The Hungarian Program: lost ethnic Dayton.

It was both Findlay Market and the Appalachian festival yesterday.
For some pix of wonderful Findlay Market click here.

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Some people (probably most people) go to church on Sunday morning. I listen to the three hour Hungarian Program on 89.5 FM. I'm not Hungarian ancestry and can't understand a word of it. But it is sort of a audio window onto a different culture, and the music is pleasant enough. There is a guy and a gal doing the programming and the guy can speak Hungarian, which he does while announcing songs and so forth. The show is broken into three segments, more folk stuff, sometimes light opera, and modern Hungarian pop .

It is somewhat melancholy listening to the show, though, to the announcements, and to think this was once a geographical community, concentrated in two city neighborhoods. The West Side neighborhood was the strongest, it seems, with a two or three churches, as well as stores, bakeries, and restaurants. I did an analyses of it via pix and maps, recreating this lost ethnic world. You can visit this lost bit of the city at Magyar Dayton.

The Hungarian neighborhoods dissolved away with time an assimilation, people became Americanized, and moved to the suburbs after WWII (thought this was already happening in the 1920s).

There are no Hungarian food stores, bakeries, or restaurants anymore in the Dayton area. Just two churches and this radio show.