Meet Joe Osburn by Tracey Peyton

Joe Osburn currently lives at Willowbrook with his wife Peggy. He moved to Delaware from Cleveland.

Back in August, Willowbrook paid tribute to the Strand with a month-long, in-house celebration with 4 Tuesday events in the property’s Terrace Room. The Terrace Room was decorated with  movie props and paraphernalia including a handmade life-sized projector. The projector had to be hand crafted by someone who was a projectionist because of the detail, I thought.

It turns out that Joe Osburn made the projector from cardboard and glue and was never a projectionist. He started out as a chemistry teacher in Parma, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. He taught there for 34 years. He took his first art class at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland when he was 80 years of age. And he liked art so much that he took eleven more classes.

When I visited Joe and Peggy at their home, I learned that he taught skiing for 20 years and snowboarding for 12; but art is what has stuck with him. Osburn’s home is filled with many works of art from photography to sculpture (both metal and paper), from mixed media to woodworking, and from painting to drawing. There are a few charcoal drawings on the living room walls of downtown Cleveland, drawn from memory. Joe even has his own “art room” where he works on his projects.

When I asked him about the projector, he said he looked online for a picture then drew that first. Then he made a tiny rendition of a projector that you could hold in one hand. He was now ready to make what now graces the Strand lobby.

Joe Osburn is 87 years young. Joe is now working on a metal sculpture. I cannot wait to see what Joe produces to grace the front yard of his and Peggy’s house. Joe is living proof that you are only as old as you feel; and that it is never too late to try something new.