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Installment
7: 1943 to 1958
Restoring
the Yellow Spring back to nature
Today the Yellow Spring
cascades over a ledge of rock into a small basin, but it hasn’t always
done so.
Photo by AXEL BAHNSEN
The Yellow Spring under construction around 1949.
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In the spring of 1949,
Glen Helen foreman Carmelo Ricciardi and Rhodes Newby, assisted by Norman
Meranda, a member
of the Village utilities crew, began what the News referred to as “the
restoration of the Yellow Spring to its natural state,” which strove
to increase the spring’s appeal and convenience to patrons of the
Glen.
The restoration of the
spring was designed by Louise Odiorne, who also designed the Inman Terrace
at the Glen’s entrance. She had the 30-foot-diameter cement pool beneath
the spring, which had been created for guests at an old resort in Yellow
Springs, bulldozed into the mine shaft that went through the hillside; then
she began restoring the spring. Corinne Pelzl, Odiorne’s daughter,
said her mother wanted the spring to look the way it had before the resort
was built in the 1800s.
Since the 1920s, the
spring’s water had flowed into a concrete box from a pipe that brought
it up from its source in the hillside. The restoration covered the box and
built the present-day rock ledge over which the water flows. Jo Dunphy,
Ricciardi’s daughter, said Ricciardi wanted the ledge to stand for
thousands of years.
This ledge was constructed
to replace a similar ledge that had existed there previously and had long
since been breached. Odiorne gave Ricciardi the specifications for the rocks
needed for the ledge, and he chiseled them. Dunphy said that her father
“never used measurements” and could tell if a rock was the right
size just by examining it.
Ricciardi and an assistant
used a Jeep to transport the rocks to the spring; a crane positioned above
the ledge then hoisted them into place. The reconstructed ledge stands six
feet high.
Pelzl said that her mother
also “decided there should be a place for people to take a drink”
from the spring, but they’re discouraged from drinking from the spring’s
side-flow now because of the risk of salmonella contamination in the water.
The project included
the construction of the stone stairs leading down to the spring and the
channel the water now flows through. Ricciardi and Newby planted indigenous
shrubs around the spring and under the nearby oaks to prevent soil erosion.
For the convenience of those visiting the Glen, the project also sought
to provide “ample space for community gatherings.”
The restoration of the
Yellow Spring was part of a larger endeavor to beautify Glen Helen, which
is responsible for the way the Glen looks today.
However, Pelzl, who learned
to walk near the spring, is concerned that the spring needs repairing. “When
it was built,” she said, “my mother . . . set a piece of steel
in cement to define the level of the pool.” That steel has since rusted,
and Pelzl said that a little dam should be added to the channel to raise
the level of the water.
—Evelyn
La Croix
From
‘hobby shop’ to successful business
One Sunday evening in
March of 1948, Hardy Trolander, an electrical engineer and physics teacher,
went down the hall in Graywood dorm, Antioch College’s faculty dorm
at the corner of Davis and Xenia Avenue, to talk to a friend about an idea
for a business.
Hardy Trolander, left, and David Case in the Yellow Springs Instruments
plant.
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Trolander’s friend
John Benedict was completing his mechanical engineering degree, and between
them they knew an able chemist and a mechanical engineer who also wanted
to turn a few deals and see what might happen.
“We were about
to have the world by the tail,” Trolander wrote in a history of his
company, Yellow Springs Instruments. A team “consisting of an electrical/electronic
and a mechanical engineer plus a chemist could do damn near anything, or
so we then thought.”
Yellow Springs Instruments
rented space in the basement of the Antioch Science Building, just across
from the original facilities for Vernay Laboratories, and got its first
few design orders from Fels Research Institute and Kettering Labs, both
associated with the college.
What the young scientists
had in mind was something of a modest operation where they could put their
problem-solving minds together to design creative solutions for others,
Trolander said in a recent interview.
“We wanted to grow,
but we didn’t budget for growth or profit,” he said. “We
figured if we were a healthy business we’d grow and we’d make
some money.”
