Daytons destruction

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Daytons destruction

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jsustik 1 post 29-May-2008 12:19 PM	What happened here? Dayton used to be a safe,clean place to raise a family.Why and how did we let it get this way?You cant go downtown any more and feel safe.I used to love taking my children to Elderbeermans at Christmas to see the tree and the lights.Now Id be afarid to walk out my front door.
jsustik 2 post s 29-May-2008 12:24 PM	My mother and I both attended Colonel White High School,Do you how I can find our year books?Also there was a race riot there in 1967 and I was wondering how and where I can find the news clippings.
SorghumGrass 1 post 30-May-2008 1:02 PM	Contact the Dayton Metro Library at history@daytonmetrolibrary.org for information on the race riots.
SorghumGrass 2 post s 30-May-2008 1:08 PM	The Dayton Metro Library has Colonel White High School annuals for 1977, 1978, 1999, and 2002. Contact the library at history @ daytonmetrolibrary.org
AllenN71 3 post s 30-May-2008 10:29 PM	I believe what we are seeing in Dayton iss the product of the failure of community. People have been yapping about "diversity" for so long that they have failed to see that ther may come a time that we got so diverse that we wouldn't have anything in common on which to build and/or sustain a community. Now, diversity is a good thing overall; and so is, oh, say, food and drink. but too much of either leads to problems. Anybody remember the "Welcome Wagon"?? A couple of folks would visit a new arrival with a basket of goodies and have a chat with the newbies. This accomplished 3 things: (1) Howdy, neighbor! Good to know ya! (2)The newcomer was informed of various aspects of the community and his part in it and (3) If the neighborhood had a nut case on its hands, forewarned was forearmed. Nowadays nobody really wants to much chat with anybodey outside their clique (that dang overdose of diversity, among other factors). One of the posters over on the 60s/70s thread said it was because the money and the jobs left. Yeah, Frigidaire and Delco and Airtemp left before I got out of HS in '71; and of course NCR is looking not much better than my dad did in mid April (he passed on on March 2). But this just begs the questrion of why these businesses passed away or left and why others did not rise to fill the gap. As to why these businesses left, therehis not enough space on this site to discuss it fully but unionsn being too grabby probably had more than a bit to do with it; not that I would discount or excuse inept management, etc. More important is why the city where two bicycle repairmen taught the human race to fly cant marshall the brains and brawn of its entire yeomanry to lift the city up out of the - words fail me - decay it has fallen into. "Profit is not a dirty word in Ohio" was a political slogan back in the late '60s. One reason that things are so good here in Northern VA is that the State government at least mostly stays the hell outta the way of folks who want to write paychecks and constrains local government from raping business and killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. As I sit here looking out my window ont King Sreet in Old Town Alexandria, where new businesses are started all the time by folks who have to spend lots more than they would in Dayton, I realize that I am really looking at what Dayton once was and could be again, If the spirit of the Wright Brothers still remains. As it is, the ghost of John Patterson weeps not so much for NCR but for the beloved hometown that he helped bring through the flood. There is a wealth in Dayton waiting to be bought to life and exploited and increased by some savvy souls, I know it. We are - YOU ALL ARE - Midwesterners, dammit! We're the heart of the heartland and (once again) the reason people fly over Dayton is that Dayton put them in the planes to begin with!! Any time somebody puts Dayton down I wanna ring a bicycle bell in his face! But this all has to begin with getting to know aand care about your neighborhood. Twenty minutes at an ice cream social (remember those?) will tell you more about what needs attention in your community and come up with more possible solutions than listening to twenty college-educated idiots prattle about Cuber and Durkheim ever could, would, or will. And I am here to tell you that until somebody resurrects the social infrastructure, the good Ship Dayton will continue to founder. Please wake up, my hometown.
JeffN 139 post s 31-May-2008 12:11 PM	I can remember my mom and dad talking about how wonderful Dayton was in the 40s and 50s, and how crime, etc., was ruining it ... and that was over 30 years ago, when I was growing up in the 70s.
Ptom 1 post 10-Jun-2008 11:41 AM	"What happened here? Dayton used to be a safe,clean place to raise a family." And the very next post you mention the race riots in 1967. Which is it? Was it safe back then, despite the rioting? But it's dangerous now, with no rioting at all? Memories are odd.
