Gathering in the Community

Though the College and the Village come together with purpose at regular intervals along the road, they’ve also come together in less intentional ways and enjoyed the more leisurely side effects of the relationship they’ve worked so hard to build.

On Sundays in Yellow Springs in the 1950s, be it Villager or student, faculty or business person, man, woman or child, everyone was packed into the renowned Antioch Tea Room – now referred to as the Antioch Inn. The Antioch Tea Room was run at the time by Mr. Kenny Hamilton, father of Virginia Hamilton ’57, and was famous for Roderic O’Connor’s ’28 dinner rolls. “The clover leaf rolls! Everybody knows about those rolls, they came out hot and delicious. It was the thing to do to go there; the food was marvelous,” recalled Rachel Dewey, who came to Yellow Springs in 1947 when her husband George Dewey became Assistant to the Dean of Students for the College. “When George applied for a job at Antioch he said, ‘I’ll sweep the floors to come to Antioch,’” Rachel recalled. “He had wanted to attend Antioch and couldn’t manage it, and so he delighted in coming here.”

Visitors came from Springfield and Dayton for lunch and might have ordered a plate of fried chicken, a meat loaf, or a nice roast. It was all considered “good, down home cooking.” At the time, most of the other restaurants in town were segregated, and many at the College tried not to patronize those businesses. The College, which admitted black students, sought to create a space where everyone, blacks and whites, students and villagers, locals and out-of-towners, could come together and feel comfortable.

“One of the other reasons people came to Yellow Springs, of course, was to watch the Antioch students,” Dewey said. Their strange hair-do’s and their retro clothes provided visitors with entertainment along with their meal. After lunch, on most Sundays, many of the families whisked their children off to Glen Helen, where they played regularly without their parents. It was a standard Village rule in the 50s that as long as the children were in groups of three, they could go down into the Glen and do whatever they wanted.

Around that time, the swinging bridge was just being built, and Susan (Dewey) Oldfield ’66 and Kathy Dewey went down by the stream every day to watch the two ends come together to make a bouncing, swinging thrill for them to cross over.

The boys, looking for physical competition, would cut reeds down and use them for sword fighting, Rachel Dewey said.

Around the same time, there was another safe, inclusive community gathering hole frequented by locals, if in a slightly different vein. According to Anna Hogarty ’80, there was not an evening restaurant within a 50-mile radius of Yellow Springs where blacks could go and have dinner until Com and Goldie’s opened up and started serving food on W. Davis Street.

Com Williams, who earned his name shooting the big glass marbles called “coms,” opened the bar just after the war. Then Com’s wife Goldie, whose father was the former police chief and who also cooked a “mean fried chicken,” began cooking food at home and selling it from the bar. Soon Com’s became a neighborhood restaurant bar that drew students and families from the College and the Village every night of the week. “There was always good food, and you never felt like you didn’t belong there,” Hogarty said.

Now, Peach’s, a local eatery and pub, and Dino’s coffee shop, right next to the Yellow Springs Senior Center, bring students and villagers together regularly in an intimate, relaxed manner somewhat reminiscent of those earlier years. Antioch students, local high school students, and Village residents all work shifts at the coffee shop, and the deep couch nestled in between a tiny sea of close knit tables makes it hard for anyone to enter without brushing shoulders with a good many others in the room.

Recent Antioch graduate and Dharma Center resident Leisa Schaim ’01 immediately gravitated toward the friendly hum of activity along the Village streets when she arrived in Yellow Springs. She could always walk into town on a Saturday morning and find people at the farmers’ market or just milling around town. “I felt welcome and excited about the distinct sense of community, and I wanted to participate in this, too,” she said.

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