Of the 11 current businesses sited at the Millworks Business Center in the northern part of town, most are doing well, owner and landlord Allison Moody told the News last week.

But some, she said, are poised to move elsewhere in the coming months and a couple left recently under less-than-favorable circumstances.

After six years of selling and making wine and ‘shine, Tuck-N-Red’s was forced by court order to permanently vacate their production and retail space last month.

The business opened in summer 2020 by self-proclaimed “hillbillies and hippies” Tucker Thompson (“Tuck”) and Charles Harrell (“Red”). In addition to the alcohol operation, Tuck-N-Red’s hosted a variety of live music performances, benefits and gatherings. June 16 was its last day.

The micro-distillery and winery announced its departure on social media with a post that read: “Time to Roll Out and Roll on! To OUR people, ONE LOVE. Thank you for all your support over the years! As for Yellow Springs … We’re no longer ‘A GOOD FIT.’” The post also featured an image of a motorcyclist making a lewd gesture and driving into the sunset.

Under the advice of her attorney, Moody had no comment on Tuck-N-Red’s eviction.

A public records request with the Village shows that Tuck-N-Red’s relationship with Moody as well as local government became strained over the last year — largely due to zoning code violations and breaches of their lease agreement.

Correspondence between Moody and Yellow Springs Police show that Moody sought Village enforcement of Tuck-N-Red’s conditional use agreement — which Planning Commission unanimously approved in 2020 — of doing public-facing business only between the hours of noon and 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and manufacturing 7 a.m.–7 p.m. on Sunday.

Live shows and performances would frequently extend beyond those hours, records showed.

Several such occasions were recurring “Twerk Fests” — parties that spotlighted evocative dancing — which former Village Planning Administrator Meg Leatherman maintained violated Village restrictions on “sexually oriented businesses.” Security footage from one of those events shows several attendees breaking and entering into a separate leased space at Millworks to film themselves undressing; another tape shows an alleged sexual assault occur beside a shared Millworks bathroom.

Another code-related infraction was Tuck-N-Red’s use of a Millworks office space for food production — oil fryers were occasionally used to provide snacks for events. Once notified by Moody, Miami Township Fire-Rescue shut that operation down.

Mainly owing to Tuck-N-Red’s hours of operation and the on-site manufacturing of goods occupying more than the approved 30% of the total space, Village Manager Johnnie Burns sent Thompson and Harrell a mandate last December to correct all business practices and abide by the parameters of the conditional use permit. 

On Jan. 16, Burns sent a second letter: a notice of the revocation of the conditional use.

In an email to the News earlier this year, Tuck-N-Red’s attorney Matthew Cull said that the Village’s dispensation of zoning regulations was “erroneously imposed or tenuous at best.”

“It’s clear Tuck-N-Red’s misunderstood what the 2020 conditional use authorized,” he wrote. “Tuck-N-Red’s has operated in good faith since the beginning. There comes a point where one could begin to question the Village of Yellow Springs’ motives.”

Despite the revocation of the distillery’s conditional use permit, it continued doing some business, hosting hard rock shows, battle of the band competitions and memorial gatherings over the next several months.

All the while, court records show that Moody launched an eviction case through Xenia Municipal Court that began in March. By early May, a judge ruled that all unpaid rents were owed to Moody, and that the business must officially depart. The last event held at the location was on Sunday, June 14 — a celebration of life for recently deceased villager Carl Moore.

The last time Tuck-N-Red’s appeared in the News was in the police report two weeks ago: Security footage caught a former employee causing property damage and absconding with $2,000 worth of artwork from the business park.

Now, the 5,000-square-foot space at the center of Millworks sits unoccupied.

Though Moody declined to remark on the former tenant’s departure, she said she’s looking forward to moving someone in.

“It’s our policy to always offer available spaces to existing tenants first,” Moody said. “We always want to encourage them to grow on site if possible. And we’re already in conversations.”

More at Millworks

Tuck-N-Red’s isn’t the only recent departure from Millworks. Kyle Truitt, of Truitt Fitness, packed up his weights and left Millworks in April.

Since summer of 2024, Truitt has operated his personal training gym as a subtenant of Nuke’s Warehouse — a baseball training facility in one of the larger industrial spaces at the business park. A personal disagreement between Truitt and Nuke’s latest owner, Charlie Miller, led to the split.

