oregano. It smells like spaghetti sauce, so it goes in spaghetti sauce.’ We would smell things to figure out what they would go into.”

Mary was always the girl who sold the most during fundraisers. She sold her own pies to kids in high school and used the proceeds from her sales to buy trees to grow the fruit she and her family would use in their baking and cooking. The vegetables that she used in her baked goods, which she and her mother sold, then would buy more seeds and plants to keep the cycle going, making a profit along the way.

The bakery itself is quite cozy. It sits around 40 people and Mary has made a real effort to help out her fellow merchants. She stays openlate some evenings to host small concerts and for the Akron Artwalk, which runs every first Saturday of the month.

Changing course

Life in Downtown Akron might have been quite different if she had followed her original career path. Mary had an appointment to the Air Force Academy but decided against attending after she broke her collar bone two weeks before basic training when she took down a nearly 300-pound man during an ROTC training exercise.

She also studied Microbiology and Russian in college. In 2004 she was working with women who also liked to bake. “We heard a lot of people in the office talking about how they were working so much they couldn’t bake cookies and cakes for their families and I was like ‘Hmm, maybe we can supplement