Twenty-four steps lead up to the new Dayton Street home of Beyond Limits Yellow Springs, or BLYS, and owner and local resident Guy “Tron” Banks knows every single one of them — after all, he and a friend had to tote each of the new gym’s 100-pound rubber floor mats up those stairs this spring, one at a time. Heavy, but flexible, the mats were awkward to lift and maneuver, but Banks said he figured it out, mat by mat.
“The more that I kept doing it, the more I started learning how to do it,” he said.
His experience with the mats, he added, has been an apt metaphor for the way he’s built BLYS — pronounced “bliss” — at 128½ Dayton St.: He moved into the space in May and spent the month cleaning, painting and laying flooring, adapting the vision of his business to the space as he went along.
“I’ve just built everything up piece by piece,” he said.
Billed as offering “community fitness coaching,” BLYS will celebrate its grand opening Sunday, Aug. 23, 2–6 p.m.
Though he’s known about town, and outside it, as a hip-hop artist, fitness work has long been part of Banks’ bread and butter; he trained clients at the Wellness Center at Antioch College for two years, has provided fitness training to high school baseball players in West Carrollton and has led school and youth programs at the Antioch School for several years.
After his work at the Wellness Center ended in 2024, Banks kept seeing clients in smaller community spaces. All the while, he explored larger possibilities for an independent gym, but said the cost and scale kept pushing the idea beyond what he wanted — something manageable, where the business could grow according to the people using it.
“I would have to do too much and fill the space in these different ways just because of the cost [of large spaces],” he said. “So the idea took a back seat for a while, and I started thinking, ‘If it’s gonna happen, it will happen, right?’”
And when it happened, it happened quickly: He had the keys to the Dayton Street space within a few weeks of learning it was available, and started seeing a few of his clients in June.
Banks described BLYS as a gym built around “not specifically athletes or bodybuilders, just lifestyle coaching, because that’s really what I do.” Most clients meet with him for 30 minutes, twice a week, and the work, he said, follows the answers to a few simple questions: “What are your activities of daily living? What do you like to do? What are your goals?”
If a client wants to keep gardening, Banks said training might focus on leg strength and practicing getting down to the ground and back up. Other clients come to him with limited mobility, pain or neurological conditions; in all cases, Banks said, his practice involves adapting movement around what clients can safely do, and a “focus on ability versus inability.”
“I never allow anyone to commit to an exercise till I know they understand the movement,” he said.
Banks said he aims for the “community fitness” approach of BLYS to also include making connections with other local businesses and wellness practitioners; he pointed to Kishani Obey, of nearby Sage and Stretch Restorative, who will offer a four-week “Resilient Body” course at BLYS. For the grand opening, Banks has collected donations from Yellow Springs businesses for raffle baskets and plans to display local business cards.
“When I say ‘community,’ I really mean it,” he said. “Everybody is bringing something unique.”
It’s why, he said, he believes there’s room for what he does amid the scope of fitness services offered within and near the village, and room for other practitioners who might come after.
“It’s like, as a performer, I’ve never said, ‘I’m gonna be the only one to have the best performance,’ because it’s a collective,” he said. “I want everybody to be great so the whole show is lit, right? If we’re together, now we’re all lit. … It’s a beautiful thing, right?”
Banks said his community focus carries particular weight after his January 2024 termination from the Wellness Center, where he had worked as a personal trainer since April 2022. News readers will recall that the termination drew a wealth of letters to the editor in support of Banks week after week for a few months, as well as advocacy from The 365 Project. Banks said the experience, which was mutually resolved between him and the College in April that year, changed his understanding of his place in Yellow Springs.
“That type of adversity prepared me to appreciate something like this a lot more,” he said. “Before that, I had no clue who I was to this community.”
He said the public response left him with a greater sense of responsibility to the people who had spoken on his behalf. It also left him with a desire, he said, to center Yellow Springs in his current venture, such that he intentionally left his own name out of the business and paid tribute to the community in the black-and-yellow color scheme that decorates the walls of BLYS.
“It’s yellow for Yellow Springs all day,” he said.
Having worked for several years with area youth in both music and fitness, Banks said he’s also working to establish an after-school program, initially aimed at ages 7–12, meeting three days a week for a few hours.
“Anything I do is gonna have a youth program,” Banks said.