Though Moody was remorseful over Truitt’s departure, she said that Nuke’s Warehouse is now poised to expand its footprint.

The local electronic scooter rental operation headquartered at Millworks — Yellow Springs Scooter, LLC — also closed up shop this year. Moody said the business-owning Lawson brothers opted not to reopen the seasonal business once winter passed.

There are likely additional departures on the horizon.

Earlier this summer, YS Baking Company announced that it’s set to close in a few months. YS Baking Co. started in early 2022 at Millworks as a polished kitchen with an emphasis on catering and, occasionally, pick-up and delivery services of their sweet and savory goods. Then, in 2024, the business expanded to a downtown storefront at 108 Dayton St.

As Moody noted, Baking Company owners Karina Tafolla and Rob Houk entirely renovated their space — turning “an empty office space into a commercial production kitchen” — and they’re looking to sell a great deal of their cooking and baking equipment.

Another departure: The Spencer Building Group. Moody said Mike Spencer is looking to downsize his operations onto his own personal property. Village Solar is expected to expand its operations and storage into that space, Moody said.

It’s not all “see you later” at Millworks, though.

Blue Sky Technologies; Yellow Springs Home, Inc.; Yellow Springs Brewery; Heather Horton Counseling; Sculptor’s Emporium; Studio Uncommon; Village Solar; Nuke’s Warehouse and Lark Overland all have no intentions of going anywhere, Moody said.

In fact, the latter — the village’s only modular camper dealership, Lark Overland — is about to grow in a major way.

Within the month, Moody said crews are breaking ground on a new 9,000-square-foot warehouse for Lark Overland to store and sell their campers. The new facility will sit on Millworks’ northern most section — the large field that abuts Fairfield Pike and the bike path on the eastern side.

“Lark Overland is really thriving in the village, even though they’ve only been here for a little over two years,” Moody said. “They’ve outgrown their current building.”

So much so, Moody added, that the business intends to hang onto its existing 4,750-square-foot warehouse even after its new building is complete.

Around the new building will be native landscaping — a flowery prairie resembling the Women’s Park along Corry, Moody said — and a walkway that adjoins the bike path. Additional parking spaces will also be added.

On the northern edge of the Millworks property, right where it touches Fairfield, will be Moody’s piece-de-resistance: a gabion retention wall. Relying on 7,000-year-old technology that can be traced back to ancient Egypt, gabion walls are stacked mesh cages filled with stones, rocks and other minerals to quell erosion.

“So that bank there was just covered in weeds, and it is really difficult to mow and maintain,” Moody explained. “But the biggest issue is that it’s been eroding. It’s holding up our north lot, and soon, a new building.”

At the base of this gabion wall, Moody said she’ll also install a bioswale to help mitigate stormwater runoff.

All told, Moody said she hopes to be done with this new project and have Lark Overland installed in the new building by this September.

At the Emporium last week, Luckens Merzius, a Haitian immigrant and Springfield resident, laughed as he explained why “Caribbean Colors,” the music and culture show he co-hosts on WYSO on Thursday nights, is prerecorded.

“Because it’s 10 to midnight,” he said. “Who wants to be there at that time?”

The light moment arose in spite of heavy news; it was the day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could move ahead with ending Temporary Protected Status for people from Haiti and Syria. For thousands of Haitians living in Springfield and elsewhere in Ohio, the decision carries the threat of lost jobs, lost services and deportation.

But Merzius preferred not to let the ruling swallow his story, or the stories of other Southwest Ohio Haitians, whose lives have often been discussed in the same breath as controversy or with the air of a problem that needs to be solved. He said that’s not the kind of story he wants to tell.

“I’m OK to talk about excellence,” he said. “It’s a way to show our resilience.”

The work Merzius has done to document that resilience was the impetus behind his interview with the News: In June, the Ohio’s Best Journalism Contest awarded Merzius first place for his feature reporting for WYSO. He told stories about Haitian Flag Day and an immigrant-focused poetry and art showcase, and interviewed a Haitian filmmaker — stories that presented Springfield’s Haitian residents as artists, organizers, parents and neighbors.

