Around and around they go. Where they exit, nobody knows.

On an average day, more than 45,000 vehicles pass through Tallmadge Circle. Daring motorists wait their turn to go for a whirl on the eight-spoke intersection, dodging traffic as it rushes counterclockwise in a never-ending loop.

If drivers miss their exit — a common occurrence — they wheel around as many times as necessary until they find the right road.

At some point, a motorist must wonder: Why?

Why was the intersection built? Who designed it? And what the heck was he thinking?

The answers go back more than 200 years. With all due respect to geometry, the circle used to be a square.

Tallmadge began as Town 2, Range 10, of the Western Reserve. New England surveyors Amzi Atwater and Wareham Sheppard mapped out the thickly wooded territory for the Connecticut Land Co. in 1797.

One of the first settlers was the Rev. David Bacon (1771-1817), a Puritan missionary from Woodstock, Conn., who moved to Ohio after spending five years in Michigan trying to convert Indians to Christianity.

According to Akron historian Samuel A. Lane: “Mr. Bacon conceived the idea of founding, in the wilds of Ohio, a community that should be in full sympathy with his own unswerving orthodox religious notions — a sort of Ecclesiastical Utopia — to be conducted upon, and governed by, a strictly moral and spiritual code of ethics.”

He arranged to buy 12,000 acres from landowners at $1.50 an acre for the founding of a religious colony. Connecticut businessmen served as brokers of the deal, which was expected to be paid off in three years.

Bacon named the town for Col. Benjamin Tallmadge, a spy master for George Washington during the Revolutionary War, who owned 5,611 acres but never actually lived there.

After securing the property in 1806, Bacon immediately hired Seth I. Ensign of Connecticut to resurvey it.

Bacon envisioned a 7½-acre public square with a church and schoolhouse in a swampy area at the center of town. Jutting out from the square would be eight roads — 66 feet wide at 45-degree angles — corresponding to the eight true directions of a compass.

From above, Tallmadge must have been a heavenly sight when it was founded in 1807.

In every direction

According to Akron historian Oscar Eugene Olin: “He had roads laid out north and south and east and west to the middle of the township lines, and diagonal roads to each corner, giving a system of eight straight roads radiating from the ‘square’ to all parts of the township. His idea was to give every one easy access to the church, which was to be the center of the colony.”

To this day, the avenues of Tallmadge Circle bear the names North, South, East, West, Northeast, Northwest, Southwest and Southeast, making it fairly difficult for drivers to get lost as long as they know which road they are traveling.

A guidepost on the public square helped early travelers find their bearings. The unusual sign had eight fingers pointing in eight directions with the names of 20 or so destinations. It became a point of amusement for out-of-towners.

“It is related that one day the people living about the square were attracted by loud and repeated peals of laughter and on looking out of their doors and windows discovered a stranger rolling upon the ground, near the guide-board, indulging in the most extravagant contortions and paroxysms of laughter,” Lane wrote in his 1892 book Fifty Years and Over of Akron and Summit County.

“He was soon surrounded by quite a crowd, who, from his hilarious antics and prolonged and vigorous guffaws, thought the stranger must have been taken suddenly crazy. After awhile, in response to their anxious inquiries, he raised himself on end and replied: ‘I’ve often heard (ha! ha! ha!) of the (ho! ho! ho!) center of creation (hi! hi! hi!) but I never expected to (he! he! he!) see it — and now (ha! ha! ha!) I’ve got there!’ ”

Founding of church

In 1809, nine settlers gathered in Bacon’s log cabin to organize the Church of Christ in Tallmadge. The cabin was situated on present-day East Park Boulevard near Newton Street in Akron.

In the fledgling town, Bacon wanted land sales to be restricted to people of the Calvinist faith, so deeds required residents to support the church by paying $2 per year for every 100 acres. Through the land tax, Bacon expected to fulfill his contract with the Connecticut businessmen.

“Public spirit, local pride, friendly intercourse, general culture and good taste, and a certain moral and religious steadfastness are among the characteristics by which Tallmadge is almost proverbially distinguished throughout the Reserve,” Bacon wrote. “No observing stranger can pass through the town without seeing that it was planned by a sagacious and far-seeing mind.”

Unfortunately for Bacon, a court overturned the land tax in 1811 after settlers objected. He no longer could pay off his creditors in New England. When the War of 1812 intervened, all hopes for a religious colony were dashed.

A crestfallen Bacon moved his family back to Connecticut, where he died five years later in Hartford.

The wheel that he designed continued to spin. A new landmark rose at its hub.

Work was completed in 1825 on the First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, whose congregation formed in Bacon’s cabin. The historical landmark remains the center of town — just as Bacon had wished.

“To this day, the good effects of this primitive establishment of religion and order is plainly visible among this people and their posterity, and will no doubt exhibit them through all time,” wrote Charles Whittle­sey in A Sketch of the Settlement and Progress of the Township of Tallmadge (1842).

The corners of the public square rounded with time. Tallmadge’s Old Town Hall, which was built in 1859, joined the church in the center.

Today, Tallmadge has more than 18,000 residents — and tens of thousands of daily visitors who circle it in cars.

Some of them might be praying for an opening in traffic at this very moment.

The Rev. David Bacon didn’t anticipate the invention of the automobile, but in a roundabout way, he was the first man behind the wheel.

Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

The sound of muffled laughter echoed through the quiet corridors of Buchtel College in Akron.

During the late 19th century, mischievous students took the starch out of the Victorian era with a series of outrageous pranks that burst the seams of buttoned-down society.

The elaborate practical jokes, as daring as they were diabolical, bewildered professors, aggravated administrators and amused classmates of the hilltop campus, the forerunner of the University of Akron.

The Ohio Universalist Convention established Buchtel College in 1870 as “a denominational institution of learning.” The school, which opened in 1872, was named for its largest benefactor, John R. Buchtel, an Akron industrialist and philanthropist.

Buchtel College’s code of conduct was so strict that students received demerits for infractions such as missing lectures, loitering in hallways, straying from campus and arriving late for meals. Youths faced a private admonishment at five demerits, a public admonishment at 10 demerits and a suspension or expulsion at 15 demerits.

Despite the academic risks, some students couldn’t resist shenanigans.

One popular prank was to sneak to the top of stairwells and drop paper bags filled with water. Launched from dormitories on the upper levels of Buchtel’s main building, the aqua bombs exploded on the first floor, drenching anyone who had the misfortune of passing near the handrail.

“On one occasion a mischievous boy, who always looked angelically innocent, dropped an unusually large sack of unusually cold water with unusually accurate aim on the head of an unusually tall, slender, black-bearded, deep-voiced professor,” recounted English professor Albert I. Spanton, an 1899 graduate, in his history Fifty Years of Buchtel (1922). “The indignant instructor, almost as wet as a drowned rat, rushed with fearful leaps to the top floor, and burst into the room of the innocent-looking boy, who was sitting at his desk evidently hard at work on his Greek.”

The student nonchalantly looked up from his book and asked the professor what he wanted. The dripping instructor left without saying a word, sure that he had invaded the wrong room.

“It was mighty lucky for me he didn’t come over to the desk, for I had jerked that Greek book up in such a hurry, I was holding it upside down,” the student later told friends.

Other pranks

Ah, the stairwells. Boys lived in the east hall and girls lived in the west hall. Unmarried faculty members also resided at the dormitories to maintain order. Late at night, students removed slats from their beds and slid down the steps on makeshift sleds. They scrambled upstairs before faculty members could figure out who was causing the commotion.

Pranksters were known to heat iron dumbbells and cannon balls over gas jets and gingerly roll them down the stairs. The THUNK THUNK THUNK inevitably drew the attention of the uninitiated. One professor picked up an offending object as it smashed into his floor, but he dropped it immediately because it was fiery hot. Those rascals were at it again!

Students blew air into gas pipes, extinguishing public lights. They tainted drinking water with foul-tasting salts. They raided Buchtel’s hog pen, where trash was disposed, and painted the pigs bright red.

“Chapel exercises were favorite targets for student pranks,” history professor George W. Knepper explains in his UA book New Lamps for Old (1970). “The working day started at these services and they afforded a splendid opportunity for the ingenious prankster to produce effects before a wide audience, since the president customarily presided, the faculty sat in dignity upon the platform, and all students were present. The pranks ranged from the amusing to the disruptive. One morning the president raised a box-like cover that was kept over the Bible, and a chicken emerged, crowing his discontent.”

During another chapel service, a pianist was startled to find that his instrument made no sound despite repeated pounding. He lifted the lid and was dumbfounded to learn that the entire insides of the piano were missing.

Another morning, hooligans removed the entire contents of the chapel — including pulpit, platform, piano and chairs — and arranged everything in proper order on the front lawn. Stuffed animals from the biology room were placed carefully on the wooden seats in solemn poses.

Legendary incidents

One of the legendary pranks at Buchtel College was a bit of cloak-and-dagger skulduggery. Late one night in 1876, students “borrowed” a wagon from the Collins Buggy Co. on South Main Street, rolled it to campus and dismantled it piece by piece. They hauled the components to the Buchtel College roof and reassembled the wagon by lantern light.

When dawn arrived, students and professors gaped at the vehicle resting on the crown of the five-story building, a remarkable feat of ingenuity that was the subject of discussion for decades.

From there, it was only a hop, skip and a jump to actual livestock.

Perhaps the greatest practical joke in Buchtel College’s history came at the expense of a gentle bovine.

“One night an unofficial and hastily improvised class in biology induced a cow, her feet muffled in carpet, to climb the stairs in the stillness of the velvety dark evening, and on an upper dormitory floor they hitched her to the knob of a professor’s door,” Spanton recalled. “The professor opened his door in the morning, and in walked the cow.

“A peculiar thing about the cow was that although she had been led upstairs in the dark with no particular difficulty, nothing in the world would persuade her to walk down in the light of morning. The problem finally had to be solved by the construction of an inclined plane, formed by laying boards up the stairs. Then the cow was thrown, her feet tied, and on her side she went sliding down the boards.”

Pranksters probably made up only a fraction of the 2,000-student population, but they left their imprint on the school’s lore. When Buchtel converted in 1913 to the University of Akron, a municipal college, the bar was already raised high on student high jinks.

A little mischief truly goes a long way.

Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Investigators spent months of surveillance at the building, quietly observing the arrival and departure of guests, noting every vehicle that parked in the lot and using binoculars to peer into windows at night.

When the police raid inevitably came, it made front-page news in Akron.

