Dayton Diary: Special delivery

When my husband and I first moved to Dayton in 2009, we were eager to buy our first house. We wanted an older home — not a new build or something cookie-cutter — one with character and a story. Big windows, wood floors, maybe a bathroom that needed a little fixing up.

We honed in on campus-adjacent Oakwood. One of the first homes our real estate agent scheduled was on Irving Avenue. I wasn’t thrilled about the busy street, the neighbor’s porch littered with beer cans or the tall residence hall (Campus South) across the street.

But the house itself was nearly perfect — three bedrooms, one upstairs bathroom with a lavender bathtub, a big kitchen and a bright sunroom. In the backyard, we found something unusual — a second mailbox.

Just off the sunroom door, leading to the white-picket fenced yard, was a long, slender mailbox — the kind that would fit a rolled-up newspaper. But our agent said it wasn’t for a Dayton Daily News subscription.

The sellers, an older couple moving closer to grandchildren, shared that the husband was a former UD professor. He had his students walk a few blocks and turn in their term papers in that backyard mailbox. The sunroom was his office.

The house had character, alright — and what a story.

We ended up buying another house, but that small detail stuck with me for years. As we made Dayton our home, that feeling never quite left and when I was offered a job at UD Magazine, it didn’t feel like a new beginning, but more like a return to something I already knew.

I’ve never found out who the professor was or if that story was real; our real estate agent was probably just trying to make a sale. 

But I sure hope it was.

Illustration by Dan Zettwoch

“Dayton Diary” is a series of short, personal UD stories: quirky encounters, lighthearted moments or heartwarming snippets. Why not write one yourself and send it (up to 300 words) to magazine@udayton.edu. Put “Dayton Diary” in the subject line.

A version of this article appears in print in the Summer 2026 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 35. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE