Madison Commencement
Bengals hold off season activites
Missing in American Memorial
Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2007 > April > 01 > Entry
forward, into the past
I have been enjoying a vintage flashback to the Dayton of a century ago. I’m reading “Family Crisis” (Reynal&Hitchcock) by Sherlock Bronson Gass. The book was published in 1940. I borrowed it from the author’s granddaughter.
Gass sets the stage for his memoir in this author’s note: “The family was of a sort as numerous as any in the country—very middling middle class. The place was a medium-sized city in the Midwest—Dayton, Ohio. The years were the last five of the last century, a period already falling into perspective as, industrially, the end of an era—the end of smallness and independence, and the beginning of magnitude and subordination, the end of the man, so to speak, and the beginning of the corporation. And this struggle was precisely a small man’s struggle for independence during those years and in that world of industry.”
Gass takes readers back to the long ago Dayton of the late 1890’s. The more things change the more they seem to remain the same. He declared: “I had come, not long ago from Chicago. But for all Chicago, I was a little stunned with the Dayton smoke that Sunday afternoon. Charlie met me at the station, and the station was dingy beyond belief. Under the arch of the trainshed smoke hung low and motionless. The whole Miami Valley, as I learned, has an extraordinary power of holding its breath in the heat and humidity of summer.”
Downtown Dayton was rather different then. “What lay beyond, toward Jefferson Street, was bigger than the laundry, and better, but it was dingy as compared with the Main Street side. Beyond the fish-stall was a restaurant—dinner twenty-five cents and indeed a rare treat to us in the next five months—and beyond the restaurant, on the corner of Jefferson Street, Isaac Stern’s gents’ furnishing store.
Gass continues our flashback tour of 1890’s Dayton: “Across the way a like change took place in the middle of the block. Behind the publishing house, from whose open windows came the exciting rhythm of the presses, was a dark alley, and then Billy Gray’s livery and sales stable; the Central Hotel in its blaze of red for the saloon, yellow for the Moorish balconies on the second floor, and blue for the shades of the top floor windows; after that a harness shop; and finally John Roth’s saloon—the White House—on the corner of Jefferson.”
Gass recounts some rather unusual memories of life in long ago Dayton in “Family Crisis.” I’ll bring you more of his recollections in a future installment of FORWARD,INTO THE PAST.
Permalink | | Categories: memories of Dayton