The Serenity Prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, reads: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

The Silver Maple Alcoholic Hospital sometimes didn’t know the difference.

The 25-bed institution opened in the mid-1940s in an aging, two-story frame house at 1453 S. Arlington St. near the Hillwood Homes development. Its superintendent was Samuel S. Cummings, who gave up a factory job at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in an effort to rehabilitate men and women suffering from alcoholism.

Silver Maple, a for-profit facility, charged patients a $60 fee, payable in advance, for a five-day stay. Despite its cramped conditions, the home still filled a need in Akron.

In the 1940s, when police arrested alcoholic offenders, they were sent to the Summit County Jail to “dry out.” The probate court reviewed the patients’ cases to determine if they had a psychosis, and if so, transported them to the Summit County Receiving Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, later known as Fallsview Psychiatric Hospital. The problem with this procedure was that the county jail and receiving hospital often were filled to capacity. Patients were forced to go elsewhere.

The treatment of alcoholism was still evolving.

Dr. Robert Smith, an Akron physician, co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in June 1935 in Akron with New York stockbroker Bill Wilson. Sister Ignatia Gavin agreed to admit Wilson to St. Thomas Hospital under the guise of “acute gastritis.” A year later, the Akron hospital opened the country’s first ward dedicated to treatment of alcoholic patients.

Silver Maple was a decidedly low-rent operation in a rickety home that could have used a good cleaning. Its patients were hard-luck cases who needed a place to stay while battling their demons. Pale, sweaty, agitated and sick, they often suffered convulsions and delirium while tossing about on less-than-sterile cots.

“I have been devoting my time to rehabilitating men and women in Akron from this alcoholic problem, and have been active in helping judges care for men who had become a nuisance to the courts and had been neglecting their families,” Cummings explained to the Beacon Journal.

He posted “Quiet Please!” signs throughout the home and supplied old magazines and comic books for patients who felt well enough to read.

A native of Scotland, Cummings was a cigar-smoking, bespectacled man who wore nice suits to the office. He maintained a locked medicine cabinet and kept an oxygen tank in case patients needed to be resuscitated.

The superintendent’s assistants routinely gave patients injections to quiet them and make them sleep. This became a point of controversy because the staff often didn’t know what it was dispensing. The shots, which sold for $1, were logged as “Vitamin B1.”

Cummings later acknowledged that the injections were a hyoscine-morphine-cactoid compound of habit-forming drugs that produced “anesthetic somnolence” and were intended for minor surgery.

At least five people died at Silver Maple during its first years of operation. According to the county coroner, causes of death ranged from heart disease, bronchial pneumonia, barbiturate poisoning and acute alcoholism.

In the early 1950s, Akron police received a tip from the distraught wife of a former patient who questioned his treatment at the hospital. Sgt. Paul Wein, leader of the narcotics squad, ordered an investigation into the distribution of drugs.

Detectives Florian Smole, David Wise and Thomas Brown pored over thousands of prescriptions for narcotics and barbiturates. They learned that the hospital’s Ohio Department of Health certificate hadn’t been renewed in five years.

They also learned that the nurses’ training ranged from an advanced first-aid class to a correspondence course.

Peering through binoculars at night, investigators saw motorists park outside Silver Maple, enter the building and disappear behind closed doors in Cummings’ office.

A patient told police that he had not been seen by a physician during three days at the home, “at least not while I was sober enough to remember it.”

Investigators found there was no doctor: Cummings did not have a medical degree. Despite its name, Silver Maple was not truly a hospital.

City, state and federal agents raided the office in 1952, seizing hypodermic needles and vials of phenobarbital, pentobarbital and tuinal — drugs that carried a high risk of dependency and overdose.

Cummings, 52, was charged with practicing medicine without a license, but insisted he had done nothing wrong. He told agents that he was “under the impression” that the state had authorized his staff to carry out “the regular routine of the hospitals.”

“To the best of my knowledge, all this publicity and trouble is due to the jealousy of others connected with this work,” he said. “My records and general setup has been open for inspection at all times. Regardless of this scandal, I’m not going to stop my work.”

The Akron Health Department ordered that a registered nurse be kept on duty at Silver Maple to care for the patients, but gave Cummings “a reasonable time” to find one. The hospital continued to accept alcoholic patients.

The case took nearly a year to resolve. In 1953, Cummings decided to plead guilty before Akron Municipal Judge William H. Victor on a charge of illegal practice of medicine.

“I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong,” he told the judge.

In a surprising turn, Prosecutor Richard M. Stewart urged leniency, saying Cummings was doing “humanitarian work” and “some consideration should be given.”

The proprietor was fined $100 plus court costs.

Despite the guilty plea, Cummings remained in business, operating the facility until his death in 1957 at age 58 after a long illness.

New owner Frank Hadveck renamed it Akron Alcoholic Rest Home and reduced its occupancy to eight beds. In April 1959, the city shut it down.

Chief Sanitation Inspector Floyd Rees revoked the home’s license, citing a “serious situation” involving barbiturates and a “lack of proper care of patients.” At any rate, improvements in treatment were making such homes obsolete.

In the 1960s, the property served as a storage area for unclaimed freight. Today, it’s the address of a fast-food restaurant near Arlington Plaza Shopping Center.

Motorists who order at the drive-through window probably have no idea of the pain and suffering that once occupied that space, and it’s probably just as well that they don’t know.

Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

If you don’t know her name, you probably know her face.

Actress Marian Mercer seems so utterly familiar because she created a lengthy playbill of memorable characters during more than 40 years in theater, film and television.

She’s especially recognizable in Akron because this was her home.

Born in 1935, Mercer grew up in a two-story colonial house at 1351 Bellows St. in Firestone Park.

Her parents were Sam and Nelle Mercer, high school sweethearts in Moundsville, W.Va., who moved to Akron in 1916. Sam Mercer found a job at Firestone, where he remained for 47 years, retiring in 1963 as supervisor of the tire room at Plant 1. Marian’s siblings were Sam, Robert, Martha and Marjorie Mercer.

“I was very happy,” Mercer recalled of her childhood. “I loved to go to school and always got good grades.”

She attended Firestone Park Elementary and sang at Firestone Park Methodist Church, where she enjoyed her first showstopping moment. Marian was only 5 years old when she wandered out of the chorus in a children’s program and casually strolled out front to finish the song — much to the delight of the church audience.

Mercer studied voice with Burton Garlinghouse in Akron, and caught the theater bug at Garfield High School when drama coach Alexander Wilson persuaded her to try acting. She won the lead role of Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, Garfield’s 1953 senior play.

A tall, slender, green-eyed blonde, Mercer enrolled at the University of Michigan to major in voice and minor in drama, expecting to teach music someday. The only C grade she received in college was in public speaking, a bit of an irony, given her future career.

“I think the most frightening thing for me was the jump from Akron to college,” she once told the Beacon Journal. “All of a sudden, there were lots of good people competing. It was a great leveler.”

Mercer immersed herself in theater, appearing in four Michigan stage productions during her freshman year. She later won a lead role in The Pirates of Penzance. Teaching was out. Theater was in.

“There’s something inside of me that has to come out,” Mercer admitted. “Even if I fail or have trouble getting work, I’ll just have to keep trying.”

After graduating in 1957, she returned to Ohio as a trouper for Musicarnival, the tent theater in Warrensville Heights, where she appeared in Guys and Dolls, Show Boat and other shows. A Beacon Journal critic praised her as “a comedienne with an unerring sense of timing” and labeled her as “the Carol Channing type.”

Mercer preferred subtle humor. She didn’t like making silly faces or pratfalls, and considered such antics to be undignified and unfeminine.

“I’m afraid even to mention I’m a comedienne because right away people expect me to do something kooky,” she said. “Gosh, how I hate that word.”

The Akron thespian moved to New York in the late 1950s, modeling clothes at Bergdorf-Goodman and working as a hostess at Schrafft’s restaurant while auditioning for roles.

She began receiving notice after succeeding Eileen Brennan in the off-Broadway hit Little Mary Sunshine, a spoof of operettas. She joined the ensemble in Greenwillow, a 1960 musical starring Anthony Perkins, and appeared in the flop New Faces of 1962, which closed in less than a month.

“Every job is a new challenge — even if I fail,” Mercer said. “I like to try new things.

Mercer told agents she was a character actress, but they kept sending her to auditions for sexy roles. That’s how she found herself playing a stripper for a Kenley Players’ production of Gypsy in Warren, Ohio.

“I won’t let my parents go and see me doing those bumps and grinds,” Mercer said. “I’ve had a whole series of sweet parts and it’s a shame I had to do this one so close to home.”

Mercer found work on TV variety programs such as The Andy Williams Show and The Dom DeLuise Show.

In 1964, she married actor Martin J. Cassidy, a castmate from Little Mary Sunshine. The couple settled into the Dakota apartment building at Central Park West. Despite her glamorous surroundings, Mercer remained firmly grounded.

She loved to clean house, calling it the greatest therapy in the world. When she got depressed, she scrubbed floors.

“I’m usually up at noon — I’ve been a sack hound ever since high school at Garfield,” she told the Beacon Journal. “Then I usually go out to audition for commercials.”

Mercer landed a career-making role in the 1968 Broadway show Promises, Promises, written by Neil Simon with music by Burt Bacharach. She portrayed bar floozy Marge MacDougall, a tipsy temptress in an owl coat, who doesn’t appear until the second act. Mercer joined leading man Jerry Orbach in the song A Fact Can Be a Beautiful Thing.

In April 1969, Mercer won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical. Orbach was named best actor.

“I’m glad this happened at 33 instead of 23,” Mercer told a reporter. “I know I won’t change now, but I don’t know if I could have handled it then.”

Her career became a whirlwind. She appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and landed her first movie, John and Mary, starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow.

She became a regular on The Dean Martin Show and The Sandy Duncan Show, appeared in several Broadway musicals, including a revival of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off with Sammie Davis Jr., landed parts in movies Oh, God! Book II and Nine to Five, and still found time to visit Akron.

After her first marriage ended in divorce, Mercer married Patrick Hogan, and the couple welcomed a daughter, Deidre.

In 1980, Mercer joined the cast of It’s a Living, a new ABC sitcom about waitresses working in a ritzy restaurant atop a Los Angeles skyscraper. Mercer played the role of stuffy hostess Nancy Beebe.