AllenN71 20 post s 10-Jun-2008 2:11 PM	Ptom, what is going on in Dayton right now IS a riot; its just in slow motion. It has driven Dayton's retail core right out of the city among other things. Heck if Rikes had moved out to Huber Heights like Elder Beerman did they might still be around. I don't want to sound harsh but you sound like one of nthose young whippersnappers who would rather make smart remarks than confront the real problems of culture and community that are at the core of this mess. I thank God that Ohio honors my Virginia concealed carry permit, because when Im in town I know that if I get a flat tire in the city my Walther ppk is handy.
Ptom 2 post s 11-Jun-2008 6:10 AM	I'm downtown every day and feel quite safe, thankyouverymuch. The OP's comment wasn't about vanishing retail, it was about 'feeling safe' My point was those 'good old days' included race riots and violent crime - so how good were they really?
AllenN71 21 post s 11-Jun-2008 7:22 AM	Ptom, I apologize for insinuating that you might just be a smart-aleck, I am quite certain that you love our hometown and think Dayton is getting a bad rap. But I re-iterate that there is a riot in Dayton; it's just not a race riot and is taking place in slow motion. Lack of retail makes for empty streets and lack of witnesses are a thug's best freind. You waqlk the streets of Dayton in the daytime, before the crackheads and whores come out. Oh,to be sure in the daytime that little PPK stays in the trunk mostly (carrying a firearm can be a pain in the ass) but in the nighttime J.J. - that's her name, for "jammin Jenny" which she was before I had her gunsmithed - is a comfort. Check the per-capita crime stats (I believe the Dayton PD has them available) from say 1969 to 1970 and compare them with what they are today and if nthose don't show thatn Dayton is more dangerous now, I will figuratively eat my words.
Ptom 3 post s 11-Jun-2008 7:30 AM	Oh I am a smart-aleck, that's for sure. I just found those 2 messages, adjacent to one another, rather amusing.
couldnthititsideways 4 post s 11-Jul-2008 12:00 AM	If I remember correctly, better get your word eatin bib on... I remember in the late 60's that Dayton BEAT Detroit for most murders per capita in the United States... the sixties were the heyday of the "Bill Steppe Gang" in Belmont, and the "Brown Street Gang" in South Park...these were both started as gangs of youths who got into a lot of fistfights...then many of them got guns, then they branched out in to criminal enterprises...I lived in the East Side and was afraid of the West Side, and went to school with black kids who told me they were scared to death of the East Side... in the early 70's the "Dayton Crime Family," a loose conglomeration of 20-30 people were in the rural bank robbery business, to finance their heroin addiction-of course the drugs were bought and sold in Dayton...during the heroin epidemic of the late sixties, robbery was the way to finance heroin habits-one of the novel ideas being that of getting on a bus, robbing the bus driver, then casually getting off at the next stop...East 5th close to downtown (The "Oregon" District) and out to about Linden was always ROUGH-so were other parts of the East Side; Valley Street area and other parts of North Dayton were ROUGH (I had cousins that lived in Parkside Homes when it was ALL WHITE-and I was scared to death to go near the place!); the West Side was ROUGH; unfortunately, areas that Daytonians always knew were ROUGH and therefore stayed away from expanded, and they expanded when jobs were lost, and when neighborhoods where workingfolk lived turned into neighborhoods where people without jobs lived. Dayton has simply followed every other medium to large city in the rust belt-jobs are lost do to changing economic and business patterns; the cities decline; the jobs are NOT replaced becasue WHAT companies want to locate in a declining city? There is a photo blog about Dayton somewhere on the Internet-photos from both East and West Sides-makes Dayon look very very bad-but, that is how it is! Of course drugs have played their part-but when fortunes decline, there are no jobs, etc., people are going to use drugs-period! And Dayton has ALWAYS been a BIG drug town! I have talked to guys that were using heroin in Dayton in the 1940's and 1950's!!! Supposedly, the original 1964 race riots were started by a member of the Brown Street gang who was in a crime deal that turned sour with a guy from the West Side-so he went and did a drive by shooting on his former partner on a busy street in the West Side-everybody saw the shooter was white, and thats how the riot started. So, you know-now, then, six of one, half a dozen of the other-if it aint alcohol its drugs, if it aint drugs its alcohol, if it aint guns it fists and bats, if it aint fists and bats its guns, the poor and unemployed get to a frustration level that says we cant go on like this, and this stuff happens. EVERYWHERE in the USA~ Last Edited on 11-Jul-2008 12:04 AM
