By Rachel Sayers
For some former Bobcats, the mere memory of Athens is enough, but for some local business owners graduation wasn’t the sign to leave.
Many of the current owners of Court Street’s distinctive eateries decided to take root in their college town and have enjoyed familiar surroundings as their businesses grow.
“There’s something about when you drive back and see the (Ohio University) campus,” Fluff owner and 1999 alumna Jessica Kopelwitz said. “It just kind of brings me to life.”
After hearing a few of her former classmates had purchased Court Street businesses, Kopelwitz decided to return to Athens and do the same. In 2010, she opened Fluff, an Uptown bakery specializing in homemade baked goods.
“As alumni, it’s kind of nice to just stay in town,” explained Brenen’s owner Josh Thomas. “At just 24 years old I owned a business on Court Street. It was pretty cool.”
Thomas, who earned a Food Service and Management degree from OU in 1997, runs the café with his wife Jessica, an avid baker and fellow alumna.
“I just never left,” Thomas said. “I started as manager the day of graduation, and I bought the place three years later.”
Lenny and Megan Meyer, owners of Bagel Street Deli, have a similar story. The couple graduated from OU during the late ’90s with degrees in education.
However, after years of working at Bagel Street they found they simply couldn’t stand to watch the business go.
“It was either buy the place or watch it go under,” Lenny Meyer said.
They chose to buy it.
The feeling that kept these Bobcats right here in Athens also happens to be one of the reasons thousands of alumni flood Ohio University’s campus every year.
“All these different people coming from different places and being thrown together into a mish-mash small town,” Kopelwitz said. “It’s magic.”
rs289910@ohiou.edu