He aims for each after-school session to combine fitness, a nutritional snack and discussion, a life-skills lesson and recreation of the young participants’ choosing; during the interview in the new space, Banks showed off a burgeoning library of books for a range of readers, as well as board and card games, video games, a basketball hoop and small foosball, billiards and air hockey tables. He also hopes to invite community members to introduce young people to careers or skills they may not otherwise encounter.
The youth program also has its own small cast of mascots: Lamoné, a mop-topped anthropomorphic lemon; Lien, a wide-eyed lime; Brian, a wild, dog-eared critter with a brain-like coif; and Sundae, an ice-cream-esque, rabbit-eared creature. The characters began as drawings Banks’ nephew made two years ago on a napkin, which Banks saved. When BLYS started to take shape, he gave the characters names and recast them as the faces of the youth program.
“They’re the BLYS Youth Kids, and they represent the energy of the youth program,” he said.
Banks emphasized that the youth program is not meant to compete with other after-school offerings — “Kids will choose where they want to go, and this is just another choice,” he said. “I always want to be mindful of that.”
The upcoming Aug. 23 grand opening will take place primarily outside in a lot behind the building, with class demonstrations inside. The event will include demos of cardio boxing, Coach’s Choice intervals, Obey’s “Resilient Body” course, the youth program and line dancing; live music from local resident and roots music legend Bob Lucas; a fashion show; and food and drinks from The Juice Box food truck. Raffle tickets for items donated by local businesses will be $10 and will include popcorn and a sno-cone. Chef Locksley Harper will also provide a meal for youth during the event. Demo spots are limited, and guests are encouraged to arrive “dressed to move.”
Banks said the schedule beyond the opening will remain flexible, with classes changing or making room for individual coaching according to who shows up and what they need.
The idea behind BLYS, he said, is to “get something that will help you in your day-to-day life and help you do it effectively, do it better.”
Go to http://www.beyondlimitsys.com for more info.
Home to a variety of shops and boutiques, Kings Yard in Yellow Springs’ downtown business district is for sale. For the buildings that house 11 commercial tenants, the adjacent courtyard and brick pathways, the owners are asking $1.4 million.
The listing of the property is the latest in the local Baldwin family’s efforts to downsize the land holdings of the late Bob Baldwin Jr., who died in 2024.
The shops of Kings Yard include: Bonadies Glasstudio, Toxic Beauty Records and Poster Gallery, Yellow Springs Pottery, Village Herb Shoppe, Mirabella Boutique, Basho Apparel, Tibet Bazaar, Little Fairy Garden, Wildflower Boutique and House of Aum, as well as an office space leased by villager Jason Bailey. Presently, no storefront in the yard is vacant.
Selling the property for the Baldwin family is Irongate Inc. real estate agent Karen Huelsman, who earlier this year sold some of Baldwin’s other downtown properties — specifically, the former hardware and toy store buildings, which were bought by the YS Development Corporation.
Members of the Baldwin family trust declined to comment on their sale listing of Kings Yard, Huelsman told the News earlier this week. Huelsman did say, however, that the asking price may go down soon, but did not specify the amount.
The Kings Yard property amounts to 0.17 acres and is divided up among six parcels — three of which are small bits of land, or vestiges of past zoning; one is mostly asphalt frontage to House of Aum, and adjoins the parking lot; and the remaining two are business structures and the courtyard next to Ye Olde Trail Tavern. The buildings on the property amount to a total of more than 13,000 square feet.
Baldwin purchased the oblong structure of shops at 220 Xenia Ave. for $440,000 in 2010, and two years later, the adjoining buildings at 224 Xenia Ave. for $190,000.
In 2010, local resident and comedian Dave Chappelle won the bid for the shops when they were last on the market, but never closed the contract — that’s when Baldwin stepped in.
Baldwin was the son of Robert Baldwin Sr., who with a group of local leaders in the 1970s formed the Upland Corporation for the improvement of downtown, according to past News reporting. Upland purchased Kings Yard from Antioch Bookplate, and divided the building into multiple retail spaces.
“They thought downtown could use a shot in the arm and more retail space to accommodate these latest artists in town,” Baldwin said in a 2010 interview.
The longest anchors of the shops are Yellow Springs Pottery, which opened in 1973, and Bonadies, which opened in ‘76. The newest is Mirabella, which took over the space from Wander and Wonder earlier this summer.
For additional information on Kings Yard’s sale, go to http://www.loopnet.com and search for 220 Xenia Ave., or call Huelsman at 937-478-3410.
By Jonas Bahn
If you’re downtown on a Wednesday evening and see a group of people riding down the bike path, calling out to other cyclists to join them, you’ve likely just run across members of the recently founded Village Bicycle Club.