AllenN71 38 post s 12-Jul-2008 12:46 AM	Hey "chis" (awkward but folks call me "Allen" on these threads. How bout we call you "Chris" for short?) But whatever. anyway there are a couple things about crime, and you have to do here with a former military crriminal investigator; and I also hold an Associates Degree in Criminal Justice Administration. Since you are not a random smart-aleck but a serious poster who loves our home town let me clue you in; There are two kinds of crime rate: The statistical per-capita crime rate and the crime rate that people percieve. So you might have a city of 100,000 people. Of these, 10,000 live in an area where 3,000 violent crimes and 2,000 burglaries take place every year. So the liklihood of being a victim of rape, robbery or burglary is even money for 10% of the city, or 50/50 odds (and apologies to Ruth Lyons) that you will be a victim if you live in that part of the city. But if the majority enjoyn a relatively low crime rate of say 4 or 5 %, then for most of the city crime is low except for the pockets of crime that every large gathering of folks from time immemorial have had to deal with. And most of the folks feel safe. However. Let the incidence of say gas-station hold ups or muggings increse by only three or four incidents a year and it will cause the folks in the "safe" neighborhoods to raise hell. The percieved crime rate has in thier eyes (which is why it,s called the "percieved" crime rate) gone way up. On the other hand, if the police by ttheir very best efforts have lowered the incidence of crime to 35% in the "bad part" of town, that is still quiote high and the response nwill be "Po-Lice ai'nt do nothin' for us". Now for all of this it doesn't matter what side of town you are on if you are walking down the street and get attacked by a thug. The over all crime rate could be half of a percent but for you at that moment the percieved crime rate is exactly one hundred percent. Capische, Paisan? Yeah I know about Bill Stepp and his bunch. Check my posts and a few others over on the 60/70 thread. But organized hoods at least back in the day didn't prey on the common folk for fear of the common folk's wrath. Nobody really caares if a strip club owner gets ripped off in an extortion scheme (and I asked this on the other thread but what DID become of Bill Stepp and his gang of idiots?) What most folks fear is the guy you described in your post on the other thread with the chain. If Bill Stepp had headed a gang that did street robberies he'd have wound up in prison so fast it would have nmade his head swim. Anyway I haven' even sent that word-bib to the drycleaners yet. As I told "ptom": consult the Dayton Police crime stats and if they do not beart me out, then please pass the ketchup.
couldnthititsideways 11 post s 15-Jul-2008 6:45 PM	Allen, yep, I get what yer sayin! Several years back (dont remember exactly WHAT year) there was quite a bit of stuff in the newspapers about Bill Stepp-he had been arrested for dogfighting, if I remember this correctly-perhaps more than once-and every time he was supposed to show up in court, he would "have" to be rushed to the hospital due to his "medical condition." When he finally did get to court, his lawyers said he was not able to testify due to his mental condition (I dont remeber if they said he had alzheimers, or simply "dementia," "senility," whatever-unfortunately, I dont remember the outcome of all that-but if he was as half as bad as thewy were claiming at the time, he is probably deceased by now. I think he would probably be in his 70's-anyway, un the late 70's, I knew this guy called "Old Man Eddie" who was a card shark, who was supposedly "employed" by Bill Stepp as a card dealer in crooked games-at least, this is what this guy claimed... Back to the guy with the chain-this guy didnt exactly go after the "man on the street," but only "UD Students," which, in the neighborhood around UD, were not seen as an innocent bunch-they were looked at as a bunch of arrogant New Yorkers (many UD students were from N.Y.) who came to Dayton, thought they had landed in some hick town, and proceeded to commit depradation after depradation upon Dayton and its citizens, and saw the "Brown St gang" that continually fought with the UD students as a sort of group of frisky young men who were being insulted and attacked in their own neighborhoods by the arrogant New York "punks"! It seems once a Brown t guy got the crap beat out of him by some UD students-EVERYBODY knew it was UD students that beat this guy up-although he had probably beat UD students in the past, he was very vocally defended in the neighborhoods, but the chancellor of UD was in the Dayton Daily News claiming those who beat him could not have POSSIBLY been UD students, as UD students were little Catholic Angels who never committed wrong! The Dayton Police investighated, of course, but I dont thin anything ever came of any of it~ it was surprising how naive the Chancellor (I think it was Rev. Roush) of a University the size of UD was regarding the behavior of his students when they were out of class! He seriously believed they were incapable of doing wrong!