“I had turned down four other pilots before It’s a Living because I had gotten typed as a sort of young Eve Arden, like the saucy neighbor I played on Sandy Duncan’s series,” Mercer said. “But Nancy Beebe is a lot classier than some characters I’ve played and the first villain I’ve done on television.”

It’s a Living catapulted actresses Ann Jillian and Crystal Bernard to fame. It was briefly renamed Making a Living, then canceled by ABC after two seasons. It returned in 1985 with new syndicated episodes, and Mercer appeared in all 120 before the show ended in 1989.

She continued to find roles in such TV shows as The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, Touched by an Angel and Murder, She Wrote. Mercer’s final credit was in a 2000 episode of Providence, starring another Akron native, Melina Kanakaredes.

Without warning, Mercer disappeared from theater, film and television. Fans didn’t know she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

She spent her final years in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif., surrounded by residents who also had been in show business.

She was 75 when she passed away in 2011. Marian Mercer returned home to Akron, where she was buried in a family plot at Glendale Cemetery.

Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

The wind shrieked as lightning raked the evening sky and clouds turned a ghastly green.

The Mills Bros. Circus was entertaining a family crowd under the big top in Wads­worth when the giant tent shuddered beneath a heavy gust. The center pole snapped and the canvas drooped, spooking wild animals in the menagerie and sending a shiver of concern through the audience.

Circus attendants led spectators to safety before the tent collapsed. No one was hurt in the 8 p.m. mishap, but it signaled the start of a terrifying night on the homefront during World War II.

The April 27, 1943, tornado began its eastward crawl, traveling 20 miles over the next 60 minutes, and cutting a wide swath of destruction across the middle of Summit County.

Tallmadge resident Edward M. Bogard, 62, a lifelong resident of the area, had never heard of the disaster until 2008. He and his wife, Susan, were going through boxes of photos that belonged to his late mother-in-law when they found an old brown envelope stuffed with black-and-white pictures of splintered Akron buildings.

They were taken April 28, the day after the storm.

Bogard, who writes a blog about local history, researched the tornado and posted photos. The images — which can be viewed at http://mred-criminals-daycare.blogspot.com — reveal massive devastation.

The Akron tornado, one of at least five that hit Ohio that night, had estimated wind speeds of about 200 mph, which would probably put it around F3 on today’s Fujita scale.

The storm roared across Copley Township, disintegrating farmhouses, destroying barns and killing livestock. It smashed homes, toppled trees, cut power and tossed cars in Akron neighborhoods, halted production at war plants and shattered windows downtown.

The tornado traveled south of Copley Road and cut across Wooster Avenue, Main Street, Case Avenue and Massillon Road. Then it slammed into Mogadore before dissipating.

Although the storm occurred 70 years ago, it’s still a vivid memory for some.

Barbara Gazella, 73, of Stow, was not quite 4 years old when the tornado hit her family’s home, a one-story bungalow at Valdes Avenue and Little Street — one block south of Copley Road in West Akron.

“My mother grabbed me out of my bed, which was near a window, threw me in my sister’s bed and crawled in with us with the covers over our heads,” she said.

That was as far as they got.

“The windows blew out,” Gazella said.

The little house moaned and quaked, but by gosh, it stood. When the tornado passed, an eerie calm took hold.

“I remember kneeling on the sofa, looking out the front windows that were not broken and watching all the emergency vehicles going up and down the road,” she said.

The neighborhood was in shambles. Behind Gazella’s home, a two-story colonial had been lifted off its foundation and flipped upside-down.

A block over on Frederick Boulevard, the entire side of one house had fallen onto the ground without breaking any windows. In an upstairs bedroom rested an automobile.

“Our rickety old garage stood,” Gazella said. “Across the street, they had a brand-new garage. It took the garage, the doghouse and the dog. The dog came wandering back the next day. But sightseers hit the dog and killed it. So, that was sad. We all loved that dog.”

Her family had the only working phone in the neighborhood, “so we were kind of like ‘command central’ of people coming and going.”

The storm damaged B.F. Goodrich and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and halted war production for a couple of days. Akron supplied tires, aircraft and other vital equipment for the U.S. military.

Gazella’s father was on the night shift at Goodrich when the tornado struck.

“He said sheet metal lifted up off the table and sat back down,” she said.

Jim Martin, 76, of Firestone Park, recalls being 6 years old when the storm hit his home on Lease Street near Crouse and Beaver streets. He was a first-grader at nearby Mason Elementary School.

He was at home that evening with his mother, three brothers and two sisters while his father worked at Goodyear. What he remembers most is the fluttering drapes, a set of curtains that Martin’s parents had hung up to separate first-floor rooms.

“We were going into the dining room into the kitchen,” Martin said. “As soon as we come through them drapes, the doggone dining room come apart. Everything went to hell.”

The tornado cracked open the house and sent debris flying. A board hit Martin in the head, but he had the presence of mind to rescue his sister, whose bed was in the room.

“I reached into the crib and grabbed my baby sister Sally and pulled her out of the crib by her feet,” he said.

When the house stopped shaking, Martin’s family tried to open the front door, but it was jammed. His older brothers, who rode out the tornado upstairs, broke open a window and the family crawled out.

With ruins everywhere, it was like stepping into a war zone. Martin ran into a buddy who believed that the Japanese had bombed Akron.

Richard F. Smith, 82, of Uniontown, grew up in a home on Idella Street in Mogadore. On the night of the tornado, he was 12 years old and getting ready for bed. He was wearing pajamas when his parents called him downstairs to wait out the approaching storm.

“The lightning was unreal,” Smith said. “It would just hang there and then it would kind of drop, you know?”

As the rain poured harder, the family heard an oncoming freight train, a common sound on the Mogadore tracks.

Smith remembers his father saying: “Boy, oh, boy, do I pity the engineer running a train in a storm like this.”

“He no more got the words out of his mouth and that sucker hit us,” Smith said.

The house rose, moved about 20 feet and slammed down hard. The wall split open and the front door hit Smith in the head, knocking him out.

“The front porch roof came into the living room, and that kind of protected us,” he said.

After Smith regained consciousness, his father picked him up and had him slide down the shingles. His mother and father followed him outside.

Their home was destroyed. The entire street was in bad shape, but miraculously, no one was seriously hurt.

Smith recalls that one man was frantically searching for his son in a neighbor’s cellar.

“What the dickens are you doing in my basement?” the neighbor asked.

Sure, enough, the boy was there — frightened but alive. The wind somehow had hurtled him to safety next door.

In all, the tornado caused more than $9 million damage (about $121 million today) in Summit County. Insurance companies estimated that 5,000 homes were damaged. At least 40 homes were destroyed.

Although more than 60 people were treated at local hospitals, no Akron fatalities were reported. (Two boys, 9 and 12, were killed when a barn collapsed near Medina, but that was a different vortex.)

Seventy years later, survivors still marvel at the storm.

“It was quite impressive, so it stuck in my mind,” Gazella said.

“After I got hit in the head with that board, somebody said I was never right since then,” Martin joked.

“If it gets stormy bad yet today, I get a twinge in my tummy,” Smith said. “The older I get, the less it gets. But, boy, it really left a mark.”

Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Akron Patrolman Arthur A. McClister rarely made big arrests or solved major crimes.

He considered that a badge of honor.

In the early 20th century, the police officer commanded respect as he walked the beat in South Akron, cheerfully greeting pedestrians, patting children on the head and joking around with residents and business owners.

“If you check my record, you’ll find that I probably made fewer arrests than any officer ever stationed in South Akron. … I tried to rule by reason and common sense rather than by use of a nightstick,” McClister once told an interviewer.

The jovial cop was so well liked in the neighborhood that he earned several nicknames, including “The Mayor of South Akron,” “The Daddy of the South Side” and “The Police Chief of South Main Street.”

For his uncanny memorization skills, he also was dubbed “The Human Directory.”

“The time was when I could call every man, woman and child in South Akron by name,” McClister said.

Granted, there were fewer names to remember back then. The city’s population was a mere 42,720.

A Norton Township native who worked at B.F. Goodrich, McClister joined the force in late 1900 after John Durkin was installed as police chief. The 50-man squad was retrenching following the riot of Aug. 22, 1900, in which an angry mob dynamited Akron City Hall and burned down Columbia Hall.

McClister, 29, received a club, whistle, badge, helmet and cap, but had to pay for his uniform and gun on a salary of $60 a month (about $1,900 today). The son of Irish immigrants, McClister found himself on the force with such names as McAllister, Michelson, McConnell, McFarland, Mahoney and McGuire. The daily roll call must have been confusing.

The rookie cop was assigned to a territory bounded on the north by Russell Avenue, on the south by Cole Avenue, on the east by Brown Street and on the west by Summit Lake.

In those days, Main Street was paved only as far south as Russell Avenue. The future site of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. was mostly swampland. The future site of Firestone Park was mostly farmland.

Nearly 40 saloons dotted the streets on McClister’s sole-grinding beat. He often had to break up brawls between factory workers, especially on Saturdays, but he was blessed with the gift of gab and could usually defuse tense situations.

“I was never a fighter,” he once told the Akron Times-Press. “I just didn’t believe in it. Kind words are better than rough deeds.”

Instead of sending inebriated men to the city jail, a common practice of the era, McClister preferred to escort them home, where they could sleep off their uncivil behavior.

“I made few arrests,” he said. “I felt as if I was only taking bread and butter from children’s mouths. I figured that it was better to help a drunk home than to arrest him.”

That’s not to say that McClister didn’t have close calls. One time, while investigating a stabbing on Sweitzer Avenue, McClister trailed the assailant to a nearby basement. The gift of gab wasn’t enough to make the suspect surrender.

“We located our man in his godmother’s cellar on Andrus Street,” he recalled. “He refused to come up. I shot in the cellar. Then he hollered and said not to shoot anymore, that he would come out.”

He reluctantly violated his no-arrest policy that day.

McClister had a reputation as a practical joker, which sometimes got him in hot water with Chief Durkin.

He once sent a rookie officer on a search for a criminal. The sleuth returned empty-handed two days later, only to find the suspect seated at a desk in the city building. The man in question was actually another cop.

Another time, McClister had a new officer track a police motorcycle on foot through city streets. The panting cop gave up after four miles of pursuit.

McClister walked the beat for 17 years and 10 months, and watched Akron’s population grow to more than 200,000. Faces were unfamiliar. It was a struggle to memorize names.

“Things ain’t what they used to be,” he said.