In June ’48, Trolander,
Benedict and David Jones, a chemist, each put up $100 to purchase a vendor’s
license, and the company incorporated with a fourth stockholder, David Case,
early the following year.
The company came into
financial straits on several occasions throughout the next few years because
its limited instrument production did not provide enough short-term cash
flow. The first time, Wright Field engineer Fred Hooven came to the company’s
aid when he secured several orders through the Army Air Corps. YSI had no
production facility at the time, so the company moved into a bigger space
on campus to produce a programmable training system for bombardiers.
Then in 1952, YSI produced
its first commercial product, the Model 3A dielectric constant meter. With
this and sporadic contracts from the military, YSI bobbed along respectfully,
just above the surface. But Trolander said he was not certain of the company’s
financial viability until later.
YSI’s first shareholders
initially chose to run the company “more like a commune than a corporation,”
Trolander wrote, and they liked it that way. “You can fumble along
living by your wits for quite awhile,” he said recently of that period.
Company leaders were
interested in operating a manufacturing plant with very few rules, no discrimination
and a strong sense of trust among employees. In short, it should be a place
where people wanted to come to work.
Trolander wanted to be
a stable employer, and he strayed away from the variability of consumer
products to keep layoffs down. He also supported a union, against the advice
of Sergius Vernet, who owned another growing industry, Vernay Laboratories,
which also had a union.
“Serge told me,
‘Don’t do it, Trolander,’” he recalled.
But he did do it, and
spent much of the 1950s carefully balancing production with development
and marketing. It wasn’t easy, and a 1955 audit revealed that the
company needed help once again, from a progressive benefactor willing to
take a small risk on a good thing.
Ironically, it was at
this point, Trolander said, he realized YSI could really be big. What he
didn’t know, until Julius Stern came along, was that the company was
operating at a loss of $17,000.
Stern, a banker, businessman
and Antioch affiliate, loaned YSI the money it needed for renewed momentum
and then turned the loan into equity, becoming the company’s sixth
shareholder.
Sales grew from there
and, Trolander said, YSI turned from “a rather rudderless engineers’
hobby shop into a successful growing business.”
—Lauren
Heaton
Antioch
and town targeted for ‘Red’ ties
Communists, socialists,
pinkos, radicals. According to two men, one a straightlaced native son and
the other an ex-Communist stool pigeon, Yellow Springs and Antioch College
in the early 1950s were hotbeds of such subversives. Fueled by feelings
of revenge, ambition and perhaps self-delusion, the men brought national
attention to Yellow Springs and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee
(HUAC) brought its considerable power to a tiny town in Ohio.
In the end, HUAC absolved
Antioch and Yellow Springs of Communist influence. But the process, like
many anti-Communist witch-hunts during the Red Scare, sparked local conflict,
smeared the reputations of good people and left lasting scars in the community.
“The situation
at Antioch, the Antioch Community and the Yellow Springs Area is glaring
and disgraceful. And right now certainly no man with any degree of social
equilibrium can expect a situation to continue such as is being flaunted
at Antioch, the Antioch Community and the Yellow Springs Area without public
abhorrence, disgust and resentment.”
The author of those words,
Lowell Fess, initiated much of the trouble. The son of former Antioch College
President Simeon Fess, Lowell Fess lived in the village most of his life,
served as mayor during World War II and was elected to the Ohio House of
Representatives. By 1954, Scott Sanders, the Antioch University archivist,
said, Fess was “a pillar of the community.”
But Fess was also a man
of many resentments, a political conservative who felt the village and college
never fully appreciated the efforts of his father, who was also conservative.
He felt particular resentment toward Ernest Morgan, the owner of the Antioch
Bookplate Co. and one-time publisher of the News, who was an avowed Socialist
and the son of former Antioch President Arthur Morgan.
Political ambition may
also have contributed to Fess’ accusations, Sanders said. Fess once
told an acquaintance that he was “waiting for Ohio Representative
Clarence Brown to die,” in order to take Brown’s place in Washington,
Sanders said.
The last straw for Fess,
apparently, was the college’s action in 1954 against longtime chemistry
professor Clyde “Doc” Adams, also one of the community’s
more conservative voices. Long allowed to use the college facilities for
research even after he stopped teaching, Adams had continued to receive
a half-time salary, which was reduced to quarter-time during a period of
economic instability.
In a letter to the Yellow
Springs News, Fess expressed his concerns: “When you have a community
to which has migrated individuals from all over, not only the United States
but all over the world, who teach Marxist theories and Socialism and in
some cases downright subversion, particularly as it applies to interracial
relationships, and you have an institution that condones these things, it
is about time that the matter be cleaned up.”
McGregor clarified the
college’s position in a statement from August 1952: “Antioch
upholds the American tradition of academic freedom. This means the right
to hear and investigate critically all sides of any question, including
the question of Russia and Communism . . . . Antioch is not Communist, and
does not support Communism. On the contrary, Antioch follows the best method
that America has found to discourage belief in false ideas and specious
ideologies — the open forum, where falsehoods can be exposed.”
Some villagers’
support for the free expression of all political perspectives, including
Communism, had contributed to a local controversy 12 years earlier. On June
25, 1940, the Xenia Gazette published an article, “Nineteen Names
on Red Petitions,” which identified Yellow Springs residents who signed
a petition to allow the Ohio Communist Party to run candidates in national
and state elections.
Adding to the controversy
that year was the revelation that 12 Antioch students were members of the
Young Communist League. While some area papers called for the students to
be expelled, Algo Henderson, the college president at the time, refused
to do so.
Still, many in the area
held on to the image of Yellow Springs generally, and Antioch specifically,
as being Communist-friendly, and when the McCarthy hearings of the early
1950s heated up anti-Communist fevers, Yellow Springs provided an easy target.
Before Fess got involved,
another red-baiter aimed his sights at the college. That man, Harvey Matusow,
in 1952 began a career as a “professional red-sniffing, whistle-blowing
squealer, a job description couched in the term ‘Research Assistant
for the Ohio Un-American Activities Commission’,” Sanders wrote
in his history of Antioch.
A former member of the
American Communist Party who was considered by HUAC to have a keen eye for
Communist sympathizers, Matusow testified before a U.S. Senate committee
that 6 percent of Antioch’s 1,200 students “carried membership
cards of the Young Progressives of America, ‘known’ to be a
front organization.” In addition, Matusow speculated that 40 percent
of the Antioch student body supported YPA activities.
According to Sanders,
Matusow researched Antioch’s Communist connection by spending several
days in town at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, talking politics with students over
beer.
Matusow, who also accused
the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts and the YWCA of having Communist sympathies,
later gained nationwide attention with his book, False Witness, in which
he confessed to having made up much of the information used in his accusations.
While Matusow proved
a less-than-credible accuser, his accusations raised fears in a fearful
time. And those fears were magnified by Fess, who remained persistent in
his campaign to root out the Communists at Antioch.
One figure of controversy
at the college was Ollie Loud, longtime professor of physics. A statewide
leader for the Progressive Party in Ohio in the 1950s, Loud made no secret
of his intellectual affinity with Marxist socialism. “I acknowledge
the power of Marxist social science,” he told a Dayton Journal Herald
reporter in 1951. “In it I have found both a clarification of my worldview
and a procedure for the analysis of every concrete social issue.”
But Loud disavowed Communism,
and proved a poor target.
Other suspicious figures
at the college, according to a paper, “Red-educators at Antioch College,”
published by the National Council for American Education in New York, were
M.N. Chatterjee, professor of social science, for his civil rights activism
and membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation; Arthur Morgan, former
Antioch president, and Wally Sikes, associate personnel director, for his
membership in the Conference on Peaceful Alternatives to the Atlantic Pact.
The House UnAmerican
Activities Committee’s focus settled on Robert Metcalf, professor
of arts and aesthetics and chair of the creative arts department. A member
of the Communist Party for a short time in 1945, he had since ended his
affiliation with the party.