“We are talented, we are resilient,” Merzius said. “I wanted people to see that.”

He also shared first-place honors for best documentary and best minority issues coverage with fellow WYSO producers Virginelle Jerome, Miguelito Jerome, Gerly Philidor and Jacques Adler Jean-Pierre for their work on last year’s WYSO documentary series “Haitians in the Heartland.” In that series, as the News reported last year, Merzius and his fellow producers presented stories from within Springfield’s Haitian community, including their own.

Merzius’ U.S. story began in 2017, when he left his job as a data-entry supervisor for a maritime shipping company in Haiti and moved to Florida; the following year, at the encouragement of a friend, he and his family moved to Ohio.

It wasn’t long before Merzius started building connections in Springfield; tasked with taking his friend’s son to Fulton Elementary School every morning, he formed a friendship with a member of the administrative staff there, who asked if he’d be willing to share his command of both English and Haitian Creole with students experiencing a language barrier.

“And I said, ‘I can help out if you want,’” he said.

Merzius started at Fulton as a volunteer while he studied at Clark State College and worked third shift in a warehouse, but he was soon hired as a full-time bilingual assistant with Springfield City Schools. Later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Clark County Combined Health District tapped Merzius to become a bilingual community liaison. He initially offered to recommend someone else, but he had already become a trusted connection between Springfield institutions and Haitian families, and the county wanted him.

In 2022, Merzius met “two young Haitians, very talented,” Miguelito Jerome and Gerly Philidor, who had established New Diaspora Live, or NDL, a Springfield-based radio station aimed primarily at the area’s Haitian community. Jerome, then NDL’s CEO, asked Merzius if he would volunteer at the station as a public relations manager.

“And I said ‘yes,’ because I’m a community-oriented person,” Merzius said. “Anything that represents the Haitian community, I’m in it.”

Up until that point, Merzius’ community work had involved interpreting institutions for individual people. As he promoted NDL, and later became an on-air host, radio became a way for him to speak to, and from within, a whole community.

And it eventually connected Merzius with WYSO; in 2024, reporter and then-managing editor for the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices Chris Welter met the NDL crew at the station’s CoHatch home and broached a collaboration between the two stations. After months of meetings and production work, Merzius and the other producers launched “Haitians in the Heartland” as a kind of answer to the stories that had been told about Springfield’s Haitian residents without their input. The series’ producers spoke about migration, parenthood, art, activism, separation and reunion, giving shape and sound to individual lives.

“Everybody has a different story,” Merzius said in the opening episode. “I extend an invitation to people to share our stories, share our experiences. … People will discover hope, faith, resilience and community.”

In another episode, Merzius told the story of leaving Haiti with his wife, who was pregnant with their second daughter, while their older daughter, the then-4-year-old Marley, stayed behind with relatives because he and his wife couldn’t secure a visa for her.

“It was sad. It was sad,” he said in the series.

The family was eventually reunited in Springfield, and listeners were treated to an on-air conversation between Marley and her younger sister, Sephora, who remembered finally meeting each other in person at the airport after having only previously interacted through phone screens. Their conversation moved from the reunion to school, friends and the things they liked and disliked, carrying the larger subject of migration through the ordinary details of family life.

“When you tell the story with dignity, it makes an impact,” Merzius told the News, adding that, rather than arguing with people who have already decided what they believe, a storyteller can “commit to the excellence, commit to the truth.”

Merzius’ connection to Yellow Springs began before he knew he would spend most of his weekdays here. In the summer of 2023, he visited the village with his wife and neighbors after hearing about it in the news and from others.

“I liked the way I was seeing people in the streets,” he said. “This is a beautiful town, like a small city.”

Two years later, he enrolled full time at Antioch College, where he’s currently studying social enterprise and social innovation, and where he said he considers both students and alumni to be his “extended family.” When it was time to choose his co-op placement, he chose WYSO, where he now works in several capacities. Between Antioch and the radio station, he’s in Yellow Springs five days each week, making the village a kind of second home.

To that end, Merzius said he’s starting to become a recognizable presence in the village — if not always by sight, then by sound.

“They say, ‘Oh, I heard your voice on WYSO — oh, Luckens Merzius, nice to meet you!’” he said.

