Joint Endeavors

Sometimes either outside forces or intentional planning would cause the College and the Village to collaborate for a common goal. Often it was one visionary using the strengths of both groups to establish a new organization, or to sponsor a community event, many of which continued annually for many years or still exist today.

During WWII, Village and College leaders began holding informal lunch meetings at Bill Pohlkotte’s Restaurant in the old “Flatiron” building at Xenia Avenue and Corry Street to discuss the Village’s future in the post-war era. Questions about how to reabsorb returning soldiers into an intentionally structured community and how to create a modern, progressive society with a social support network turned into a formal two-week peace conference held in Yellow Springs during the summer of 1943. Village mayor Lowell Fess ’15 served as the chairman of the board which included College President A. D. Henderson, Dayton insurance man Robert Baldwin ’30, local businessman Glenn Deaton of Deaton’s hardware store, and the indispensable Arthur Morgan.

The group invited others to the Bryan Center gymnasium that summer to design a community that could boast a strong farming and business economy and also provide for its residents with strong schools, health centers, housing, roads, recreation and other public works. One of the conference’s programs read: “Yellow Springs will never be a New York or a Chicago. But if the hopes and aims of its citizens, now being expressed around a community peace table, are realized, it will become one of the most livable communities in America.”

The theatrical productions in the community, too, would never have come together in the way that they did without both the College and the town participating on stage and behind the scenes to raise enough money and sell enough tickets to continue year after year.

Rachel Dewey became the promotion coordinator for the summer Shakespeare Under the Stars – revitalized in recent years by Associate Professor of Theatre Louise Smith ’77 – and she worked with many villagers who volunteered to bake cookies, usher, fill in on stage and contribute to the annual event whenever needed.

Pat Dell ’50 remembers singing in the College operettas Anything Goes and Naughty Marietta held at the Village Opera House at Dayton Street and Winter Street before it was torn down in the late forties. “Faculty and students and people from Dayton all participated; I met a lot of towns-people that way,” she remembered.

When Pat Dell came to the College in 1945 as Patricia Martin from a Pennsylvania prep school, she was not so prepared as she believed for what she found here. “I was terribly impressed with the sophistication and education of the students and the fabulous faculty,” she said. Her rural Ohio roots drew her off campus and into the Village on Saturday mornings to Joe Holly’s Dry Cleaning and then to Dick and Tom’s for breakfast with a group of her hall mates. And on Saturday evenings the surrounding residents and farmers would all come into town to party together at the Glen Cafe, the Old Trail Tavern, or the formal DIV dances at the College.

Dell ended up marrying a local boy, Warren Dell, as did two of her girlfriends – Bonnie Fulton (Kannapell) ’49 and Helen Hammond (Pitman) ’51. The Dells stayed in town.

As a student, Pat worked at the Antioch nursery school, and after graduation she taught kindergarten at Mills Lawn for ten years, until she had her daughter Cammy. “I began to really appreciate the town when I had Cammy and realized there were so many options open to her in the Village,” Dell said. “And I couldn’t have had a more interesting group of nursery school parents like Rae Dewey and Gene Trolander, and others.” When Cammy was seven, Dell went back to work at the Antioch School, staying there until 1989. Her grandson Danny is now a student there.

The College initiated a major contribution to the community in ways that were unanticipated when modern dance pioneer Louise Soelberg came to Yellow Springs on a Whitman grant to choreograph Shakespeare Under the Stars and teach dance at the College. Soelberg also gave lessons to local children in the College storage building on E. North College Street after a group of parents renovated the attic. Then when Soelberg suffered a ruptured disc that prevented her from dancing, she turned to her childhood love, horses.

Soelberg was aware of a little house with a barn on a Hyde Road farm bordering the Glen and owned by the College. She convinced the College to lease her the property in 1959 and established an equestrian teaching facility called the Riding Centre to introduce the harmonious dance of rider and horse to as many community children as possible. Carolyn Bailey, whose parents Donald Myatt, Professor of Engineering, and Nina Myatt ’53, Curator and Library Acquisitions Assistant, were both eventually College employees, started riding there in 1967 when she was eight years old. She is now the Centre’s director. Many of the Village children, whose parents were often associated with Antioch, rode there, and all of the families did an enormous amount of work volunteering, cleaning stalls, and helping to keep the Centre going.

In 1974, Soelberg established the Therapeutic Riding Program to help disabled children connect with animals and the outdoors. Two years later she was the first woman to receive the National Council on Aging’s senior citizen medal.

Carolyn Bailey runs the program these days and Antioch students have the option of taking riding lessons at the center for physical education credit.

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