Hugh Downing, Paula Stone Tucker, Sharon Downing

Happy housewarming!

Retired BJ printer Hugh Downing and wife Sharon Downing, who have lived in their home in The Villages, Florida for a dozen years or so, congratulate 1970s BJ State Desk reporter Paula Stone Tucker on the new purchase of her home in The Villages, on Bonita Drive.

Paula and her former State Desk editor, John Olesky, have been renting in The Villages for three months on Rainbow Drive.

To get to the Bonita home, you drive down Rainbow in your car or golf cart and turn left onto Bonita.  So Paula found her new home somewhere over the Rainbow. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Paula and John live in a home they own in Tallmadge, within smelling distance of the restaurants on Howe Avenue and Chapel Hill.

The car in the background is John’s Honda Accord, which accompanied him to Florida via the Amtrak auto-train.

Paula looked at ONE HUNDRED homes before she settled on the Bonita beauty. And she has a spreadsheet listing every one of them to document her intense, successful search.

To savor the happy home purchase fully, John took all four of them out to dinner at the Orange Blossom Country Club.

So far John has played golf 35 times since their Jan. 1 arrival and found THIRTY EIGHT golf balls in the backyard of their Rainbow Drive rental, which is 110 yards from Silver Lake golf course’s No. 2 tee.

Slicers contribute heavily to John’s collection, even though he doesn’t gather the golf balls up till the next morning, giving the errant duffers a fair chance to find their bad shots.

All this and outdoor concerts available free every night of the year, and a reunion with Paula’s former Kent State roommate and another with a fellow Akron St. Mary’s graduate plus John’s reunion (and nine golf outings) with Hugh and John meeting 200 to 300 West Virginians (so far).

Mountaineers permeate The Villages and Florida.

Plus Paula plays her flute with the New Horizons Band (the same name of the band she is part of in Cuyahoga Falls since New Horizons bands are all over America) and the Flute Fanatics and takes colored pencil drawing lessons.

And both swim when the temperature hits 80, which is pretty much every day in March and even sometimes in February in The Villages.

Congratulations, Paula, on your new home purchase!

And to John’s alma mater, the West Virginia University Mountaineers, reaching the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA’s basketball March Madness.

John knows 200 to 300 West Virginians in The Villages who share his euphoria.

John and Paula, two happy people.