In 1919, McClister was reassigned to the patrol wagon, hauling suspects from crime scenes to the police station. It was strenuous work because many suspects didn’t particularly want to go. After a year, he was reassigned to walk the beat at Perkins Woods Park, where his main duty was to make sure that young lovers didn’t get too romantic.

During his public service, McClister regularly invested in Akron real estate. He owned so many properties that he earned his most famous nickname: “The Millionaire Cop.”

He and his wife, Katie, moved into a brick home at 548 Dorchester Road, which McClister boasted was “the nicest residence owned by anybody on the force.”

By then, their three children were adults. Son Virgil A. McClister was an Akron councilman. Daughter Thelma Emmons was the wife of Summit County Common Pleas Judge Clande V.D. Emmons. Daughter Gladys Haberkost was the wife of plumbing and heating contractor Arthur J. Haberkost.

McClister’s final assignment in law enforcement was as bailiff in Akron Municipal Court, escorting defendants to appear before judges. He received high praise for his professionalism.

“He has been an exceptional bailiff, and has lightened the burden for many unfortunates who have come into his court,” Judge Carl Hoyt said.

Judge A.F. O’Neil agreed: “During my four years as judge of municipal court, I can truthfully say that I had no counsellor or adviser to whom I looked to with more respect.”

In 1928, McClister walked into Chief Durkin’s office and submitted his resignation. “I’ve served 27 years, and that’s long enough for anybody,” he said. “So here’s my resignation. I think I’ve earned a rest.”

Durkin reached into a drawer, pulled out a gold badge and pinned it to McClister’s chest. The badge was given to veteran officers for faithful service.

“Art, you’ve been a good patrolman and deserve a rest,” Durkin replied. “I congratulate you on your record.”

Beacon Journal staff writer Herman Bonchek reported: “Perhaps it was the reflection of the sun streaking the somber windows in the office with glorious colors, perhaps it was just a shifting of shadows, but the eyes of the chief seemed to glisten in a golden mist for a moment before he strangely turned his face aside.”

McClister and his wife enjoyed a quiet retirement of travel and leisure. They were three months shy of their 50th wedding anniversary when he passed away in 1943 at age 73.

During his tenure, McClister mentored such notable officers as Chief Robert Miller, Capt. Stephen McGowan and Detective Patsy Pappano. He touched the lives of countless others on the beat in South Akron and in the courtroom.

“When Chief Durkin pinned a gold badge upon the coat of Patrolman Arthur McClister, signifying that official’s retirement from more than 27 years of service, it was a mark of honor and respect in which the whole city joins,” the Beacon Journal reported in 1928. “Officer McClister was a credit to the force. He loved his work, and his daily contacts with the people, and they can understand that his day of retirement from service was an event that more than justified the attention shown him.”

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

When a mermaid stripper performed her act in Akron, nightclub patrons enjoyed getting tanked.

Her name was Divena and she was a breathtaking sight.

She undulated behind glass in a 600-gallon tank of crystal-clear water, slipping into something more comfortable while goggle-eyed customers got a little sloshed at their tables.

“There’s nothing new under the sun … but UNDER WATER — ah!” the newspaper advertisements gushed.

Divena’s so-called “aqua-tease” was a popular draw in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the Yankee Inn, a swanky club owned by George Zenallis at 231 W. Exchange St. in Akron. The establishment was famous for its live entertainment, featuring rising stars such as the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads, Johnny Ray, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

Part “divine” and part “dive in,” Divena was billed variously as “The World’s Premier Underwater Ballerina,” “The World’s Loveliest Feminine Form” and “The World’s Foremost Novelty Attraction.”

“Divena, the girl who does a striptease while submerged in a 600-gallon tank of water, is back at the Yankee Inn this week for three shows nightly,” the Beacon Journal reported in 1953. “She’s making a terrific splash there as she goes through the many antics of Esther Williams, while refusing to hide any of her curves.”

With the surging popularity of television, nightclubs increasingly turned to gimmicks to lure customers away from their living rooms. Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance weren’t likely to disrobe in giant aquariums, so Divena offered something different for viewers.

With dark curtains providing a backdrop, the aqua-tease tank measured 4 feet by 5 feet by 4 feet and featured plexiglass windows five-eighths of an inch thick.

The water was heated to a comfortable 80 to 90 degrees.

Dressed in an evening gown, Divena eased herself into the tank from an adjacent platform and slipped beneath the surface while live music played. She wiggled rhythmically in the water and wriggled slowly out of her clothes.

Each garment was treated with fluorescent dye, so the effect was enchanting as Divena tossed and turned beneath colorful beams and strobe lights.

The graceful swimmer worked on her backstroke and sidestroke. The giant tank appeared to be full to nightclub audiences, but a decorative frame hid the breathing space at the top where the stripper casually surfaced to grab some much-needed air.

She systematically stripped down to “an abbreviated brassiere” and “swim panties,” but anyone expecting to see more must have forgotten that this was Akron (or the 1950s, for that matter).

“Contrary to popular belief, I can’t see the audience while I’m disrobing,” Divena once told a reporter. “The first time I presented the aqua-tease, I became confused and finished my act with my back to the audience and blowing kisses at the tank exit.”

Divena performed three nightly shows at 10:30, midnight and 1:30 a.m. at the Yankee Inn. The show was so popular that an “early bird show” was added at 9:30 p.m.

“HELD OVER!” newspaper ads boasted.

WCUE radio personality Jerry Crocker scored an exclusive interview with Divena inside the tank. Listeners mostly heard splashing noises and unintelligible conversation.

“Out in Akron, the world’s first underwater interview with a strip teaser was accomplished not very successfully by a disc jockey named Jerry Crocker,” columnist John Crosby told readers. “Carrying a micro­phone, he dove into a tank of water and gurgled briefly at a nightclub entertainer named Divena. Didn’t get much information out of her.”

Regular customers might have noticed something unusual. One year, Divena was a blonde. Another year, she was a brunette. Yet another year, she was a redhead. Now it can be revealed: Divena was more than one person.

Charles Rayburn, a Los Angeles publicist, copyrighted the name Divena and enlisted swimmer Clarice Murphy as the original mermaid. Initially, Rayburn built a 1,000-gallon tank on rubber wheels, but decided that the 600-gallon tank was easier to transport.

The show was so successful that Rayburn hired more swimmers and launched five touring productions for nightclubs, theaters, carnivals and fairs. Tank volumes ranged from 400 to 600 gallons. Some of the other Divenas were Nanette Parker, Diana Grey, Harriet Rockwell and Randy Steven. Any one of them may have performed in Akron. Or perhaps they all did.

Each woman earned about $7,000 a year (roughly $68,500 today). Hazards of the job included pruning skin, frequent colds and crude remarks from drunken spectators.

Another sign of the show’s success was the growing list of imitators. Other underwater nightclub acts included Merma, Sirena, Atlantis and the Golden Mermaid.

In Chicago, Divena was accused of indecent exposure for wearing two silver stars in a most innovative way. In Atlantic City, comedians Stump and Stumpy were fired from their nightclub act for jumping into Divena’s tank. In Macon, Ga., Divena stopped traffic by sitting in a hydrant-filled bathtub at a busy street corner.

The most infamous incident occurred in New Orleans when Divena was hired as the lead act at the Casino Royale, reducing the usual headliner, Evangeline the Oyster Girl, to second billing.

The Oyster Girl’s act was to rise out of a giant shell and hold a giant silver orb representing a pearl. When she found out that she was demoted, the Oyster Girl cracked.

She grabbed a fire ax and began swinging it at Divena’s water tank during the middle of her aqua-tease performance.

“There! There! There!” the Oyster Girl screamed.

The plexiglass shattered, pouring hundreds of gallons of water onto the stage and forcing Divena to hang on for dear life. Customers jumped on table tops or scurried to the back of the nightclub, wondering if the flood was part of the act.

The Oyster Girl reached through the glass and pulled Divena’s hair before club workers could separate them.

“The pressure in the tank is pretty terrific,” Divena told a reporter. “I lost consciousness when she began to hit it with the ax. I feel as though I had been riding horseback for two weeks. I’m going to see a doctor for a complete checkup.”

Police arrested the Oyster Girl, who apologized for her outburst. She was fined $10.

On a typical weekend night in Akron in the early 1950s, Joe Rockwell’s Orchestra was at Club Topper with the Four Freshmen at the Old Mill, Frankie Reynolds and His Orchestra at Trianon Ballroom, Wanda Goodrich at Ted Boyer’s Backstage, George Zittai and the Polka Notes at the Trocadero and Joe Yobi and His Trio at the Ghent Road Inn.

Over at the Yankee Inn, Divena frolicked in an underwater act that would be considered relatively clean today.

“Curves alive with the poetry of artistic and unrestrained motion … sheer loveliness in bodily rhythm … and eye-popping submarine display of sinuous, artistic action,” the advertisements read. “Underwater, onstage, in person.”

Oh, Divena. Tanks for the memory.

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

A single arrowhead pointed James A. Braden toward a literary path.

He was a little boy when he discovered the chipped-stone relic on his family’s farm in Trumbull County’s Greene Township. The artifact piqued his curiosity about the natives who had lived in Ohio before the arrival of New England settlers. From that day forward, he kept a closer eye on the ground, gathering all the arrowheads he could find.

Braden grew up to be a children’s author in the early 20th century, selling millions of copies of adventure books about American Indians. He loved sharing stories with youngsters — just as much as he enjoyed reading them as a kid.

“A good book was worth more to me as a boy than a gold mine,” he once said.

One of eight siblings, Braden was born in 1872 to James and Miriam Braden and attended Warren schools. His interest in Indian customs became something of an obsession after his father gave him a worn copy of Henry Howe’s Historical Collection of Ohio (1847).

Braden delved into that book and learned many interesting things about Indians and the great outdoors.

“The stories in that old book fascinated me,” he told the Akron Times-Press years later. “Then Dad took me to interesting historical places. … I visited many Indian burial grounds.”

The boy found that he could work the tales to his advantage. One of his chores was shucking corn, a tedious job for a child who preferred to read. With the aid of neighbors, Braden turned the job into a pastime.

“Often I would invite the boys to father’s barn with the understanding that as long as they helped husk the corn, I would keep on telling stories to them about the Indians,” Braden recalled. “Always I drew out my stories until all the corn had been husked.”

Braden planned to be a teacher, but entered journalism after his father bought a Warren weekly newspaper. He was 18 when he joined the Canton Repository in 1890, earning $3 a week. Three years later, he moved to Akron, where he landed editing jobs at the Evening Times and Daily Beacon.

