You So Pretty

Cache Owner bennet mysteriously directs us to You So Pretty, adding that this cache will indeed be attractive. Get it? Magnetic, attractive? The hunt in store for us promises to be bodacious.

Cruising across the Great Miami River, our tires take us into the West Side. Historical decades of segregation and discrimination have driven high unemployment, poor housing, and disconnection to government, both political and law enforcement.

Blacks and whites from Kentucky poured into Dayton during the Great Migration, looking for jobs in the industrial super engine of World War I. Black migrants were escaping racial targeting in the South. At the same time, many white Kentuckians brought a deeply rooted anger toward  integration of persons they viewed as place-holders, immutably below them, in the great social pyramid.

In this boiling cauldron, Lester Mitchell was sweeping his sidewalk on West Fifth in 1966, when he was shot and killed by a white motorist. Protest riots shook the city. With 96 per cent of Dayton’s Black community living in segregated housing, rioting and damage in West Dayton raged to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Over the next 10 years, a serial killer executed over 30 drive-by shootings of Black men. The killer’s final target was the white university expert negotiating the busing of school children to integrated schools. Upon his arrest, the killer justified his own perceived role as the protector of white children.

With quiet contemplation, we pause on West Fifth Street. Before us is the Miami Valley Housing Opportunities Center. The former YMCA, this venerable brick building served the Black men of the community with mentorship and vocational training for 100 years. Today, dedicated community individuals operate the Opportunity Center from this monarch of buildings, creating permanent housing solutions for people in need.

Down the road, the Miami Valley Child Development Center works with both children and their caregivers to implement resources and training for upward mobility. On this scene of rage and carnage fifty years ago, now prevails the strength of people who see life as an elevator, where everyone who gets on goes up, rather than a pyramid, where the bottom is big and the top is small.

Our GPS moves us onward, to . . . a fence. A lot of fence.

A prodigious concrete field stretches out beyond. Industrial warehouses loading tools, parts, products, and commodities onto trucks, bound for trains, tiptoe by, phantoms of a time now gone.

We walk up and down, no muggle problems here, for sure. We look too poor to be mugged, right? Cranial protoplasm bubbles. Where is the one piece of metal that could shelter a cache for 15 years?

Turning homeward, fading strains echo in the sunset anthem.