I think sometimes the nicest people in the world migrated from the East and the West and landed in Ohio, a world of gracious and loving people (yes, I know, not only that) from my odd perspective. Dayton is a powerful dose of another reality, a city that gave itself over time and again to powerful companies that abandoned the city and left it feeling hollow, empty and in struggle.

My book appearance is at Books & Co. in the suburbs as there has not been a bookstore in Dayton for many years. What there is are staggering corporate ghosts, monuments to  corporate culture with no ethics other than profit, no loyalty to a community that served powerful companies so well and for so long, and no responsibility for the people they leave behind and the lives that are shattered. I drove by the vast and abandoned GM plant in Moreau (a Chevy parts assembly plant, above) and then the abandoned National Cash Register Co campus, abandoned two years ago for cheaper labor in the South and elsewhere.

There is not much left of Dayton and it touches the heart. I’d love to come back and take some more photos of the places that speak to this city the world seems to have left behind.