Electric chair on display at museum

Electric chair on display at museum

MANSFIELD, Ohio

The original electric chair from the Columbus Penitentiary has made its way to the Ohio State Reformatory.

The execution device dubbed “Old Sparky” arrived June 1 and is on permanent loan to the prison-turned-museum from the Ohio Historical Society, the News Journal reports.

It currently sits on display behind a glass case at the museum and is going to a room that was formerly a prison office next to a warden’s office.

A year after the reformatory opened in 1896, the electric chair — considered a more humane form of execution — replaced the gallows. From then up until 1963, 315 people were put to death in the electric chair, including three women.

The chair will be part of the State of Ohio Correctional Facility Museum inside the reformatory, scheduled to open sometime next year.

Geography quiz

Q. Norman, home to the National Weather Center, is in Tornado Alley in which state?

A. Oklahoma. The center, on the University of Oklahoma campus, is a partnership of state, federal and academic organizations.

Hotel offers Netflix

NEW YORK

Marriott is welcoming cord cutters, making Netflix available to guests in its hotel rooms.

Guests can use their own accounts to sign in to the streaming service right now at six hotels, and that will double by the end of the summer. Marriott plans to expand the service to 100 hotels by the end of 2015, and to nearly all of its more than 300 U.S. locations by the end of next year, the company said last week.

Nonsubscribers can sign up for an account through Marriott International Inc. during their stay at the same price offered by Netflix.

Marriott says it is the first hotel to provide guests direct access to Netflix.

Montana tourists

KALISPELL, Mont.

A tourism research group says visitors spent $3.9 billion in Montana last year.

The Flathead Beacon reports the Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research at the University of Montana released a study showing a 1-percent drop in visitors for 2014, though group sizes were slightly bigger than previously.

The study says visitors supported 38,000 jobs, and indirectly supported 15,000 jobs and $1.9 billion in additional economic activity.

Combined dispatches