Tisa Braddy, an organizer for Dayton’s Don’t Tell Comedy, partnered with local entrepreneurs Dani and Mike Mortell, of Lark Overland, to found their own cycling event in Yellow Springs, inspired by the monthly Dayton Bike Meet. The group meets every second and fourth Wednesday of the month, at the train station.
“Dayton attracts a lot of people from outside Dayton. Their bike meetup is massive,” Dani Mortell told the News. “Maybe people in Springfield or Dayton will be looking for something to do, and they can come to Yellow Springs and meet the people who live here, and explore the town a little bit.”
Although they said they hope to attract people from all around the area, the organizers envisioned the Bike Club as a social event that both locals and newcomers to Yellow Springs could participate in.
“We’re focusing on bringing people together, doing something active outdoors. Just, you know, giving people a fun way to spend an afternoon,” Mortell said.
“It kind of turns into networking, also,” Braddy added. “Every ride there’s been somebody new. We learn about each other, what the other does, whether we’re from in the community or outside the community.”
In making these new connections, the Village Bicycle Club has been able to expand its scope. One of Braddy’s ideas for the club was to end each ride at a different business in town. At the end of the route, the cyclists have found themselves at Trail Town, Peach’s and the Yellow Springs Brewery on various days. The cyclists take this time to eat, drink and get to know one another.
“When you’re riding you may not talk to every person, but when you’re sitting and you’re stationary, a lot more conversations spring up,” Mortell said. “I feel like I’ve already met so many more people just from doing that.”
The route changes every meeting, but usually stays within town.
“We usually hit up the bike path, and then we’ll go a little bit through downtown,” Mortell said, “but a lot of it’s just the residential streets that are less busy, and more of a chill vibe.”
“Chill and informative,” Braddy said. “You may hear tidbits about some YS history along the way.”
The organizers said they’re aware of safety concerns raised about the group online after some noticed bikers in the club not wearing helmets during a recent ride. Though Ohio law doesn’t require standard bicycle riders of any age to wear helmets, the Village Bicycle Club does require minors to wear helmets, and participants are encouraged to keep safety in mind and protect themselves; all riders must sign a waiver before riding.
“We’ve encouraged folks to wear helmets,” Mortell said, “but we also respect that if you’re an adult going on a chill bike ride in the afternoon, it’s your choice to wear a helmet.”
The Village Bike Club is also putting out a call for volunteers, both to lead rides and to host and sponsor the post-ride hangout. Those interested in riding or volunteering can find more information on the Village Bicycle Club’s Facebook page, where they post details about their next rides, including the time and the route. Meeting times are also posted in the community calendar, in this very newspaper. The next ride is Wednesday, Aug. 12, 5:45 p.m., starting at Millworks.
People of all ages are welcome — just show up, and be ready to ride.
Contact: ysnews@ysnews.com
*Jonas Bahn is a freelance reporter for the News. He was the first recipient of the Lauren Heaton Scholarship Fund for Aspiring Journalists.
Last month, local residents might have noticed a group of young folks — conspicuously dressed in orange jumpsuits — hauling a bag of trash around Yellow Springs, unloading it, packing it back up and moving on.
They were the cast and crew of “Minimum Security,” a new, four-episode web series from MLQ Productions — the independent local film collaborative formed by Kian Barker and Miles Gilchrist in 2020 and peopled over the years by a growing cast and crew of friends.
The first episode of the series will landed Friday, July 31, on MLQ Productions’ YouTube channel, @mlqproductions, with subsequent episodes released weekly. A trailer is already available on the channel.
In speaking with the News, co-directors Barker and Kirby Kingsley said “Minimum Security” follows four prisoners assigned to an experimental community-service rehabilitation program. Each episode centers on a different member of the group, placing the characters in locations connected to their backstories.
The show’s central premise arose while Barker and several friends, including Gilchrist and Lili Herzog, were sitting at his house, kicking around ideas for a summer project.
“What if we did a show about prisoners doing community service?” Barker recalled asking.
From there, the group started dreaming up the characters who would eventually occupy the screen: Olive Cooper plays Macey, a self-centered pop star whose carelessness lands her in a jumpsuit alongside Gilchrist’s Philippe, a suave Frenchman with a secretive past; Barker’s Conrad, a former genetic researcher who carries a mason jar containing a bug he claims will someday take over the world; and Herzog’s Clementine, an alleged serial killer who, as it happens, becomes the group’s emotional center.