On Sept. 15, 1954, a
subcommittee of the HUAC met with Metcalf in Dayton, and apparently was
satisfied that he was not a threat to the American way of life.
Metcalf was the first
and last Antioch faculty member to face HUAC, and following the hearing
the committee, which was by then losing national support, aimed its attention
away from Yellow Springs.
“The aftermath
of these events indicates the existence in this world of justice, even if
only poetic,” Sanders wrote. Metcalf remained in good standing at
Antioch, and the college itself received favorable publicity for its conduct
around the issue. Harvey Matusow admitted his deceits, and “went to
prison for lying under oath,” Sanders wrote. “And Lowell Fess
never made it to Washington, except as a delegate to the American Legion
National Conventions.”
—Diane
Chiddister
Village
Charter approved in postwar reform effort
After World War II, veterans,
liberals and Antioch College faculty helped reform Village government and
led to the adoption of the Village Charter, the document that gives the
Village its power and authority.
Howard
Kahoe was the first Village manager, a post he held from 1951
to 1974.
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The reform movement was
sparked by an inefficient government and a changing Yellow Springs. Veterans
returned to town empowered by the Ally victory. An influx of young people
and faculty members at Antioch started to change the political landscape
in town. An increase in population taxed poorly managed Village services.
Reformers wanted make
Yellow Springs a home-rule community and establish a Village Charter. It
took two tries during the postwar era, however, to change the Village government
to its modern form, under which Yellow Springs still operates.
The first effort actually
started during WWII when Yellow Springs organizations and World War I veterans
formed the Little Peace Conference. Originally formed to help vets when
they returned from the war, the conference inspired efforts to improve the
community, including reforming the local government.
In 1945, a charter committee
and the League of Women Voters worked to place on the ballot an initiative
asking voters to approve the forming of a commission that would write a
charter. Council, however, did not support the issue. After a brutal campaign
full of rumors and propaganda from both sides, the initiative was defeated
by 11 votes, 328 to 317.
It would be another four
years before the effort to reform the government was revived. In the meantime,
local residents had time to study the government and understand how Yellow
Springs was changing.
“The actual conditions
leading to the reform pressures were the awkward set-up of the machinery
and its inability to perform the needed services to the expanding community,”
Kenneth Shepard, an Antioch College student, wrote in a 1957 paper on the
Charter Commission.
Before the Charter was
approved, two policymaking bodies, the Board of Trustees of Public Affairs
and the Village Council, ran the Village.
The Board of Public Affairs
had three members who operated the Village utilities: electric, water works
and sewage. Norman Meranda, the utility superintendent in the 1950s, had
a staff of about nine.
The pre-Charter Village
Council was made up of six members and the mayor, who served as the president
of the Council. The Council was responsible for the streets, the sanitation
departments and law enforcement. The mayor held the executive powers of
the Village, giving him the responsibility of overseeing the Council’s
finances and enforcing the laws and ordinance enacted by the Council.
The division of responsibility
of the Board of Public Affairs and the Council led to inefficiencies and
waste. Apparently, the board and the Council did not work well together,
and did not exchange equipment or even manpower. Except for Meranda, all
of the Village officials were part-time and were paid little for their services.
Another Antioch student
paper on the Village government, by Jay A. Mundstuk, says that there was
also a large discrepancy between the funding the two boards received. While
the Board of Public Affairs handled about $90,000 of the Village’s
business, the Council managed only $10,000, limiting the effectiveness of
the Council.
In the 1940s, Yellow
Springs was “sharply divided” politically, said Ken Champney,
who was the publisher of the Yellow Springs News from 1950 to 1992, between
longtime residents, many of whom were farmers, and Antioch faculty and alumni
who remained in town after graduating.
After the war, the political
tide in Yellow Springs had changed and a more liberal Council was in place.
In an article in 2000 on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Charter,
Champney attributed the shift in part to veteran African Americans who had
fought for freedom overseas, and, he said, now returning home “wanted
to make sure there was freedom here, too.”
