This week’s column was supposed to be a celebration of a wonderful little toy store in a joyful Midwestern town. A store that, heartbreakingly, is scheduled to close this week. But circumstances intervened.
Yellow Springs, Ohio, is the kind of place that makes you smile the moment you step onto its main street. The kind of Main Street Generation X — and every generation before us — assumed would always exist. The kind that, to my children’s generation, now feels less like a living place and more like a memory: something America once built everywhere and now struggles to protect anywhere.
For decades, Yellow Springs resisted the fate that hollowed out so many towns like it. Its downtown endured in large part because of Antioch College, the pathbreaking liberal arts school founded by 19th-century education reformer Horace Mann. Mann believed deeply in education. He did not believe in endowments. The result is a college that still stands for bold ideas, even as it has struggled financially in recent years…