So, I was relaxing by the bike trail in Loveland, OH, enjoying some fine weather, sipping a beer, and munching on pot stickers when I received a text message, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in a rush-hour traffic jam on the expressway. The text was from a road-tripping friend in Indiana, and said little more than “[I] decided to make my way to Beavercreek for some snacks.” I immediately knew exactly what he was talking about.
That friend was Pat Bremer (half of the Road Trip Memories team), whose Facebook feed, like mine, had recently been filled with posts about a little store in a suburb of Dayton, OH. I knew enough of the story to understand Pat’s reference, but there was a lot I didn’t know. I’ll start with what I knew before my phone pinged in that trailside bar.
I knew that the travel center Goliath, Buc-ee’s, had sued Davidish Beaver’s Mini Mart for copyright infringement. Note that the Mini Mart doesn’t have a website or even a Facebook page. Nor does it have any gas pumps. Buc-ee’s locations tend to have a hundred or more. Many of the Facebook posts that made me (and presumably Pat) aware of this resembled this one, which identifies several local businesses that have temporarily placed a beaver in their logos in support of their longtime neighbor. The town that is home to the business being sued already had a beaver in its name. Beavercreek, OH, was incorporated as a city in 1980.
In addition to all those companies posting logos featuring beavers, customers have been showing up in droves. Snacks are being purchased, and donations are being made to a legal defense fund. There is a GoFundMe. Reportedly, lines at least as long as the one in the picture are now nearly constant.
When I met Pat in the store parking lot, I knew of but had not seen John Oliver’s July 26 segment on Buc-ee’s, and didn’t know much about their growing reputation for aggressive trademark activity. In particular, I knew nothing about their attack on Mickey’s. Pat clued me in. Mickey’s is a regional chain of convenience stores with headquarters in Milan, OH. Their stores in northeast northcentral Ohio could legitimately be considered Buc-ee’s competitors, but, as Mickey’s attorneys have astutely observed, “a moose is not a beaver.” I personally have to question whether customers who confuse one for the other are worth pursuing. The same thing could be said of folks who cannot distinguish the rodent with the red hat from the bare-headed fellow on the Mini Mart sign.
I have never been a Buc-ee’s customer candidate. This photo of the recently opened location, about 10 miles north of Beaver’s Mini Mart, is as close as I have knowingly been to one. Although they are a rapidly vanishing breed, my favorite gas stations are still those where the actual owner steps out of a tiny office or pauses an oil change to fill your tank. The further a station moves from that image, the more my fondness fades. Buc-ee’s seems to be about as far from that image as possible. The pictured location in Huber Heights is the first in Ohio. Another is planned for Mansfield. It’s pretty obvious that these are the triggers for the attacks on Beaver’s and Mickey’s.
Is the answer to the half-witty question in my title yes or no? Regarding Buc-ee’s vs. Beaver’s Mini Mart, it seems at least possible that the answer is yes. In a statement taped to their door, the little market says it will “fight this lawsuit all the way”. In addition to the surge of flat-tailed and big-toothed logos, donations are being made to support the fight. Ohio’s governor and at least one state senator have made statements condemning the lawsuits. Governor DeWine calls them “ridiculous”. Beavercreek’s city council is about to vote on a resolution “affirming the beaver as a historic symbol of the community”. All that negative publicity can’t be good, and it’s hard for me to see how even the complete disappearance of Beaver’s Mini Mart would benefit the big Texas corporation. It seems reasonable to believe that the big guy just might end the ugly-looking assault on this little guy.