“How well I remember the days of reporting here,” he reminisced in 1927.

In 1894, Braden married Rosalie M. Flohr of Canton. Within a few years, the couple welcomed a baby daughter, Dorothy, and moved to a house on Adams Street in Akron.

Although newspaper work paid the bills, Braden needed a creative outlet. He began writing an adventure tale about pioneers, carefully crafting words in longhand before committing them to a typewriter.

The Saalfield Publishing Co. of Akron was so impressed that it bought the manuscript.

Braden’s first book, Far Past the Frontier (1902), which sold for $1, was set in the Western Reserve and told the story of two pioneer boys camping near an Indian village along the Cuyahoga River in 1800.

Among the glowing reviews, the Beacon Journal predicted that Braden would make his mark in the literary world.

He followed up his debut novel with Connecticut Boys in the Western Reserve (1903), Captives Three (1904) and The Trail of the Seneca (1907). His early books were serialized in the Akron Evening Times.

The author weaved fact with fiction, creating exciting tales that enthralled children. He filled stories with references to “palefaces,” “redskins” and “savages” — words that might be considered disparaging today — and had Indian characters occasionally grunt “Ugh!” and “Heap good!”

To modern eyes, Braden’s stories seem rather grisly for kids. Consider this Connecticut Boys passage in which a character finds a body in the forest:

“In his still open eyes, was a look of abject terror, and a cry of pain and fear seemed to have stopped half uttered on his lips. From his head the scalp was missing, and where his hat still lay, and under the body, the snow was red with blood.”

Braden did writing on the side. He held various jobs, including advertising manager of Diamond Rubber Co., traffic manager of Northern Ohio Traction & Light Co., salesman at Commercial Printing & Lithograph Co. and editor of Akron Topics magazine.

He changed gears entirely in 1908 with The Auto Boys, a Saalfield book about young adventurers in a sputtering car. The book was so popular that it spawned four sequels.

In the 1920s, Braden and his wife lived in a home on Medina Road in Copley Township. Their daughter, Dorothy, married Warren Packard, heir to the Packard Motor Co., and the couple had two children, Rosalie and Warren.

Aside from editing the 1925 Centennial History of Akron, Braden took a break from the past, but resumed writing about Indians as a favor to H. Karl Butler, founder of Camp Manatoc near Peninsula.

“Karl wanted to impress the boys with the traditions of the land there, so I told them about the Erie massacre which is believed to have happened there,” Braden said.

Saalfield published Little Brother of the Hudson (1928), and it became one of Braden’s best-selling books. The “Little Brother” in the title was a reference to the Cuyahoga River.

Braden’s final novel, The Carved Sea Chest (1930), published by Harper and Brothers, was a Canadian tale of lost ships, buccaneers and Indians.

The author said his research of Indians brought him closer to “the real Americans.” He championed preservation of historic sites and lamented the destruction of an Indian mound east of Cleveland.

“Even as I looked over the scene of the domestic and the wartime life of those who were here before us, workmen were busily engaged in converting this grand old monument into cement building blocks,” he said. “Could there be a more pathetic commentary upon the value which a commercial and industrial age is wont to place upon the relics of the historic past of its own surroundings?”

After his wife, Rosalie, died in 1932, Braden took a long vacation, following the Northwest path of Lewis and Clark.

He returned to Akron and tried his hand at cowboys, assisting Saalfield with picture books based on movie serials.

“I experienced more pain keeping Tom Mix alive from one reel to another than letting Pokog the Pequot live for 21 chapters,” he lamented.

The logic of movie serials was utterly ridiculous, he said.

“Why, a reel would end with the hero prostrate, literally riddled with bullets,” he said. “In the next, he would fight a gang and hold a buxom but fainting heroine under his free arm.”

In 1936, the author moved to Michigan to be closer to his daughter and grandchildren.

“While I hate to leave Akron, most of my old friends here have gone, and it will not be such a pull as it would have been in the old days,” he said.

But come back he did. In 1940, he married Alta Taylor, a Saalfield editor, and the couple moved to a home on Revere Road in Richfield Township.

The retired author was content to live out his remaining years overlooking the Cuyahoga Valley, which he called “my Indian land.”

After Alta died in 1954, Braden went to visit his daughter in Michigan. He took ill there in June 1955 and died at age 82. He was laid to rest at Rose Hill Burial Park.

Today, Braden’s books are out of print, but they can be found at local libraries or read online for free at websites such as Google Books. More than a century later, Braden still takes readers far past the frontier.

As he once said: “If I was nothing else in my life, I do believe I was a good storyteller.”

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Would you lend your brand-new car to a total stranger? What if he promised to chain himself to the steering wheel, stay awake for five days and drive around continuously?

Why, yes, of course you would — if you owned an Akron auto dealership in the 1920s. That was good publicity!

Texas rancher Fred Mathews Jr., better known as Daredevil Mathews, took Akron by storm in May 1928 with a headline-grabbing offer to break the local record for nonstop driving. Was there such a record before he arrived? Who knows? It sounded impressive.

Mathews, who billed himself as a cowboy from the Rio Grande Valley, ambled from town to town, making a career out of endurance driving. In Akron, the 29th city on his national tour, he approached William A. Hahn, the owner of a Gardner Motor Co. dealership at 30 N. Summit St., and offered to publicize a new model through “five days and five nights of continuous driving.”

“I brought a letter of introduction to Hahn, telling him to give me a Gardner car of the smallest type to make this nonstop drive,” Mathews told reporters in 1928. “He offered me a car and I told him it would stand the gaff.

“Hahn offered to make a gentleman’s agreement, which I did and which I win if the car fails to stand up without my resorting to unreasonable abuse. If it stands up under the running it will get, I will have to admit that it is some car.”

Daredevil Mathews agreed to drive a Gardner Model 85 for 120 hours without stopping “except to comply with traffic regulations, a signal or a passing train.” He arranged for Akron police to handcuff him to the steering wheel and keep the key at headquarters.

Believe it or not, this was a common act. Jack Allen, Al Blackstone, Jack Derby, Harold Lockwood and Bennie Mercer, all billing themselves as daredevils, performed similar stunts in cities across the country in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mathews pledged to Akron officials that he would stop the car if he ever felt too tired to drive. Joining him on the road was Barbara Cox, his nurse and business partner, who was to “administer nourishment and lend aid in all possible ways during the long hours,” the Beacon Journal reported.

Mathews lined up a dozen merchants to supply food, gas, tires and other supplies for the drive. He became a rolling advertisement for their products, touting them at every turn.

His only stimulant was black coffee. His only food was milk and ice cream. His only vices were cigars and cigarettes.

“I’m in good condition for the test,” he said. “It doesn’t pay to go to sleep.”

Officer Thomas Lynett handcuffed Daredevil Mathews to the Gardner steering wheel at 6:30 p.m. Monday, May 28, in front of the Beacon Journal’s headquarters at East Market and Summit streets. The car was topped with a large sign promoting Mathews and Hahn.

Mathews pulled away from the curb as hundreds of spectators cheered. His daily schedule was published as follows:

7 a.m. — Courtney Dairy Co., Merriman Road Extension, for milk.

8 a.m. — Akron Pharmacy, Main and Market streets, Portage Hotel, for coffee.

8:30 a.m. — B.F. Connelly service station, 970 N. Main St., for Freedom oil and gasoline.

9 a.m. — Beacon Journal, 140 E. Market St., to talk to reporters about his condition.

9:30 a.m. — Hahn & Co., 30 N. Summit St., for a cigar.

10 a.m. — Rudick’s jewelry store, 143 S. Main St., to have a Bulova wristwatch rewound.

10:30 a.m. — Sokol’s Furniture Co., 66 S. Howard St., for a cigar.

11 a.m. — Dewitt Distributing Co., 447 S. Main St., for a spotlight check.

11:30 a.m. — Furnas Ice Cream Co., 34 N. Broadway, for ice cream.

Noon — Banner Tire & Service Co., 316 S. High St., for inspection of spark plugs.

12:30 p.m. — Instant Tire Service Co., 440 S. High St., for inspection of Miller DeLuxe balloon tires.

1 p.m. — Dewitt Distributing Co. 240 W. Exchange St., for a cigar.

1:30-5 p.m. — Akron neighborhoods to meet new friends.

5 p.m. — Beacon Journal for another chat with reporters.

5:15 p.m. — Sokol’s Furniture Store, 66 S. Howard St.

5:30 p.m. — Rudick’s jewelry store, 143 S. Main St.

5:45 p.m. — Akron Pharmacy, 173 S. Main St., Ohio Building, for coffee.

6 p.m. — Hahn & Co., 30 N. Summit St.

6:15 p.m. — Instant Tire Service Co., 440 S. High St.

6:30 p.m. — U.S. Barber Shop, East Market Street and Broadway.

7 p.m. — Courtney Dairy Farms for more milk.

7:30 p.m. — B.F. Connelly, 970 N. Main St., for fuel.

7:45 p.m. — Akron Pharmacy, Market and Main streets.

8 p.m. — Hahn & Co., 30 N. Summit St., for a last cigar.

8:30 p.m. — Sunset Gardens for cigarettes.

9:45 p.m. — Brady Lake Park to drive around carnival rides all night.

Crowds gathered to see the daredevil in action. Pedestrians waved along the way, and Mathews waved back.

Technically, he didn’t stop for public appearances. He rocked the car forward and backward, making sure it was always in motion — even when guests hopped aboard.

That made his daily shave a little bit frightening.

“A day’s growth of beard gave the cowboy record breaker a somewhat haggard appearance when he drove up to the barbershop about 6:15 o’clock, with 23 hours, 45 minutes of continuous driving already to his credit,” the Beacon Journal reported. “In a few minutes, a barber was busy lathering Mathews’ face, standing in the tonneau while the driver’s head rested on the seat back.

“The automobile, however, continued in motion. Forward a foot, then reversed a foot, then forward again. Mathews drove as the barber struggled to soften the beard.”

The crowd held its breath when the barber whipped out a straight razor. Despite the rocking of the car, Mathews didn’t even suffer a nick.

The driver averaged about 200 miles per day. By Wednesday, he suffered fatigue, headaches and neck pains. He had a chiropractor treat him in the car and he felt better afterward.

“Good coffee also helps, and they surely do make good coffee at the Akron Pharmacy Co.,” he said.

That’s the way the daredevil spoke — always mentioning his local sponsors.