In 1949, the Council
agreed to place an initiative on the ballot asking voters again to approve
the formation of a 15-member Charter Commission to write a charter for voters
to approve in an election the following year. In an article in the Yellow
Springs News, Council member William Beatty said, “It has become apparent
to many people in our village that our present system of local government
no longer meets the need of our present day problems and requirements.”
This time the issue passed easily.
The commission members
“broadly represented” the community, said Barry Hollister, who
served on the group. Six were from longtime village families, five were
Antioch faculty members, four were African Americans and two were women.
They worked for a year, studying other charters, and forming subcommittees
to write the various sections of the Charter.
The Charter Commission
considered four types of governments, and chose the council-manager form.
The commission proposed that a Council of five elected members be established
and that the Board of Trustees of Public Affairs be abolished. A professional
Village manager would take over the government’s executive functions,
including overseeing the utilities, finances and the day-to-day operations
of the Village.
“This would free
up the new Council to concern itself with ‘the long-range programs
and policies for which no one has time under the present set up,’”
one Charter Commission member said in an article in the News in August 1950.
Council would have authority
over the Village’s activities, except for judicial responsibilities,
which would be held by the mayor.
Unlike the fierce 1945
campaign, the 1950 election was relatively quiet. Proponents of the Charter
argued that the new government would lead to better efficiency and services,
eliminating the overlapping authority of the Council and the Board of Public
Affairs. They also cited the need for a full-time manager to run the Village.
Most current and former mayors and members of Council and Board of Public
Affairs supported the Charter.
Council member David
Jenkins, however, opposed it, questioning the proposal’s affect on
the Village’s utilities. He argued that the size of Yellow Springs
did not warrant “the increase in maintenance the charter government
will cost.”
On Nov. 8, 1950, Yellow
Springs voters approved the charter, 548 to 507. A year later, voters elected
five men to a new Council. But a close vote made things interesting. One
candidate, Chet Loe, finished sixth by just three votes and asked for a
recount. The Greene County Board of Elections determined that Loe still
finished in sixth place.
One of Council’s
first acts was to appoint Howard Kahoe, who had served on the Miami Township
Board of Trustees, Village manager until a permanent chief could be found.
Kahoe did “such a fine job and so gained the confidence of the council
and other citizens,” the News reported in 1954, that Council discounted
its search and gave Kahoe the job permanently.
—Robert
Mihalek
Five
summers of magic and Shakespeare
Between 1952 and ’56
Yellow Springs took on a magical cast, Each June a multilevel stage blossomed
behind Antioch’s Main Building, and on it actors recreated the world
of Shakespeare. On warm summer nights theater lovers filled the seats to
overflowing and picnickers listened from the lawn to Shakespeare Under the
Stars.
Part of the cast of ‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream,’ during the 1954 Shakepeare festival at Antioch.
Kelton Gardwood, a Broadway actor, is second from the right.
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During the first 10-week
festival, 15,000 people had watched Shakespeare’s work come alive
at Antioch. And they came not only from Yellow Springs and throughout the
Miami Valley, but from all over the country. That first summer a New York
Times drama critic had written a favorable review, and the festival received
a congratulatory letter from Queen Elizabeth II of England.
But the beginning of
the festival was hardly promising. Regional drama critics grumbled about
the college veering away from its 17-year history of producing light comedies
to perform Shakespeare, and obscure Shakespeare — the eight history
plays — no less.
When 28 people showed
up for the first performance an actor questioned if the play should go on
since the cast outnumbered the audience. Things went downhill from there.
Scheduled to present Shakespeare’s eight history plays, the festival
had run through its $6,300 budget by the fourth play, and closing notices
had been written.
But then everything changed.
“Just when it appeared that the first season of the five-year project
would be the last, people began to arrive to see what this Shakespeare-Under-the-Stars
Festival of the Antioch Area Theatre was all about,” E.B. Radcliffe
reported in the 1956 edition of Theatre Arts.
Contributing to the success
of the festival was its Shakespearean stage, a two-level structure with
ramps, stairways and seven platforms, New York Times drama critic Brooks
Atkinson wrote. “Here the plays move fast and the actors do not have
to fritter away energy in externals of showmanship,” Atkinson reported.