Outside of his reporting, Merzius — along with fellow “Haitians in the Heartland” producers Miguelito Jerome and Gerly Philidor — is regularly heard by WYSO listeners on Thursday nights as “Captain Luckens,” the co-host of “Caribbean Colors.” The show aims to blend music and conversation about countries throughout the Caribbean and, as Merzius said in one episode, “keep the vibes alive for all our listeners.”

Recent episodes have featured the soca and calypso music of Trinidad and Tobago, rumba and bomba of Puerto Rico and Haiti’s kompa, as well as guests with connections to the musical traditions. Like “Haitians in the Heartland,” “Caribbean Colors” asks listeners to encounter a place through the voices and culture of the people who know it, Merzius said.

“You can stay home with your passport, and then you travel there with us,” he said.

He’s also currently developing an eight-episode audio documentary project that would bring immigrant and nonimmigrant voices together to speak about “belonging, stability and the changing American dream.” The project, tentatively titled “Negotiating the Middle,” is still seeking funding.

“There are so many stories still to tell,” he said.

Near the end of Merzius’ conversation with the News, the talk returned to Haiti.

“I love my country — I always dream of my country,” he said. “At the end of the day, if I have to go back to my country, I go back to my country, right? Even if it’s increasingly worse, I have to go — but I don’t want to go right now.”

Merzius paused as those conflicting truths hung in the air, revolving around one another.

He continued: “I feel like you make yourself vulnerable [when you] tell the truth — I’m OK with that. I think sometimes you have to speak up. Every community has stories; every community. You can make yourself vulnerable. It’s worth it to tell the story.”

As the United States marks its semiquincentennial, Yellow Springs has another anniversary to observe: The days just before July 4 mark 50 years that the penguins adorning John Bryan Community Pottery have been staring into the middle distance.

Or, at least, a version of them has.

The original mural was designed in 1976 by then-17-year-old D.J. Schiff, now a Berkeley, California-based writer, cartoonist and James Joyce scholar. Speaking with the News last month, Schiff said that, at the time of the mural’s inception, he was a YS High School student, working at Elsewhere Books, spending free time at former music store Dingleberry’s. He was absorbing Dada, surrealism and the emerging punk movement as the village and the country at large prepared to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial.

“I was a hippie who instantly became a punk — so I was sort of a ‘pippie,’” he said.

From those established credentials, one might detect a dissonance with the idea of bicentennial pageantry — and one would be correct, according to Schiff.

“I was just a snarky punk 17-year-old,” he said with a laugh. “I was sort of saying ‘no’ to the bicentennial, you know — ‘We’ve just had Watergate, our president is corrupt and there’ll probably never be a more corrupt president in the history of the U.S.!’”

When his high school art teacher, Dorothy Zopf, asked students to propose a bicentennial mural, Schiff offered an absurdist, top-of-brain suggestion: “How about penguins?”

“And [Zopf] essentially said, ‘Well, yeah, sure, why not penguins — indeed, why not?’” Schiff said.

The mural, he said, was conceived in opposition to bicentennial boosterism. Its palette of black, white and cobalt blue managed two-thirds of the nation’s preferred color scheme — “And two out of three is nothing to sneeze at,” Schiff said — but offered neither flag nor soaring eagle. Instead, Schiff drew row upon row of vaguely expressionless penguins receding upward toward a vanishing point.

“They’re literally just chilling,” he said. “They’re not doing anything — they’re just existing, damn it.”

The design began as a small drawing, about 5 inches by 11 inches, shaped to match the long wall of the pottery building. The penguins were arranged in converging lines against a blue background that grew darker from the ground up, suggesting a vista that, theoretically, continued past the top of the JBCP building.

“[The penguins] went off, it was implied, to an infinite point,” Schiff said. “Of course, the building could only hold so much of infinity.”

To his recollection, Schiff and a group of friends got started on or around July 1, 1976, beginning with the blue background and continuing into the night, when they projected a slide of his drawing onto the building and traced the penguins in black. The group returned the next day to fill in the black and white forms, which Schiff estimated took about five hours. Having previously fallen from a ladder while working for Center Stage, he said he relied on some of his friends to ascend and bring the upper-level penguins to life.