As for the less focused version of that question, the answer is almost certainly no. Buc-ee’s is not at all likely to stop its expansion into Ohio. There is a movement and a petition opposing the planned Mansfield store, but land has been purchased beside I-71, and the Mansfield city council has unanimously approved the plan. The second quarter of 2028 has been floated as a possible opening date. It’s true that the signers of that petition and the people in that line at Beaver’s Mini Mart may never shop at Buc-ee’s, but they are not the company’s target customers. While I don’t doubt that there are Buc-ee’s regulars who live just down the street from one of their stores, I do doubt that they are the chain’s primary patrons. Nor do I believe the chain is depending on folks like me who travel, but do so largely on two-lanes while keeping an eye out for mom-and-pop businesses. No, they are looking for people driving on interstates who might never stop at a particular Buc-ee’s twice but might stop at one down the road and the one after that.
This is a photo I took as I was pulling out of Beaver’s Mini Mart’s parking lot. At the time, my guess was that Buc-ee’s did not sell bait. It turns out they do, but only at some locations, and Huber Heights is not one of them. There is a pretty good overview of the situation in this USA Today article. I considered including links to other bits of news, but items are appearing so frequently that you’re better off searching for the latest yourself. I will mention two things that have appeared since my Tuesday visit. One is that it appears the mini mart’s owner Vikramjit Singh Boparai owns several businesses in Ohio. The other is that Buc-ee’s CEO Arch Aplin called the mayor of Huber Heights (Not Beavercreek!) to tell him that the lawsuit was filed because Boparai filed for a national copyright and failed to respond to their communications. Boparai denies that a national filing exists. This development is summarized in a Cincinnati Enquirer article.
I was aware of this book when it was published, and I was interested in reading it. But not so interested, it seems, to actually order it. My interest in the book came from a general interest in early aviation history that anyone growing up in the land of Wilbur and Orville, as I did, should come by naturally. The lack of urgency came from the fact that its proclaimed subject was an airport in another state. It was a nearby state, but it wasn’t my state. It took a visit by the authors to a nearer and more familiar airport to finally put a copy in my hands.
I really was not surprised that Morris and Butkos begin their story long before there were any such things as airports or even airplanes. They do it with a Pittsburgh twist, of course, and tell about early inventors and adventurers connected to the city. I got a chuckle from a quote they share about a 1897 flight by Professor Carl E. Myers and his skycycle. The skycycle appears to be a balloon with a seat and pedals suspended below it. As reported by The Pittsburgh Press, it did fly and eventually floated out of sight while “The professor, if he had any control over the skycycle, did not exercise it.”
Of course, skycycles and other “Fanciful Fliers” fell out of favor once airplanes came along, and particularly after they were proven practical in World War I. Morris and Butko share the stories of several Pittsburghers involved in wartime aviation and the barnstorming that war-surplus aircraft gave rise to after the hostilities ended. It was a group of Pittsburgh barnstormers that gave birth to the airport that would be named Bettis Field in 1926. One of them, Clifford Ball, provided a slogan that would eventually be modified for a different field and some different dreams: “Build the nests and the birds will come.”
Also in 1926, Ball sold his interest in the airport to form Skyline Transportation to pursue a government airmail contract. He did get the contract and purchased three airplanes to service it. Here’s where that WACO connection mentioned earlier comes in. The three planes were WACOs named Miss Pittsburgh, Miss McKeesport, and Miss Youngstown. Miss Youngstown was destroyed in a wreck; Miss Pittsburgh hangs at the Pittsburgh Airport; and Miss McKeesport is in the WACO Museum, parked behind Sue and Brian in the photograph above. There is another view, sans authors, 
Morris and Butko have uncovered and included an impressive number of stories about people and events connected with Bettis Airfield. It was one of the stops on Charles Lindbergh’s tour following his cross-Atlantic flight, but the Spirit of Saint Louis had to be slid sideways into a hangar because its wings were wider than the door. Quite a few black pilots trained at Bettis, but for a period, had to go to another state to be licensed because the designated federal inspector simply refused to pass them. A fairly large number of female pilots, some of whom were rather famous, were associated with Bettis. Passengers were sometimes flown on airmail flights, sitting on bags of mail; then, in 1929, real passenger service — with seats — was added.