Keeping them all in line are correctional officer Bobby Orange, played by Kaiden McFarlane — and in her first film performance, local resident and chanteuse Jenny Gilchrist portrays the supervisor in charge of the program.
The directing duo said the comedy is deliberately unruly — its episodes include a “slightly deranged” ice cream shop manager played by Kingsley and, at one point, mimes — but, at its heart, it’s warmer than its premise might suggest. Barker cited James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Suicide Squad” films as tonal touchstones that feature outsized, troubled characters colliding comedically before resolving into a found-family dynamic.
“I think there’s a nice balance in the show of some edgy, chaotic comedy, and then there’s a heart at the center of it, which I think is what makes a lot of stories like that work,” he said. “I think [Minimum Security] is definitely very deeply rooted to the humanity of the characters.”
“It’s pretty wholesome,” Kingsley added. “The show is very focused on the relationships between the characters and how their friendships build.”
The series is the latest project from MLQ Productions, which began during the pandemic with the two-season web series “My Life in Quarantine,” from which the collaborative draws its name. The group has since produced the mockumentary series “The American Theatre,” the horror-drama “OTIS” and a number of experimental shorts and other works.
The majority of the cast and crew are young adults who attended or recently graduated from YS High School; Barker returned to town this summer fresh off his first year of film school at New York University. He said he’s learned a lot at NYU, and came home to the friends who helped shape his earliest films with a stronger grounding in story structure — particularly the demands of episodic comedy.
“We have to have these concise plots that have a satisfying resolution,” he said.
As the group’s longstanding showrunner, Barker had the final word on scripts and editing, but as always, with plenty of input from everyone else on set. Barker and Kingsley co-directed two episodes, and Kingsley and Herzog each directed an episode on their own.
“Geez, [Herzog] was so good at directing,” Kingsley said.
“She wrote the script for that episode and she did a wonderful job,” Barker added.
Kingsley — who also spent much of the shoot behind the camera while Barker appeared on-screen — said he first entered MLQ’s orbit several years ago after showing up as an extra on one of Barker’s school film projects. Barker handed him a script and asked him to feed actors their lines, and Kingsley soon found himself suggesting new takes and adjusting performances.
“I didn’t know that I loved directing until I just happened to, I guess, accidentally direct one of Kian’s films,” Kingsley said. “It was so fun, and I would love to keep directing in the future.”
Barker described Kingsley as a trusted second opinion — someone who’s primed to say when a take is good enough and, on the flip side, when the group could stand to run it once more for better results.
“[Directing] was really natural for him from day one,” Barker said.
Shared control at the helm ended up being necessary under the show’s compressed filming schedule: The series was written beginning in June and filmed in the first two weeks of July, with about 10 days of shooting after rain shortened the planned shoot by a few days. The production spread across the Corner Cone, WYSO’s Dayton Street space, Ellis Pond and the farm of the group’s former art teacher, Bill Neal, just outside the village.
As with MLQ projects past, “Minimum Security” remains something of a scrappy venture, the filmmakers said — the orange jumpsuits out in the wild at Ellis Pond, for example, made folks driving by look askance, though Barker said he did stop by the YS Police Department to let officers know what was up. Elsewhere, the cast and crew made do with what was on hand: they hauled around the same bag of prop trash, they duct-taped a camera to a car dashboard to catch Cooper’s mid-drive reactions and they filmed from the back of a truck as actors ran behind to pull off a moving shot.
“I think a lot of the fun of it is trying to find simple, practical solutions,” Barker said.
Barker said the makeshift, improvisational spirit of MLQ now exists alongside the technical knowledge he’s gained at NYU — training he was excited to carry back to the place where he first learned to make films.
“I really want to bring it back here and share it with my friends,” he said. “When I think about why I’m doing this, I think about Miles especially. I want everyone to see how great he is.”
For Kingsley’s part, he said he felt newly energized by the work and proud of what he and the pack of artists put together.
“I think everyone on this was so confident and so creative,” he said. “They just really blew me away with the talent that they have.”
Barker and Kingsley said working the MLQ way — independently of outside input, but open to inside input — enables the group to engage with ideas that might be rejected on a larger set. And it requires the filmmakers to decide for themselves where traditional structure ends and invention begins.
“It’s not just that we can make our own rules; we have to make our own rules,” Kingsley said.
“That’s where the magic happens, I think,” Barker added. “In the chaos.”
