This week’s column was supposed to be a celebration. A celebration of a wonderful little toy store in a joyful Midwestern town. A store that, heartbreakingly, is scheduled to close the week after Christmas. But circumstances intervened.
Yellow Springs, Ohio, is the kind of place that makes you smile the moment you step onto its main street. The kind of Main Street Generation X—and every generation before us—assumed would always exist. The kind that, to my children’s generation, now feels less like a living place and more like a memory: something America once built everywhere, and now struggles to protect anywhere.
For decades, Yellow Springs resisted the fate that hollowed out so many towns like it. Its downtown endured in large part because of Antioch College, the pathbreaking liberal arts school founded by 19th-century education reformer Horace Mann. Mann believed deeply in education. He did not believe in endowments. The result is a college that still stands for bold ideas, even as it has struggled financially in recent years.
The town itself has fared better. Not by accident. In no small part because Dave Chappelle invested in it—not just money, but belief. Belief that culture matters. That joy matters. Those small towns are worth loving. Even as he mourns the loss of a beloved local store, he continues to pour his presence, his resources, and his faith into keeping the town alive.
Recently, I was back in town to see Dave perform at his new club. My parents helped recruit his father to teach at Antioch in the late 1960s. So, this place has always felt personal. Rooted. Shared.
We were talking in a local coffee shop when Jamie Sharp walked in. She owns the Yellow Springs Toy Company, the store that has probably generated more smiles than any other place on the block. The kind of store that feels like childhood made visible. Wooden toys. Books. Games. Objects chosen with care. A place that invites wonder instead of noise.
Jamie told us she was closing the store. I asked why. I thought of the last time I took my son there. He loved it. Everyone did. You could feel it in the room. The quiet joy that comes from a place built not to extract, but to give.
Jamie did not speak in abstractions. She spoke plainly. Tariffs had raised costs. Online giants had tightened margins. And then she said the thing that mattered most. People just do not seem to have as much money this year.
But what stayed with me was what she did not say. This was not surrender. This was not bitterness. Dave told her to stay in touch. And it was clear she is an entrepreneur who loves her town—someone closing one chapter, not abandoning the story. Home still matters. And this is almost certainly not her last act.
That understanding traveled with me.
After I returned home, I spoke with a friend who owns a paddleboard factory in Florida. Orders still come in for their most expensive models, the ones bought by people with yachts. But the middle is gone. The heart of his business has vanished. He named the paddleboard and kayak companies that have failed as middle-class families quietly pull back from anything that feels optional.
