and economic research’s 2013 annual report.

States from the central and southern U.S. dominate the list, with 19 out of 100 cities on the list in Texas.

Vehicle auction set

COLUMBUS

More than 230 vehicles will be up for bid at the State of Ohio surplus auction June 14.

The auction will be at the Ohio Department of Administrative Services, general- services division headquarters, 4200 Surface Road. The gates open at 8 a.m., and the auction begins at 10 a.m.

The auction features a wide selection of cars, vans, SUVs and trucks.

All vehicles are sold as-is with no warranties and must be paid for in full the day of the auction. Thirty-day temporary tags will be available for purchase on site the day of the auction for $18 cash.

Study: Fewer dads at home full time

NEW YORK

The number of U.S. fathers home with their kids full time is down, from a peak of 2.2 million in 2010, the official end of the recession, to about 2 million in 2012, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The slight decrease in their ranks from 2010 to 2012 was driven chiefly by employment gains since the recession eased, the report said, defining stay-at-home fathers as those not employed for pay at all in the prior year and living with children 17 or younger.

The largest share of at-home dads, 35 percent, said they were home due to illness or disability. Roughly 23 percent said it was mainly because they couldn’t find a job, and 21 percent said it was specifically to care for home or family, the researchers noted, relying on census and other government data.

Vindicator staff/wire reports