Beth and Jesse Hamman deserve a trophy. It’s what you get, after all, after being the best.
The Hammans, at least in Smithville, Wayne County and even areas beyond, were the best at trophies and plaques. Known better by Beth’s maiden name of Berkey, they were synonymous with area awards, which they provided for the better part of a century. That’s 87 years, to be exact.
That run will come to an end sometime this summer, when the Hammans shut the doors on Berkey Trophies for good after wrapping up one final school year.
“We started thinking about it a couple of years ago,” Beth Hamman said. “We had the State FFA Award, which is a major award, and gave that up a couple of years ago. My husband and I are both in our 80s. That entered into it. Another thing that factored into it is we have five (mechanical) engravers. They’re fine, but they’re old, but we can’t get parts anymore.”
Beth Hamman’s father was Wilbur Berkey, who started in the trophy business almost accidentally, filling a local void at the time. Many of the company’s wares can be found in trophy cases at schools throughout Wayne County including at Smithville High School, whose home court — the Wilbur Berkey Field House — bears the trophy patriarch’s name.
The elder Berkey was teaching and coaching at Smithville during the depression, and they couldn’t find a trophy to honor his Wayne County championship baseball team. Wilbur Berkey knew of a guy in Chicago, so with the help of some contemporaries, he got a train ticket to the Windy City.
“That started a long history,” Beth Hamman said. “From there he branched out in the summers when he was not teaching. He started serving county fairs. At one point he was working with 15 county fairs. From Ashtabula in the north to Gallia County near the West Virginia border in Southern Ohio, Wilbur Berkey hawked his product.
All the while he established his name and himself as the area’s go-to guy for prizes. Eventually, that became the ultimate side hustle. The business was and still is in Beth Hamman’s childhood home, which she moved back to after teaching for a year in Columbus. She also taught at Hayesville High School before it was consolidated into Hillsdale.
The house has been expanded to accommodate the business, which was no small operation. The basement facility has several rooms, and it would have taken a good-sized store to hold it if done outside the home.
Originally, it was pretty small. Wilbur Berkey started out with an Amish man making his trophies. That fellow was a paraplegic afflicted with polio, confined to a wheelchair, but he was a talented craftsman.
He originally created the trophies from walnut. Eventually, that became too expensive, so they shifted to a particle wood construction, which Beth Hamman said her father did not like at all.
“He called the imitation wood ‘sawdust covered with contact paper,’” she said.
The Hammans ultimately took over after Wilbur Berkey had a heart attack and needed help.
“If somebody would have told me some day I would own a business, I would say, ‘Never in a million years,’” Beth Hamman said.
It wasn’t quite that long. Beth and Jesse Hamman took things over and kept the trophy business robust.
All things, though, come to an end, an end Beth Hamman saw as much as two decades ago. When the Hammans’ kids were grown and two were teachers and another was a state trooper, there was not going to be anyone to take it over. If the business was going to go on, it was going to happen somewhere else, without any Berkeys involved. Beth Hamman tried to break that news gently to her father.
“I saw the writing on the wall that one of them would not be taking it over,” Hamman said. “I had to tell him. As I recall, if I recall it correctly, he almost stopped me in mid-sentence, knowing where I was going with it. He said, ‘It’s been good for me; it’s been good for you. If it’s time, it’s time.’
“I never asked him again. He took such a burden off my shoulders. There’s definitely mixed feelings and sadness. When my dad first started, the fairs were much smaller. He was free in the summer. It’s gotten so much bigger since then. We debated selling it, but the Berkey name will go with us. We notified the schools and said this will be our last year. We didn’t want to just pull the rug out from under them.”
Among the first to be notified was Chuck Long, WCAL secretary/treasurer, who handles many of that conference’s awards.
“I’ve been dealing with them for over 30 years, and they’re real good people,” Long said. “It seems like when I was an AD, when I got in a bind or I needed something at the last minute, they were always there for me. Since I’ve taken over as secretary/treasurer for the league, it’s the same thing.”
Beth Hamman said she’ll miss dealing with the schools and coaches, having been a teacher herself and her dad being a coach. She’ll probably still wander into a gymnasium now and then, knowing that at places like Wadsworth, Hiland and numerous others in close proximity, Berkey awards will be easy to find.
“We would go to schools and go to the trophy cases and point out the trophies in the case that we did,” Hamman said. “We had most of the accounts of the Wayne County schools.
“My greatest joy is probably meeting people that come and they would remember meeting with my dad or a memory of something we did. Now we get comments from people coming in and saying, ‘My grandpa knew your dad.’ I thought I had heard all the stories about my dad. It turns out there are a lot more.”
It seems like just about every athlete to play at an area school or on a youth team probably has a memory of the Berkeys, even if they don’t know it was the Berkeys. Their work can be found on many local shelves.
“They’ve been an institution in this county for a long, long time,” Long said, “and they will be greatly missed.”