MEET YOUR NONPROFITS | This is the second in a series profiling the ongoing work of Yellow Springs-based nonprofit organizations.
By Alissa Paolella
When The 365 Project’s Black History Walking Tour reaches King’s Yard, Lila Crockett does not need her notecards. The storefront where Wildflower Boutique Yellow Springs stands today was once Rita Caz, a shop with a staircase full of guitars, a drum set in the corner and cases of handmade jewelry. It belonged to her grandfather, Mark Crockett. She was small when it closed. She is 17 now, and on select summer afternoons she stands on that block and tells visitors about a Black-owned business in Yellow Springs that happened to be her own family’s.
“It was a very fun store,” she said.
That short distance — between the history on the card and the teenager delivering it — is the whole idea behind The 365 Project’s walking tours, now in their 11th year.
The Yellow Springs nonprofit, founded in 2008 to preserve and celebrate the village’s African American history “365 days a year,” hands its tours almost entirely to young people, some recruited as early as sixth grade. They learn the streets, the names and the stories, and then they lead grown adults through them.
The tours are among the most public of the nonprofit organization’s efforts, which range from a community encyclopedia to oral-history recordings, Wheeling Gaunt Day and a hand in the village’s MLK Day, Juneteenth and Kwanzaa observances. The group also sponsors the Citizens’ Action Reparations Fund, now in its fifth year, moving money from villagers who want to give to Black residents who can use it.
Mayor Steve McQueen teaching Mills Lawn Elementary students about Wheeling Gaunt. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Taken together, the work of The 365 Project seems to repeat, for those who would hear, a question the village keeps asking itself as housing costs climb and its Black population thins: Who gets to stay in Yellow Springs?
In 1970, about 27% of Yellow Springs was Black, the result of a mid-century village that offered African American families affordable homes and comparatively open hiring. The 2020 census, by contrast, counted about 9% of the local population as Black, with nearly as many again identifying as more than one race. Kevin McGruder, The 365 Project’s treasurer and a history professor at Antioch College, said he sees the difference in the schools he helps bring tours to: classrooms of 20 or 25, often with only a few students of color.
The tour program was built, then, to involve those students in telling the story of local Black history, and make sure that story keeps being told. The program was modeled, in part, on that of a Cincinnati museum McGruder visited with then-board secretary, and current YS mayor, Steve McQueen and the late museum director Dr. John Fleming, where the three men encountered high school students who were paid to learn exhibits and work as docents. They thought the model was locally scalable — and Yellow Springs had no museum, so they made the village the exhibit.
Photo by Reilly Dixon
John Gudgel, a founding member and the organization’s president, whose family has been in Yellow Springs since the 1890s, recruits walking tour guides from inside the schools, where he has spent more than four decades. There are no auditions and no cuts, and the young guides are paid.
“We take anybody who has an interest,” he said, and the organization pairs newer guides with seasoned ones until they are ready to face a crowd. Two guides lead most tours.
Crockett was about 12 when Gudgel offered her the job, and said the draw for her, at first, was that the pay — $10 an hour to walk around and talk. She had severe stage fright until she was 12 or 13; the tours dissolved it. Now, she said, she’s the kind of student who picks the presentation over the essay, and has watched herself become the older guide, the one training children in her younger brother’s grade.
“I try to be really approachable and friendly, so that they know I’m not judging [them] for being younger,” Crockett said, adding that she remembers being the small one, nervous around anyone more than a few years older. “I think it’s a nice little statement about Yellow Springs, that they let the younger kids be in charge.”
In 2022, Gini Meekin led a group in a “Black Food Traditions” tour — part of a tour series hosted by The 365 Project — which focused on Black-owned businesses. Above, Meekin stood in front of the Winds Wine Cellar, a building that formerly housed two Black-owned restaruants, Cassano’s Pizza King and Gabby’s Barbecue. (Photo by Jessica Thomas)
What a guide learns on a corner, McGruder said, is not in any classroom: the geography of their own town, and the fact that you can walk down a street with no idea who lived in a house or what happened there. The tours make the case that the community’s character was built and maintained across generations — and, though the guides may not say it outright, keeping that character will take the same deliberate effort.
“If they want this to continue,” McGruder said, “they’ve got to do it intentionally.”
Preserving the record is the reason The 365 Project exists. Its centerpiece is a community encyclopedia, “Blacks in Yellow Springs,” assembled beginning in 2017 by a committee of elders — many then in their late 70s and 80s — and published in 2020, with supplements still being added.