Created by local industrial
designer Budd Steinhilber, the stage provided considerable challenge, since
college officials forbid Steinhilber to disturb the magnolia trees and shrubbery
that hugged the Main Building. But the finished product offered its own
advantages.
“Directors were
quick to take advantage of the decorative natural concealment,” Radcliffe
wrote. “It provided fine sources for emergences of troops and conspirators
in surprise attacks and acts of violence. It also afforded a cover for the
embarrassment of a clumsy but eager warrior who knocked a colleague into
the bushes.”
Along with the occasional
soldier falling into the shrubs, the festival’s outdoor setting offered
many serendipitous surprises, such as the time a neighborhood dog trotted
on stage to lick the face of the dead Henry VIII, or the nightly tooting
of the 10:10 train from Xenia, during which actors froze and held their
scenes in tableau.
A young professional
actor from New York, Ellis Rabb was one of the first season’s stars,
and continued to appear throughout the festival’s next four years.
Appearing in a wide range of roles, Rabb soon garnered both local and national
acclaim.
Critics also applauded
the acting of Arthur Lithgow, who also directed the plays, associate director
Meredith Dallas and local actresses Dorothy Laming and Frances Loud, all
of whom played a variety of starring roles. Along with the festival’s
good acting, reviewers hailed the festival’s productions for their
clarity.
In ’53 Lithgow
produced Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman plays, including Julius Caesar,
Pericles and Trolius and Cressida. The 1954 season featured the bard’s
romantic comedies and tragedies, and the next season Shakespeare Under the
Stars performed “romantic fantasies.” The fifth season featured
the “rationalistic or stylistic plays,” including Hamlet and
King Lear.
By the end of the five
seasons, more than 135,000 people had attended the Shakespeare festival,
which, the Antioch Record reported, was hailed as “the first time
in the whole wide world that all of the master’s works were presented
in such a short time.” While the festival ended after Lithgow left
Antioch, its effects continued to influence theater-goers for some time,
according to a later editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
The festival was an ambitious
experiment, bringing together the beauty of Yellow Springs, the creativity
and talents of a variety of actors and directors and the appreciation of
an enthusiastic audience.
In a 1957 article in
Shakespeare Quarterly, Robert G. Shedd wrote, “Many lessons were being
learned during this period, not only by actors and directors but by audiences
as well. Indeed, a pervasive sense of discovery gave those five years a
special excitement felt by everyone who found his way to this small Ohio
town.”
—Diane
Chiddister
A
village meeting of minds
The creative postwar
planning that Yellow Springs visionaries sprouted prior to the end of World
War II was so innovative and came so early that it drew national attention
from sources such as Time magazine and Vice President Henry Wallace. Village
leaders felt that well before the war ended, residents needed to plan the
way Yellow Springs would use the momentum from the war to sally into the
next era.
The seed for the Little
Peace Conference germinated over a series of lunches at Bill Pohlkotte’s
Restaurant, in the old flatiron building at Corry Street and Xenia Avenue.
Though WWII was still raging overseas, local business and community leaders
anticipated a transition period when the war ended and local servicemen
and women would return to the area looking for jobs and housing. They wanted
to do a better job than they had done for veterans of World War I.
Conference organizers
believed they had an opportunity to implement needed changes in the way
the Village served its community. They saw possibilities for the town and
its residents. The conference charter called it “a program of community
improvements” for “a better Yellow Springs” in the postwar
era.
The two-week conference
was held in the Bryan High School gym in late June and early July 1943.
The executive committee was made up of Mayor Lowell Fess, who served as
chairman, and businessmen and educators Harold Igo, Robert Baldwin, Glenn
Deaton, Arthur Morgan and William Pohlkotte. Twenty-seven representatives
from all corners of the community participated in panel discussion, including
those from Antioch College, the Civic Club, the League of Women Voters,
Society of Friends, the rural community and organized labor.