He didn’t sign the mural or make much of his role in designing it, which was part and parcel of his approach; the work had been made with friends, and Schiff said he was skeptical of ego in art. Years later, when a local account credited the mural’s many painters alphabetically, Schiff’s name landed among the rest, making his authorship easy to miss.

Thus, the penguins went on to become known about town independent of their designer, and the pottery studio became, to many villagers, the “Penguin Building.”

“I didn’t know I was doing that,” Schiff said of creating a local landmark. “But I certainly did find out. … I don’t know what people understand [about the history of the penguins], but they love them.”

By 2015, the mural had faded enough that Schiff, by that time a longtime Californian, drew up a plan to repaint the lower penguins — the ones he could reach without a ladder — and add powdered mica for sheen. The upper penguins, he said, would have been left to fade into eventual obscurity atop their refreshed brethren. Alas, work conflicts, canceled vacations, and later, the COVID-19 pandemic kept that plan from coming to fruition.

Around 2020 or 2021, John Bryan Community Pottery Director Meg Smallwood told the News, the studio’s board asked her to redesign and repaint the mural, which had fallen into serious disrepair. Two designs were put to votes by studio members, students and the wider community, and volunteers joined Smallwood in painting the new version over the last two years.

The new mural retains three penguins, now standing among pieces of pottery beneath a cloudy blue sky. Each maintains its own distinct expression, and a yellow beam shines down near the center bird — the one that most closely resembles those in the original infinite colony.

“We adopted the penguins to be kind of our mascot, because they were so iconic,” Smallwood said. “The beam of light, honestly, was just kind of to highlight how much joy the studio brings … but the feedback I’ve gotten is that some people take it as symbolizing the spark of creative inspiration.” 

Schiff, for his part, didn’t see a photo of the updated mural until it was sent to him by the News; he studied it and took inventory.

“Only three left,” he said. “If two is company, then three is a crowd.”

Schiff added that he’s happy the penguins still exist in something of an “airless void of absurdity,” and that they’re still “doing nothing.” He also pointed to the bittersweet notion that his original penguins — faded though they might have been — are still on the building, “just under a 64th of an inch of acrylic paint.”

“They’re still there,” he said. “That’s a legacy of sorts.”

And Smallwood, regaled this week with the history of the mural, was glad to learn of the context in which it was created.

“I really wanted to make sure the original creator’s idea was represented in at least some small way,” she said. “And now I have more to the story; people always ask me, ‘Why penguins?’ And now I can say, ‘Because why not?’”

Do you have stories or memories to share about the penguin mural? The News would love to hear them; send them to chuck@ysnews.com 

MEET YOUR NONPROFITS

This is the fourth installment in a series profiling the ongoing work of Yellow Springs-based nonprofit organizations.

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By Alissa Paolella

The kiln had been a fixture of the pottery studio’s kiln yard for more than a decade — a hulking, hand-built wood-fire kiln that demanded everything from the people who loved it: weekends spent hauling lumber, marathon firing sessions stretching to 36 hours, a kind of devoted physical labor that drew a particular type of potter.

Over its lifetime, it logged an estimated 130 firings. Last year, it was retired and removed.

For Meg Smallwood, who became studio director of John Bryan Community Pottery in 2024, the decision was both practical and symbolic.

“It was, indeed, a tough decision,” she said. “But looking at what our population is like now, the cost of running it, and the cost of rebuilding it — trying to fill two equally massive buckets to rebuild kilns was just not practical for us as an organization.”

The wood kiln’s departure is perhaps the clearest marker of a studio in thoughtful transition. John Bryan Community Pottery — tucked at 100 Dayton St. and known to regulars simply as JBCP — has been a cornerstone of Yellow Springs since 1962.

What began as a co-op of four potters who pooled resources because, as Smallwood puts it, “Dude, we can’t afford all this stuff; let’s go in together,” has grown into a fully operational 501(c)(3) with 34 studio members, a packed class schedule and a waiting list that stretches 12 to 16 months.

Under Smallwood’s leadership, the studio has moved through a significant period of reinvestment. Two grants from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation in recent years funded what she calls the unglamorous but essential work: HVAC installation — the studio was previously cooled in summer with fans alone, which can be a health concern in a clay-dust environment; an expanded member workspace; a new glaze room; chemical storage; and most recently, new gas kiln burners and a replacement kiln shed.