“The help I am receiving from the Akron merchants in this drive is in no small part responsible for my ability to remain on schedule,” he said. “Then I have the Bulova wristwatch, given me by Rudick’s jewelry store, and set daily by them. Night driving has been helped considerably by the spotlight provided by the Dewitt Distributing Co.”

Mathews insisted that he never fell asleep during his endurance run. Skeptics might wonder if anyone was present in the predawn hours to see the car circle Brady Lake, or if Mathews’ sidekick nurse ever steered while he took a nap.

Nobody wanted to imagine how Mathews heeded the call of nature while cruising around with a manacled hand.

Spectators cheered when the daredevil rolled to a stop at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, June 2, breaking the local endurance record. The car traveled 1,200 miles in five days, according to the odometer. Police unlocked the handcuffs and Mathews eased himself out of the car.

He took a bath at the Taylor Hotel and fell asleep at 7 p.m. in the front window of Hahn & Co., where curious onlookers could spy on him all night.

“Watch me when I hit the hay in the Hahn Co. window in the bed that will be provided by the Sokol Furniture Co.,” Mathews said.

Upon waking at 8 a.m. Sunday, Mathews had nothing but praise for the Gardner vehicle.

“What a car! What power! What smoothness!” he said before leaving Akron.

After five days of cigar smoke and driver perspiration, though, it surely had lost its new-car smell.

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Of all the things you would expect to find inside the Bath Township Nature Preserve – plants, birds, ponds and horse trails – an outdoor brick oven capable of artisan bread baking may not be one of them.

But thanks to the efforts of a few determined township residents, the oven not only has been saved, but also restored to good working condition.

I can attest to this because I recently watched baker Kathy Lehr pull freshly baked pita bread, all puffy and charred, out of this brick structure.

It was the first time in a long time that anything was baked in the oven, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had been roasted behind its doors in the past.

It was Joseph Hostetler, one of the founders of the Cleveland law firm of Baker Hostetler, who is believed to have had the oven constructed on what was once his Bath Township property. Hostetler sold his land to the Firestone family and Raymond Firestone had a lodge building added that he named the Regal Beagle. Both men are believed to have used the land for hunting, especially fox hunts, for which Firestone was well known.

The oven was likely used for roasting the game that was caught during the hunts — pheasants, grouse, duck and the like.

In 1997, Bath Township purchased the property and turned it into a nature preserve, with the University of Akron leasing part of the land as a field station for environmental studies and education.

The Regal Beagle lodge building is used by the township, particularly during public events at the park when it serves as a staging area, explained Mike Rorar, assistant service director and park administrator for the township.

Because of the oven’s location right outside the entry to the lodge, it is kind of in the way. Because the structure had fallen into disrepair and had not been used for decades, Rorar admitted there was talk of just tearing it down.

That’s when township Trustee Elaina Goodrich put her foot down and told Rorar he needed to find a way to save the oven. “She said, ‘No way are we tearing that down,’ ” Rorar recalled.

At that point, however, Rorar said no one was even sure that the brick structure was actually an oven, much less how to operate it.

When word of the oven reached Nancy Ray, a member of the township’s Heritage Corridors Committee, she knew Lehr was just the person to call. A township resident and nationally known expert on bread baking, Lehr has even taught classes on how to construct outdoor ovens from mud.

Ray said no one was really sure if the brick hut was an oven or a smoker or whether it could ever be made usable again.

Lehr was excited with what she saw and showed township officials what a treasure the oven is, demonstrating how it could be fired up with hard wood. The structure is actually a double oven, with chambers on the top and the bottom lined with fire brick, each capable of baking or roasting any number of items, much the way it likely roasted fresh game for local captains of industry who were guests of Firestone and Hostetler some 70 or 80 years ago.

The heavy iron doors on the oven bear the markings of Donley Brothers of Cleveland, makers of fireplaces and outdoor ovens in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Recently, the township spent $1,500 to restore the oven. Neal Kilbane, of Neal B. Kilbane Masonry, who also lives near the nature preserve, performed the work, adding new flue liners, repairing the foundation, replacing some of the brick and tuck, pointing the mortar, and cleaning and repairing the interior fire brick.

From its construction, Kilbane estimates the oven was built in the late 1920s or 1930s. “It’s Depression-era,” he explained, “It’s not from the 1940s, I can tell by the fire brick and flue liners.”

The bricks used to construct the oven came from Cleveland Building Supply, and were marked with the company’s CBS stamp. Kilbane was able to find some reclaimed brick also with the CBS marking, to replace the damaged ones to keep the structure historically pure.

Lehr tested the repaired oven last week, baking off a batch of whole wheat pita bread, and showing how the structure, perhaps 80 or 90 years old, still bakes perfectly.

Rorar said the township isn’t likely to allow visitors to use the oven, because few people have the expertise to operate it properly. However, he does hope to be able to use it for community events in the future, perhaps for the parks to sponsor classes on how to bake in an open air oven.

Ray said she would like to see events in the future like a community bread baking day, where bakers will be invited to bring their dough to the communal oven and bake it in the open hearth, much the way the residents in European villages would have.

Saving the oven, and having it as a resource in the park, will only help to draw more visitors to the nature preserve, Rorar believes. “It’s a different option for people who otherwise might not have much interested in park activities,” he said.

Lisa Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or at labraham@thebeaconjournal.com. Find me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @akronfoodie or visit my blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/lisa.

Try as she might, Mary Gladwin couldn’t forget the sights and sounds of war.

She saw blood-soaked soldiers, writhing on squalid floors, crying and pleading for help. She heard the low thud of exploding artillery and felt makeshift hospitals shudder and moan.

The Red Cross nurse set aside fatigue and fear while providing comfort to wounded troops in a world gone mad.

“I have seen it all,” Gladwin once lamented. “If the fathers and mothers could have seen what I have seen on the bloody battlefields, there never would be another war.”

Akron’s angel of mercy received prestigious awards for her service to humanity, but the one badge she wore the most was a simple pin bearing a red cross. Mary Gladwin Hall, home of the University of Akron’s College of Nursing, is a lasting tribute to a caring soul.

A native of England, Gladwin was born in late 1861 in Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, the eldest of Francis and Sarah Gladwin’s seven children. In 1868, the family settled in Akron, where Gladwin grew up in a home at 268 E. Voris St. and attended Jennings School off East Mill Street downtown.

Slender and petite, the blue-eyed, brown-haired girl earned a scholarship to study education at Buchtel College, forerunner of the University of Akron, where she graduated in 1887.

Gladwin taught high school science for six years in Norwalk until she began to second-guess her career. She labored over her class lessons and often felt tired and listless.

“I wasn’t ill,” she later recalled. “I was just run-down. Didn’t sleep well. Losing weight.”

The schoolmarm went to see a doctor who bluntly told her: “Get your head out of that book or you’ll die.”

Nursing sounded interesting, so she applied to Boston City Hospital. Nine months into her studies, the Spanish-American War exploded in 1898 and the American Red Cross recruited volunteers. Gladwin found herself tending to typhoid-stricken soldiers as chief nurse at a 750-bed tent hospital in Georgia.

From there, she went to Cuba, then Puerto Rico and finally the Philippines, helping with wounded troops. In Manila, she was put in charge of Red Cross supplies. For her service, she received the Spanish-American War Medal.

Gladwin returned to Boston to complete her nursing degree in 1904, only to be drawn into global events again after the Russo-Japanese War erupted. The Red Cross sent her to Hiro­shima, where she assisted Japanese nurses.

“We can conceive of no greater privilege than to be allowed to work quietly side by side with them in the care of those whose need is so bitter and in who their brave suffering have become to us as brothers,” she wrote. “All of our hearts have gone out to great Japan in her gallant struggle for liberty.”

For her service, she received the Imperial Order of the Crown, presented in person by Japanese Emperor Meiji. She also received a medal made from battlefield shrapnel.

Gladwin returned to Akron and served as nurse at B.F. Good­rich and provided Red Cross relief for victims during the infamous flood of 1913.

When World War I began in 1914, she went to Serbia to organize relief efforts. Gladwin attended to thousands of wounded soldiers at a besieged hospital in Belgrade.

Twice the hospital was captured by Austrians and once recaptured by Serbs. For more than a year, the city was bombarded. Shelling became so frequent that it just became background noise.

War casualties filled the corridors, crying for assistance while white-uniformed nurses worked all day and night. The atmosphere was horrifying.

“There was a ward next to mine, with a door leading directly into it,” Gladwin wrote. “I could hear every sound in it and I used to tumble into bed at two or three o’clock in the morning and hear those men in the ward. They begged and prayed in all languages for help. They swore, they tore their bandages and the nights when I got up (it took all my strength of mind to stay in bed), I knew exactly what I would find when I went in — the men in their agony tearing off their dressings, the dark streams of blood on the floor.”

Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia decorated Gladwin with the Serbian Cross of Charity for her service.

Returning to Akron, she helped organized the Summit County chapter of the American Red Cross and the Visiting Nurses’ Association.

In 1920, Gladwin became one of the first nurses to receive the International Red Cross’ Florence Nightingale Medal, the most prestigious award in her field, “for great and exceptional devotion to the sick and wounded in peace or war.”

She kept her medals in their cases and stuffed them in a drawer at her Voris Street home, but continued to wear her Red Cross button. Gladwin never married or had children. Her life was dedicated to being a “Red Crosser.”

She received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of Akron, served as a hospital administrator in New York and Minnesota, went on the national lecture circuit and wrote two books: Ethics for Nurses (1930) and The Red Cross and Jane Arminda Delano (1931).

She also became an outspoken advocate for peace.

“War will end when youth are taught what war really means,” she told the Beacon Journal. “It is the conflict of the greedy.”

Gladwin believed civilization was threatened by “the selfish greed of ambitious politicians” who would rather go to battle than resolve their differences at a conference table.

“If the statesmen and diplomats fail to end wars, the scientists will,” she warned in 1929. “Let us hope the time will never come when war’s ending will depend on scientists.”

With scientific knowledge run amok, entire nations could be swept away, she predicted.

“It’s awful to think about it,” Gladwin said.

As World War II inflamed Europe in 1939, Gladwin’s health slipped away. She entered City Hospital for a rest, but her weakened heart gave out and she passed away in her sleep at age 77.

Hundreds of nurses, civic leaders and Red Cross members packed St. Paul’s Episcopal Church for the simple funeral. She was laid to rest at the Gladwin family plot in Glendale Cemetery.