Local residents were
also invited to present suggestions for the committee’s consideration.
The committee would then create a Village Charter, which local residents
would have to approve.
Morgan spoke at the conference’s
first session, clearing the field for participants to create a common vision
of a community where Yellow Springs residents would want to live. He encouraged
residents to explore what they needed in the way of everyday services such
as housing, education and recreation, and he spoke of the importance unity
played in the village’s quest to be a “community of neighbors,”
the conference minutes from June 13, 1943, state.
Some objectives were
defined as immediate needs. First off, reabsorbing servicemen would mean
creating jobs for them through the Service Men’s Replacement Bureau,
a liaison between returning soldiers and employers.
More jobs would also
mean improving local infrastructure to convince families to remain in town
and accommodate a growing population. Planners identified road repairs,
a garbage disposal plant, municipal gas ownership and a restructuring of
the Village government.
A community with more
families would eventually need more housing, more schools, an improved sewage
system and, ideally, a health center and a recreation space.
During each day of the
conference, the committee asked for submissions from the floor. Judge Frank
Geiger suggested that a state highway through the parks would afford the
public a lovely view of Glen Helen and John Bryan Park. Mrs. Grinnell presented
the idea of having a local dairy and creamery, and Mr. Stites furthered
the idea by supporting a cheese factory. Mrs. Fott supported a local employment
bureau, open to veterans and others.
The ideas presented were
not just pipe dreams. Participants discussed financing and tried to prioritize
their objectives for the short- and long-term.
Projects such as a new
grade school and recreation center would be funded through a school levy.
It was suggested that public works improvements could be funded through
tax levies, federal aid and contributions from Miami Township. Residents
could also use low-interest federally backed loans to finance building their
own homes.
Other projects were identified
as privately funded endeavors that were important for a self-sustaining
and well-rounded community. Residents suggested things such as a swimming
pool, a laundry and a refrigerated locker plant.
The conference not only
generated the foundation of a progressive Village Charter, but it also spawned
renewed commitment to civic cooperation. A letter, printed in a post-conference
brochure in 1944, from Corporal James E. Lawson, stationed “somewhere
in Italy,” provides evidence of the work villagers continued to do
after the conference:
“I have been telling
some of the boys here in my outfit what there is in store for me when I
return home and they all say it is the best thing they have ever heard of.
. . What I mean is it makes us who are fighting here feel we will not have
to go home and fight again for a job . . . [W]e don’t have to worry
now. I am really proud that I am from dear old Yellow Springs, Ohio, because
I know I have friends back there who are planning my future.”
To the delegates’
credit and thanks to those who participated in part or all of the conference,
all but one of the objectives brought forth in 1943 were accomplished either
just after the war or a decade later or many decades later. The only idea
that was never incorporated was the locker plant.
—Lauren
Heaton
The
beginning of civil rights movement
It was on the heels of
World War II, when soldiers were returning home and Yellow Springs was restructuring
itself toward a more ideal community, that residents began to challenge
racial discrimination and the status quo in favor of increased unity in
the village. It was the start of the civil rights movement in Yellow Springs,
still in its infancy, and many villagers had yet to heed the call.
A poster announcing a lecture sponsored by the
Yellow Springs Committee for Racial Equality.
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Racial tension in Yellow
Springs during the ’20s had sunk to a hostile level and discrimination
was increasing. According to a 1961 article on the African American community
of Yellow Springs in the Antioch Record, some Antioch College contributors
withdrew donations because the college admitted black students, and more
than half the students refused to sit next to their black peers at the lunch
table.
People in Yellow Springs
during this period joked that the village’s population had reached
“1,200 counting whites,” which, according to a census, translated
into one black for every two Caucasians in town.
By the ’30s some
local restaurants, barbershops and drugstores were refusing to serve black
residents in town, and at one point Moxie’s restaurant downtown had
put a sign in the window that said, “We cater to the Caucasian race
only.”
But there were at least
some local residents who would not stand for such blatant racism.
In 1941 Bob Serling,
the editor of the Antioch Record, printed an editorial advising the Little
Theatre to end its seating policy, which forced African Americans to sit
behind a rope at the back of the theater before the business lost its Antioch
patrons. The next year a group of Antioch and Wilberforce students and faculty
decided to challenge the moviehouse’s policy, and got the manager
to take the rope down.
Around that time, Antioch
professor Jesse Treichler organized a race relations committee that met
regularly to discuss discrimination issues, according to an Antioch student
paper written by Elaine Brann in 1955. The group held a two-day race relations
conference in Kelly Hall in May 1946 and soon joined forces with the larger
Yellow Springs community to form the Yellow Springs Committee for Racial
Equality (YSCRE).
The committee’s
purpose was to “work in every lawful way to eliminate racial segregation,
discrimination and prejudice wherever they appear.” Nearly half the
members were black, Brann reported, and the only college representatives
were Treichler and two students. But the group was bold, and its members
were ready to act.
An estimated 60 people
attended the first official YSCRE meeting at the home of Ernest Morgan,
owner of The Antioch Bookplate Co. and the Yellow Springs News, on Nov.
21, 1946. Participants decided the most effective move toward change would
be to challenge local businesses and the school board and Village Council
to eliminate their discrimination policies.
Two of the town’s
barber shops, owned by Mr. Squires and Lewis Gegner, and two restaurants,
Ye Olde Trail Tavern and the Glen Cafe, were of immediate concern. The plan
would be to bring to the proprietors’ attention the state law forbidding
discrimination in businesses of public service and to demonstrate to the
authorities that the law was being violated.
As the discussion continued
at Morgan’s house that night, a rock was thrown through the window.
Several committee members had rocks thrown through their windows that fall,
and Kieth Howard, editor of the Yellow Springs News, was attacked in the
street by Frank and Tom Dewine, owners of the Glen Cafe, for challenging
their discriminatory business practices.
Howard wrote an editorial
on the incident, “Why We Won’t Be Still on Racial Injustice,”
in which he said the “Nazification” of the U.S. can be prevented
if we speak out against the doctrine of ‘white’ superiority
and attempt to prevent persecution of Negroes.”
Those supporting equality
did not give up. In three months the YSCRE had grown to 200 members. The
group sought court action against the restaurants. They gathered proof to
support their case by planting white and black patrons at the restaurants
and recording who was served and who was refused.
In February 1947, Pat
Patton, owner of the Tavern, announced his establishment would be open to
African Americans, and the lawsuits against him were dropped. But Frank
Dewine was resolutely against serving blacks.
Over the following two
years, two cases were tried against him in the Greene County Common Pleas
Court, and DeWine prevailed in both. Finally in December 1949, Mayor Paul
Kintzel, Mayor-elect Leo Hughes and Frank DeWine met with Father Anthony
in St. Paul Catholic Church to try to settle the matter out of court. Dewine
finally relented and reluctantly agreed to serve black patrons. But it would
take a change of ownership at the cafe in the ’50s before the restaurant
was fully integrated.
Racial tension was also
strained in a Yellow Springs school board matter involving 15 black students
from Wilberforce who enrolled at Bryan High School in 1947. After protest
from parents and students, the five school board members and Superintendent
John Rinehart unanimously rescinded their decision to admit the black students,
the News reported. The year had barely begun when they were withdrawn.
Black Yellow Springs
residents were greatly upset by the incident, and black students boycotted
the school basketball team for two years.
With support from the
YSCRE and returning veterans, blacks won control of the Village government
in the November 1947 elections. And as more blacks moved to Yellow Springs
in the postwar period, they pooled their resources to establish a black
housing development on High Street between Fairfield Pike and Dayton Street.
There was still a long
row to hoe toward equality, but the initial efforts to even the field showed
promise for the coming years.
—Lauren
Heaton
Installment
1: 1803 to 1853
Installment 2: 1853 to 1868
Installment 3: 1868 to 1883
Installment 4: 1883 to 1898
Installment 5: 1898 to 1913
Installment 6: 1913 to 1928
Installment
7: 1928 to 1943
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