McGruder said the documents historians rely on tend to be the ones saved by wealthy families; the lives of everyday people slip away unless someone writes them down. Much of this history, he said, lives only in memory, and he is now the only one conducting the oral-history interviews that capture it. Some people on his list died before he reached them.
This year, the walking tour project brought every Mills Lawn Elementary class through the story of Wheeling Gaunt, the formerly enslaved man who bought his freedom, grew wealthy in Yellow Springs and left the village a legacy still honored each winter — delivering flour and sugar to local widows and widowers. Gudgel said he now hears the youngest students volunteer that the park by the pool is named for Gaunt.
“We know it’s resonating,” Gudgel said.
If the tours are how the village remembers, the reparations fund is how some villagers try to make amends. Its lead donor is Susan Harrison, a retired elementary school teacher who is white and who, by her own insistence, controls none of how the money is spent. She started the fund after the summer of 2020, when she marched in 25 straight weeks of racial-justice rallies in the village and kept turning over one phrase.
“The battle cry was ‘do something,’” Harrison said. “So, what can I personally do?”
Antioch Professor of History Kevin McGruder, left, and lifelong Yellow Springs educator John Gudgel helped develop the “Blacks in Yellow Springs Encyclopedia,” highlighting the rich history of African Americans in the village. (Photo by Dylan Taylor-Lehman)
She took the idea to Gudgel and McGruder, who embraced it, and she was clear about why she did not wait for a larger authority before writing the first check in August 2020.
“If you wait for the government to do it, it can take forever and a day, and it’ll never happen,” she said.
She insisted from the start that she hold no say over recipients. A committee of Black residents makes those decisions, and applicants are asked for no proof of lineage or hardship.
“It’s in their hands. It is not in my hands, and it never was going to be,” she said. “I didn’t feel I had any right to do that.”
Harrison has given about $110,000 of her own money over five years, she said, and intends to keep giving “into perpetuity.” She moved out of Yellow Springs to nearby Xenia in 2021 and funds the village’s reparations effort from outside it.
In 2024, young guides Demarion Howard and Lila Crockett led participants on a Black history walking tour in Glen Forest Cemetery, stopping at the monument of Wheeling Gaunt. (News archive photo by Reilly Dixon)
McGruder, who frames the fund in the language of the wealth gap, puts the same point in historian’s terms. In the aggregate, he said, the net wealth of Black families in the United States runs to roughly a tenth of that of white families, a gap rooted in generations of enslavement, exclusion from postwar housing wealth and discriminatory lending. The fund, he said, asks white residents who benefited from that history to help Black neighbors who did not.
The money has bought and repaired used cars, retired medical debt, seeded small businesses and, McGruder said, helped residents get current on rent and utilities.
Giving tends to move in waves, rising when a letter to the editor or a newspaper insert reminds people it is there; Harrison recalled an early insert that brought in about $17,000 and, more recently, an appeal to past donors that raised roughly $11,000.
Whether any of this keeps Black families in Yellow Springs is a harder question, and no one at The 365 Project claims a clean answer. McGruder is careful to say retention is not the fund’s stated purpose, though grants toward rent and utilities have, in practice, helped people hold on. He is equally careful about the tours, which have shifted over the years from mostly Black guides to an increasingly white group as the village has changed — a development he views, glass half full, as one that sends young allies back to their friends with a history they might not otherwise hear.
Lila Crockett said she traces her own future path — toward art history and, she hopes, a museum somewhere — directly to the tours. She may carry this history somewhere else.
What young guides take with them, Gudgel said, is “a sense of community and giving back and empathy,” whether they remain in Yellow Springs or not. Crockett, he added, “typifies what I’m hearing from guides as they get older.”
The real test for the organization, though, is in its own succession: Gudgel and McGruder have carried much of its work for close to two decades, and both wondered where the project will be in another 10 or 15 years without new people who feel the same urgency.
Their answer, for now, is the children — the seventh-graders Crockett is coaching, the kindergartners who already know Gaunt’s name.
This season’s last tour, Saturday, Sept. 12, is“Wheeling Gaunt’s Yellow Springs,” and it coincides with the annual Wheeling Gaunt Day. The tours are free, and they begin, most days, at Mills Park Hotel, where a group of adults gathers on the sidewalk and waits for a teenager to tell them where they are.
The Sept. 12 walking tour will begin at the Wheeling Gaunt statute at the Yellow Springs Train Station, 101 Dayton St. For more information about The 365 Project, visit the365projectys.org.
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