In 1979, the University of Akron dedicated Mary Gladwin Hall as its new home for the College of Nursing. Her diary, photos and other writings are stored at UA Archival Services. Gladwin’s medals were donated to the Summit County Historical Society.

Her one last wish was to see an end to war. It didn’t happen in her lifetime — or in ours.

“Nobody who has seen as much of its horror as I have could feel otherwise about it,” Gladwin said. “I hope that there will not be any more. They get worse and worse as time goes on.”

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Xerxes Smith took a few practice sweeps with a corn broom, a replica of one from the 1800s, and pronounced it would be perfect for sweeping his trampoline at home.

“It’s made of corn and it will last for 10 years,” the 12-year-old noted, proving that it’s hard to spend a day at Hale Farm and Village in Bath Township and not learn something about our area’s history.

The Smith family of Deerfield Township was among many visitors Saturday to the living history museum, which marked its opening day for the summer season.

The villagers were busy making candles, weaving cloth, shoeing horses and making brooms.

Jim Hensley of Bedford, a museum educator and broom maker at Hale Farm, showed off the wide variety of brooms he makes, as well as the field right behind his barn workshop where the broom corn is planted.

The museum harvests the corn, which is actually a member of the sorghum family, and Hensley uses it to make a variety of brooms from small pot-scrubbers to long-handled sweepers used for dusting the cobwebs out of barn rafters. He also makes a decorative wedding broom that starts out as two separate brooms, but turns into one.

Sandi and Daniel Smith said they purchased a family pass for Hale Farm this year after attending an earlier presentation on the Underground Railroad. The program depicts how men, women and children risked their lives to escape slavery before the Civil War through the Underground Railroad. He said the family hoped to come back several more times this summer.

Their 15-year-old daughter, Pollyanna, said she enjoyed learning about the lives of the slaves and emphasized how scary their journey to freedom must have been.

Their other daughter, Davia, 13, said the highlight of her day was seeing all the horses that were there on the farm.

The horses came with the Sixth Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, a Civil War re-enacting unit, which had made camp at Hale Farm.

Member Chuck Stephens of Canton said when they meet school-aged children, members try to impart more personal bits of history about what a Civil War soldier’s life really would have been like — details that don’t get attention in school history books that focus on the war and the broader political aspects of North versus South.

The group, which is the largest mounted cavalry re-enactment unit in the country, will return to Hale Farm on the weekend of Aug. 10-11, for a full-fledged Civil War re-enactment.

Jane Mason, spokeswoman for the Western Reserve Historical Society which runs Hale Farm, said the Civil War re-enactment weekend is the largest in the state and always draws many visitors.

Also expected to draw the attention of plenty of folks this summer are the four lambs recently born to sheep on the farm, which will soon make their debut, as well as the farm’s team of oxen, Star and Bright, which performed work on the farm just as oxen did in the 1800s.

Jason Klein, site manager for Hale Farm, said other events scheduled for this summer include a home and garden tour June 29-30. The tour features historic buildings and gardens at the village. Another planned attraction is the Country Fair and Antique Farm Equipment Show that takes place July 20-21. The show will include large displays of historic farming equipment, along with livestock demonstrations and other activities.

Hale Farm’s daily summer hours in June, July and August are 10 to 5 p.m. The farm is closed for public visitation on Mondays and Tuesdays. For more information, call 330-666-3711 or visit their web site at www.halefarm.org

Lisa Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or at labraham@thebeaconjournal.com. Find me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @akronfoodie or visit my blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/lisa.

Summer vacation stretched off into the horizon, a seemingly endless parade of picnics, carnivals, swimming pools, lemonade stands and ice cream trucks.

Two children without a care in the world vanished without a trace 50 years ago.

Thomas J. Sumerix, 15, of Green Township, and Ruth E. Guthrie, 12, of Tallmadge, were walking home when they disappeared one week apart in June 1963. Although the boy and girl didn’t know each other, their names were forever linked by the events that transpired.

Authorities organized massive searches, using airplanes, helicopters, bloodhounds, skin divers and hundreds of volunteers to check fields, woods and ponds within a 5-mile radius of the missing children’s homes. No one found anything.

Despite the circumstances, officers didn’t believe the two cases were related.

Tommy Sumerix had blue eyes and a blond crew cut. He was small for his age — 5 feet tall and 87 pounds — and had just finished his freshman year at Green High School. He was a good student who liked to build model airplanes and dismantle radios. Every evening, he led his younger siblings in prayer before bedtime.

Tommy left his home on Shikellamy Drive about 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, June 5, to walk to Arlington Plaza to buy shoes for a picnic the next day. He wore black shorts and a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt. A Nobil clerk recalled seeing him shopping about 7:30 p.m.

Tommy pulled out a $20 bill to buy gray suede shoes, tucked the change in his wallet and left the store with his purchase.

He headed toward South Arlington for the return trek, but never made it home.

As night fell, worried parents Marian and John J. Sumerix called neighbors to see if Tommy had stopped to visit. No one had seen him that evening. Truly alarmed, the Sumerix family phoned the Summit County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies conducted an all-night search, tracing the boy’s path between the plaza and home, but found no sign of him. They interviewed more than 50 children over the next two days to see if anyone remembered seeing the boy. They asked his friends if he ever discussed running away.

“We don’t feel he’s running loose,” Marian Sumerix told the Beacon Journal. “He’s not that kind of a boy. We feel he was either hit by a car or picked up by someone in a car.”

Added father John Sumerix: “He hitchhiked his way home several times before.”

While officers hunted for clues in Green, a similar tale unfolded in Tallmadge.

Seventh-grader Ruth Guthrie didn’t come home.

One of four siblings, the daughter of Edna and Willis P. Guthrie helped her mother with chores so she could earn money to attend the Midwest Industrial Free Fair on June 12, 1963, at Tallmadge High School’s stadium.

Pocketing $2, she left her West Howe Road home about 2 p.m. Wednesday and walked a mile south to the fair. She spent the day twirling on amusement rides and playing carnival games, one of 30,000 people to enjoy the fair that day.

Ruth had brown hair and blue eyes, stood 5-feet-1 and weighed 90 pounds. She carried a purple purse and wore white slacks, a white sweatshirt and white sneakers.

She and two girlfriends left the fair at suppertime and took a short cut through a grassy field near Overdale School.

A half-mile from home, Ruth said goodbye to the girls on Bierce Street near Vinewood Avenue, which she planned to take north to West Howe Road.

“I’ll see you later,” she said.

The Guthrie family thought Ruth was tardy because she was having fun. When it grew late, though, something was wrong. Ruth’s father reported her missing at midnight.

Police questioned carnival workers, fairgoers and the girl’s friends. More than 100 searchers, including police, firefighters and Boy Scouts, fanned out across Tallmadge.

Police Chief Michael Dremak asked for the public’s aid. “We’re doing everything possible, but we do need help from anyone who may have seen the girl, or anyone who looks like her,” he said.

Sightings of Tommy and Ruth were reported all over town: waiting for a bus on Brown Street, renting a kayak at Portage Lakes, playing in Firestone Park, soliciting for a church on Hilbish Avenue.

Their parents distributed handbills and offered rewards for information leading to the children’s whereabouts.

As weeks turned to months, hope faded. The Sumerix and Guthrie families braced themselves for the worst news.

It arrived 11 months later.

A family was looking for mushrooms in a wooded area of Jackson Township on May 2, 1964, when an 11-year-old girl stumbled across skeletal remains at the base of an 80-foot tulip tree about 150 yards from Mudbrook Road Northwest between South Arlington Road and state Route 241.

The secluded site, three miles south of the Summit County line, was 1,000 yards west of Jackson High School.

A knotted clothesline was found around the neck. A cloth gag was found near the skull.

Dental records confirmed the identity as Tommy Sumerix, whose body was dumped eight miles from home. The Stark County coroner ruled the cause of death as strangulation.

Tommy’s parents identified the clothing in the woods as that worn by their son on the day he disappeared. However, his wallet was missing. So were the new shoes that he bought.

“I’ve had most of my cry out in the months that have passed,” a dazed Marian Sumerix told the Beacon Journal.

“At least we know now,” said her husband, John.

Before the month was over, the somber scene was repeated in Portage County.

A Palmyra Township farmer and his wife were surveying an orchard about 50 yards from McClintocksburg Road on May 28 when they saw a skull at the base of a hickory tree. They called deputies, who found a partially clothed skeleton with arms crossed and hands tied.

Dental records confirmed it was Ruth Guthrie, whose body was dumped 22 miles from home. She had been strangled.

“Ruthie, Ruthie, long have I searched, and then to find you like this,” Tallmadge police Sgt. Dave Williams sighed while assisting deputies.

The Guthries identified their daughter’s clothing in the woods. The only thing missing was Ruth’s purple purse.

“We always suspected it was going to end this way,” a grieving Edna Guthrie told a newspaper reporter.

Authorities sent evidence to the FBI and Smithsonian Institution. Despite earlier doubts, officers began to suspect the slayings were related.

They also wondered if the cases were related to the strangulation of Marion Brubaker, 12, of Coventry Township, who was ambushed on her bicycle Aug. 27, 1962, in woods at South Main Street and Killian Road. Her body was discovered about an hour after the killing.

Officers interviewed thousands of people and questioned dozens of suspects, but no one ever was convicted of killing Tommy, Ruth or Marion.

“We have exhausted all leads,” Portage County Sheriff’s Detective Joe Hegedus admitted in frustration. “We have absolutely nothing to go on.”

The cases still remain open.

Portage County Assistant Prosecutor Chester Enslow summed it up in 1964: “It may be several years, if ever, before they are solved. Sometime, someplace, someone may want to come clean and get it off his conscience.”

Fifty years have passed. Is that person still out there?

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Jimmy Vaughan was a spitfire with a spitball. He literally salivated at the chance to climb the pitcher’s mound.

As ace hurler for the General Tire baseball team in the 1920s, Vaughan was Akron’s greatest spitball thrower and its last official practitioner of the forbidden art.

Vaughan threw a pretty good fastball and a mean curve, but his spitter was the pitch that usually baffled batters. He used it about every third toss.

“I chewed slippery elm to increase the amount of saliva,” he explained to Beacon Journal sports scribe Phil Dietrich in the 1950s. “I’d wet the tips of the first two fingers of my right hand, grip the ball where the two seams were nearest and throw it just like my fast one.