A third grant, received this spring, is funding improved ventilation hoods over the electric kilns.

None of it is flashy. All of it, Smallwood said, is about ensuring the studio can run for another 60 years.

“Some things have been coaxed for very long, living with a nonprofit,” she said with a laugh. “We need quality equipment that’s going to last a long time.”

That ethos of longevity extends to how JBCP thinks about its community. The studio offers six-week classes in wheel-throwing and hand-building — from beginner through level 4 — as well as workshops ranging from a single day to three weeks for those who cannot commit to a longer session. Classes are currently booked through September, with openings through December. The class fee covers clay, tools, glazes and firing; students arrive and create, no gear required.

But Smallwood was quick to note that accessibility means more than an open door. The studio runs a scholarship program — seeded by the first annual fundraiser with Yellow Springs Brewery three years ago — that awards three free class enrollments every six months by lottery to adults in the Miami Valley region who demonstrate financial need.

“Pottery is expensive. There’s no getting around it,” she said. “Being able to provide an opportunity for somebody who can’t afford to do a six-week class is really important to continue our mission.”

Her longer-term goal is something closer to an endowment: sustained funding that could bring class costs down across the board.

The studio also collaborates with the Yellow Springs Senior Center, offering programming for older adults — a natural fit given that hand-building, Smallwood said, is far more accessible for people with back issues or stiffness in their hands than wheel-throwing.

One of the more surprising recent chapters involved a Raku workshop gone sideways. A cable snapped on the aging kiln’s crankshaft just as Smallwood was preparing to fire it; the hood dropped, and the impact finished off burners that were already on their last legs. A small fireball followed — no injuries, but the kiln was done.

Chris and Havilah McGinnis, students who had been taking classes for over a year, were there to witness the whole thing. Weeks later, Chris McGinnis walked into the studio and asked for the shipping address. He had ordered a replacement — a new top-hat Raku kiln from Olympic Kilns in Georgia, valued at approximately $3,800. It now sits hard-lined to the studio’s propane tank, weather-independent and bearing a small plaque in the McGinnises’ honor.

The artist-in-residence program, which Smallwood has actively shaped, reflects the same philosophy of breadth and generosity. The program originated about 12 years ago when founding resident Bruce Grimes lost his personal studio to a fire, and the pottery community rallied. Grimes, now artist-in-residence emeritus, still comes in regularly. Current residents Cathy Mills and Robin Dakin were each brought in to fill specific gaps — Mills for her expertise in glaze chemistry, Dakin for his deep knowledge of primitive firing techniques, which dovetails with JBCP’s new pit kiln program.

“The world of pottery is just enormous,” Smallwood said. “I wanted to make sure that we had new people coming in, bringing new concepts, and ways of working and techniques to the studio.”

What ties all of it together, for Smallwood, is something harder to quantify. She described the studio as a third space — a phrase borrowed from urban sociology that describes somewhere that is neither home nor work, where people simply exist together.

“There’s nothing like finding a third space,” she said. “We have so few third spaces in our world.”

The students and members she hears from most consistently report that since starting pottery, their mental health has improved. The act of working with clay, Smallwood believes, demands a kind of present-tense focus that crowds everything else out.

“They’re able to come here and just set stuff down, leave it at the door, and go play in the mud,” she said.

John Bryan Community Pottery is located at 100 Dayton St. in Yellow Springs. Classes, memberships, scholarship applications and studio information are available at http://www.communitypottery.org or by calling 937-767-9022.

*Alissa Paolella is a local resident and freelance writer for the News.

Villagers didn’t let the oppressive heat reign over their parade on July 4. 

The lively train wound down Xenia Avenue by crowds that coalesced along the shadows of trees and awnings, waiting for the Sea Dogs’ Super Soakers — though kids were quick to dart out and nab tossed candy before it melted to the road.

Many village organizations were represented in the cavalcade. The celebration continued at Gaunt Park with friends and family picnicking, enjoying the community band serenade and, at dusk, taking in the fireworks display.

The evening was capped off with the traditional late-night dip in the pool. 

Photos by Matt Minde

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