Mickey Hart for Athens: Glimpses of Home

What one man builds, another calls it home
By Jenaye Antonuccio (photo by Sherry DiBari)

From the beginning, Mickey Hart has looked at the bigger picture.
“I see myself as a generalist,” says Hart, the director of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center on campus. “And I like working to improve the quality of life with whatever group I’m connected with.”
Whether managing his previously-owned restaurant; playing euchre at card tables with patients of the now-closed Athens Mental Health Center; overseeing life in concrete-blocked rooms of the residence halls; chatting inside the third floor LGBT Center in Baker; or stripping 50-year-old wallpaper off the walls of his own house, his lasting impact is to build comfortable points of connection to which anyone can return.
He keeps a few goals in mind: service to others; hospitality; and leaving things better than the state in which it was found.
Hart was born and raised in the beautiful backyard of tourist-attracting Hocking Hills, in Laurelville. Small town life fostered tight-knit social gatherings, of which Hart was an observer. “In a really small town,” Hart says, “businesses and restaurants can be a community building piece.”
Fresh out of high school, the future before him, with no encouragement to go further, he began work at Bob Evans. He hosted, bussed tables, and worked the kitchen area and out front, fully servicing customers. “I enjoyed it,” says Hart, “because I got to see all parts of the operation.”
When asked to consider becoming manager, he took his knowledge of restaurant operation and invested in an un-leased business. Hart formed a business partnership with his former school bus driver, and Sue and Mic’s Village Café came to life. A mom and pop hometown diner, its specialties were homemade comfort food. Owning it gave Hart awareness of his ability and power to serve others’ needs. “Everyone that hadn’t really worked much, I employed lots of those people,” says Hart. “(The restaurant) makes people happy, but it’s also (serves) as a community-organizer.”
After five years, Hart admitted it was time to leave the business and pursue his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts painting. The restaurant, renamed The Village Café once Hart’s monetary interests were removed, still runs strong. Hart’s mother is manager, and partners with his former partner. Hart continues to design menus and create specialty items such as sandwiches, salads and sauces.
Athens became home for Hart as soon as he arrived in the fall of 1990. He lived in the Athens Mental Health Center during the final two years of its Resident Volunteer program, making lifelong friends and learning to play euchre, pool, and talk with people no matter what their background.
“I’ve always done some kind of giving back work,” says Hart, “to help people out.” He also served as Resident Director in the dorms, with Teen Institute in peer leadership for substance abuse prevention, with Health Recovery Services coordinating retreats, and served on the board of Equality Ohio, and organization promoting equal rights of LGBT Ohioans. For the first time, Hart has decided to take a two-year sabbatical from devoting himself to any volunteer work, giving him time to renovate his home.
“A lot of the work I try to do is to create community,” says Hart. As director of the LGBT center, he focuses on being welcoming. “I try to make it feel like a home. My vision is that it’s the LGBT living room on campus.” In all his responsibilities, he pulls from both administrative and creative sides of himself. From making posters for the “Faces of Pride” every quarter, to organizing social and educational events, to creating table settings for the pride graduation events, he calls himself the glue. “Because the university population is always changing, someone needed to be here to be the glue, to hold the community together for the LGBT people,” Hart says. “I don’t think I hold it completely together, but it’s a binding thing and a lot of other people add to that.”
Hart believes Ohio University and Athens’ strong point is friendliness towards LGBT and Allied people. Hart stresses for students to always be aware of their surroundings, and thinking of ways they can positively give back to the local community. One specific way of making students aware is by archiving: clipping and saving posters and fliers, cataloguing history of LGBT issues on campus and in Athens. “Creating context helps students understand what came before, what they can build on, what may not have worked then but may work now, what may never work, and some things that work no matter what.”
Hart grieves the loss of personable-ness and small-school feel with recent changes to Athens and the university. “We had a big boom thirty years ago and now we have this wave of retirement happening. We have new administration in the upper levels and we’ve lost a lot of institutional memory,” he says. “We’re weathering a lot of change all at once.” He is also concerned about the imbalance between increase of students and decrease in faculty and staff. According to Hart, this affects the economy of Athens. “It’s been nice to see new business come to town,” says Hart, “but we lose what is uniquely Athens as we get more mainstream.”
Hart would like anyone to avoid “traveling a path”, cycling only through the path from home to work and back, keeping options limited. Better navigation comes when connected in many areas. In his opinion, one opportunity for involvement is often overlooked: United Campus Ministries. UCM’s mission is to engage the Ohio University and Athens communities, and has been an incubator for some such organizations as My Sister's Place, Careline, Appalachian Peace and Justice Network, Athens AIDS Task Force, River Valley Community School, and Southeastern Ohio Foodbank.
In his spare time, Hart hunts mushrooms with his 78-year-old grandmother, whom recently bagged over 6 pounds of the fungus. He says he’s slowing down a bit, and reflects on what is important. Of missing time for artwork, he says, “I’d like to make some beautiful things and add beauty to the world that way.”
“In Athens,” he says, “you have to get comfortable with people coming into your life, staying a few years, and then moving on.” These cycles are difficult, but part of the way of life here. He feels Athens is a safe and comfortable place overall. On sharing the same name as the famous drummer from the Grateful Dead, he says: “I am Mickey. My legal name is Michael, but from day one I was Mickey.”
Considering the big picture, Athens should be grateful for its own Mickey Hart.