July 27, 2006

Evan Scott and his wife Amy posed recently with their children (left to right) Jeremiah, Jamie and Ryan, outside the home they purchased on Livermore Street. Their fourth son Kellen was born a week after the photo was taken.

COMING HOME

The third in a series of interviews with young adults who grew up in Yellow Springs, went away, and returned to live in the village.

By Lauren Heaton

When Evan Scott graduated from Yellow Springs High School in 1983, he couldn’t wait to leave the village. He went to Miami University, got married, had two sons and moved to Cincinnati, then to Boston and back, before he and his wife Amy decided what they really wanted was to move to a small, progressive town to raise their family.

With financial help from both of their families, and a connection to the family of former Antioch College professor J.D. Dawson, the Scotts took the opportunity to move to the village in 2001 with their eldest sons, Jamie and Jeremiah. For Amy Scott, who grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Yellow Springs was a “true blue village,” and one in which she could homeschool her children. For Evan Scott, Yellow Springs was not only his first home but the place where his sons could connect to their grandparents, Dorothy and Bill Scott, and their great aunt and uncle, Ilse and Cy Tebbetts.

“There is something unexplainable about being in the physical place you grew up,” Scott said in a recent inverview. “Here I can map myself out in the context of the outside world in terms of my location, my friends, my needs, with a richer level of comfort. This is absolutely my home.”

In some ways, Yellow Springs is exactly the same as when Scott left. It is still the kind of town that accepts people for who they are, not for what group they appear to represent, he said. And it is still a place where families can walk downtown and back home again in an afternoon and see friends and familiar faces all along the way, he said.

But in other ways it is “absolutely different,” he said. There aren’t as many children in town, and those children aren’t afforded the same amount of freedom to play in the Glen and run around the neighborhood that he and his friends were given..

Scott grew up on the corner of Randall Road and Edgefield Drive, which he described as the self-appointed epicenter of homegrown sports activity that had so many neighborhood kids involved in wiffle ball, baseball, basketball and touch football that youth would come from across town to play, he said. Scott and his friends organized their own tournaments and even kept statistics, and though the parents weren’t directly involved, Scott said he had a sense he and the other kids were all being looked after.

When Scott first returned to town with his family, he experienced a period of disappointment that the village had somehow changed, he said. He expected to feel the same freedom and lightness he felt as a child, but instead, he later realized, he was living the life of his dad with the responsibilities of a husband, a father and a homeowner.

He looked at Yellow Springs differently too, and began to see some of its shortcomings as well. The village seemed less energetic and in general “more interested in peace and quiet than in charging things up,” he said. Scott attributes the change in energy to the number of families with children, which is currently less than half of what it was in the ’70s, he said, referring to the 2002 Yellow Springs Men’s Group cost of living study. Though people’s lives are actually busier now than they’ve ever been, Scott feels there isn’t nearly as much community time devoted to visiting with friends and neighbors.

The cost of living in the village is high, said Scott, who works with the Dayton Development Coalition while Amy Scott homeschools their four boys, including 2-year-old Ryan and newborn Kellen. For the Scotts, the reasons to stay outweigh their very real financial challenges, but unless the village does something to improve affordability, Scott indicated the cost may be too high for other families with less personal connection to the village.

Scott’s solution is to reawaken the Antioch College that incubated businesses and ideas and fostered a strong economic relationship with the village, he said. While the Center for Business and Education will receive new businesses, Scott believes it would be a far better investment to link Antioch’s curriculum with today’s industrial needs and grow new cutting-edge businesses here, ones that provide the kind of local jobs village residents are looking for.

The ideas Scott has to strengthen the village aren’t necessarily for his benefit, he said, because he is already to committed to his hometown. But he feels passionate about making a place that means a great deal to him an even better place for his children.

“It’s that notion of the place you’re from being part of your identity,” Scott said. “Place is one form of identity, and for me that’s Yellow Springs. I’m a Yellow Springer.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com