“Used the overhand delivery mostly but mixed in sidearm occasionally for a change of pace. It makes the ball fall heavily. Wetting the ball at the same place inning after inning would make it break more sharply as the game went on.”

Although Vaughan stood only 5 feet 8 and weighed 145 pounds, he was a man of great stature in the Akron Industrial League. Kids looked up to him as a sandlot hero.

An easygoing fellow with a Southern accent as thick as molasses, John Byron Vaughan was a native of Eastman, Ga., a little town most famous for producing the Stuckey’s restaurant chain and burlesque star Tempest Storm. He was born in 1892, grew up playing ball and became a pitching prodigy for his hometown team.

Another youth, Dana Fillingim, a future pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics and Boston Braves, taught Vaughan how to moisten the baseball. With a little spit and polish, Vaughan’s career took off.

At age 22 in 1914, he joined the Macon Peaches, defeating the Braves 6-2 in his first minor-league start and leading the team on offense with a .333 batting average. After two seasons, he moved on to the Montgomery Rebels in Alabama, leaving a streak of spittle across the Deep South.

The right-hander spent three seasons in the Georgia State League and South Atlantic League before moving north with his wife, Joe Lee, in 1917 to find work at one of Akron’s bustling rubber factories.

He landed a job at Firestone, but ruffled corporate feathers when he decided to play ball for General Tire instead of the home team, a nearly treasonous act in the Industrial League.

“That was somewhat embarrassing,” Vaughan admitted.

Rising star

Instead of switching teams, he changed companies, moving to General in 1919. That season, Vaughan compiled a perfect 15-0 record for General Tire manager Ulysses Fitt.

It was one of many accomplishments for the General ace over the next 10 years, including throwing 56 consecutive scoreless innings, tossing two no-hitters and performing “the ironman stunt” on six occasions by pitching (and winning) both games of a doubleheader. He averaged nine strikeouts per game, six hits and one walk while maintaining a 1.75 ERA.

Vaughan padded his income by serving as a hired gun for semipro clubs in other towns. He charged a flat rate of $100 per game while pitching for clubs in Coshocton, Newcomerstown, Dennison, Oil City, Pa., and Scottdale, Pa.

He especially liked to stop in Coshocton because that’s where he purchased his supply of slippery elm to keep the juices flowing.

Baseball leagues outlawed spitballs in the early 1920s, but pitchers who depended on them were grandfathered until retirement. New players weren’t allowed to throw them.

Paul “Pepper” Sheeks, manager of the Firestone Non-Skids, lobbied to get the Akron Industrial League to ban spitballs, hoping to gain an edge over rival General Tire.

Ptooey!

“I made him happy by not putting the ball up to my mouth before each pitch but I continued to use the spitter nevertheless,” Vaughan confided.

He secretly spit into his glove after throwing the ball to the catcher. When the ball returned from home plate, it became properly moistened before the next pitch.

Another trick

Some teams doctored baseballs with acacia gum, making them sticky and resistant to saliva. That’s when Vaughan retaliated with another weapon in his arsenal: the paraffin pitch.

He concealed a smudge of wax on the pant leg of his gray uniform and casually brushed the baseball against it.

“Made the ball sail,” Vaughan said. “I bluffed a spitter and threw the paraffin ball instead.”

In exhibition play, Vaughan went up against such teams as the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cincinnati Reds, Boston Braves and Homestead Grays. St. Louis Browns manager Lee Fohl wanted to sign him to a pro contract in the 1920s, but Vaughan didn’t feel like joining a farm team in Mobile, Ala.

So he stayed in Akron and added to his legend.

Marathon game

In one of the greatest games ever played locally, Vaughan locked horns Aug. 20, 1922, with Firestone Non-Skids southpaw Percy McKinstry at Seiberling Field. More than 4,000 fans were present for the first pitch, but the crowd eventually doubled when news spread that Vaughan and McKinstry were “hooked up in a real sizzler.”

The teams battled for six hours and ended the game at dusk with a 0-0 tie in 20 innings. McKinstry struck out 33 batters, allowing only five hits. Vaughan struck out 24, allowing only seven hits.

Three days later, General and Firestone returned for a tiebreaker. Vaughan outdueled McKinstry 4-0 and captured the Akron Industrial League championship.

Vaughan played for General Tire until the team disbanded in 1929. He continued to work for the company until 1957 when he and his wife retired to Florida to enjoy the remainder of their golden years.

Three years before his death at age 74, Vaughan was inducted into the Summit County Sports Hall of Fame in 1963. McKinstry was enshrined, too. Their 20-inning battle forever sealed their place in local baseball lore.

Vaughan credited the spitball with his career longevity, saying he never had a sore arm during 20 years of pitching.

“They should bring back the spitball,” he told the Beacon Journal in one of his final interviews. “It would be a life saver for the pitchers.”

Mark J. Price will sign copies of his book, The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at Perkins Stone Mansion, 550 Copley Road, Akron, during the Summit County Historical Society’s Civil War 150 Commemoration. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Something was loose in Perkins Woods Park.

Something hungry.

Akron police officers responded to an emergency call about a wild animal prowling in the dark at the 79-acre preserve in June 1953.

Patrolmen Duane Harris and Jack Heislman rushed to the scene, parked their cruiser and trained their flashlights on a crazy-eyed beast.

“Meh-eh-eh-eh!” it cried.

A cute little goat stared back at police.

This was the city: Akron. It was June 19, a Thursday night.

The officers exchanged glances. This investigation was going to be weird.

“When we got to the park, we found the goat standing in front of the men’s room door at the park building, bleating its head off,” Harris told the Beacon Journal 60 years ago.

“I offered it a candy bar. That quieted him down a bit and we got to be rather chummy.”

The officers made the logical assumption that the animal had escaped from a goat enclosure at Akron Children’s Zoo, which had opened to the public only a month earlier in Perkins Woods. Not wishing to play nanny to a goat, the police decided to ditch the bewhiskered billy while they searched for clues.

“So we locked the thing in the men’s room,” Harris reported. “It was the most convenient place.”

The goat protested loudly: “Meh-eh-eh-eh!” But the officers had a job to do.

Heislman and Harris hoofed it to the zoo, where they were surprised to see that the park’s two resident goats — the only ones that lived in Perkins Woods — were safely behind bars. There was no sign of a jailbreak.

Feeling a little sheepish, the officers returned to the men’s room to retrieve their suspect.

All was quiet. Too quiet. The goat was gone.

The perplexed patrolmen looked high and low (OK, mostly low) for the escape artist but didn’t find hide nor hair. Harris and Heislman were just about to give up their search when they checked the goat enclosure one last time.

Inside were three goats.

“Meh-eh-eh-eh!”

Mystery unfolds

Although they knew they would be the butt of jokes at headquarters, the officers still filled out a report in case someone was trying to pull some funny business at Perkins Woods.

No kidding. It was funny business. It was pure comedy.

This wasn’t just any goat. This was a thespian!

Police unwittingly had arrested a cast member of Mister Roberts, which was being staged May 21 through June 20, 1953, at Weathervane Community Playhouse, then located at 1474 Copley Road.

Written by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan, the play takes a comedic look at life aboard a Navy cargo ship during World War II. Akron actor Chuck Reynolds starred as the title character supervising a motley crew of misfit sailors in the Pacific. One of them even manages to smuggle a goat aboard the vessel in the second act. A West Akron farmer lent a goat to the troupe.

“Where director Robert Beard assembled this excellent cast I’ll never know,” Beacon Journal theater critic Art Cullison wrote in his 1953 review. “Most of them have never appeared here on the stage, and several had never even been behind the footlights before. But they make a wonderful crew for the voyage. Several are ex-sailors; maybe that’s the reason.”

The cast included Jackson Morris, Jesse Skriletz, Mel Romain, Livia Bury, Don Cook, Danny Senuta, Albert Canfora, Don Bagley, Bill Mason, Mike Frank, Bill Noland, Bob Stalnaker, Bernie Margileth and Robert Craysdale.

And one live goat.

It would be rude to say that the goat overacted, but he did chew the scenery. He had a fondness for fake palm trees on the set. Sailors chased him across the stage every night — or pulled him by tether, depending on his temperament.

A broom and dustpan were kept nearby in case the goat had a show-stopping moment.

The great escape

On June 19, the night before the play’s final performance, a property master took the goat for safekeeping at the zoo. However, she couldn’t find a caretaker, so she tethered the animal in Perkins Woods and returned to the theater.

In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, the goat chewed through the rope and scampered off in search of mischief.

Weathervane troupe members returned to check on their cast mate, and found themselves in a real-life farce.

The goat was missing.

Fanning out across the park, the crew heard a strange commotion from behind the closed door of the men’s room.

It almost sounded like a muffled “Meh-eh-eh-eh!”

Troupe members had no idea how their wayward friend got inside the stall, but they freed him and led him to the zoo, where a caretaker put him in the enclosure with the other two goats. That was the scene that dumbfounded police after the theater folks had left.

The comic timing must have been perfect that evening. How did the officers and stagehands keep missing each other while leading a bleating animal around the park?

The final performance went off without a hitch the next night at Weathervane. The goat returned to the farm — its short-but-memorable stage career at an end.

“The Case of the Missing Goat” was resolved to the satisfaction of local police.

And the moral of the story?

There is more than one way to get someone’s goat.

“Meh-eh-eh-eh!”

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

If it weren’t for the chain-link fence, barbed wire and no-trespassing signs, the view would be spectacular.

Reservoir Park in Goodyear Heights is a stone’s throw from Akron’s highest natural point at 1,206 feet above sea level.

The lofty elevation is why the city constructed a reservoir at Brittain Road and Newton Street nearly 100 years ago.

The concrete basin — 312 square feet and 30 feet deep — was designed to hold 20 million gallons of water, Akron’s average daily consumption at the time. The man-made mound, an oddity to modern observers, is covered in earth and grass except for a fortresslike station built into the western edge.

In the early 20th century, Summit Lake was Akron’s primary source of drinking water, even though industrial waste and raw sewage made it “offensive to sight and smell,” according to a Summit County Board of Health report.

“Akronites in those days rather expected to see a polliwog slither out every time a spigot was turned,” Akron Times-Press reporter Evan Williams Jr. recalled in 1931. “The taste of the fluid could best be described as vile. Turning a faucet was almost a signal to hold the nostrils.”

Deadly typhoid outbreaks were a constant threat to the city of 69,000.

In 1911, hydraulic engineers Frank Barbour and E.C. Bradbury recommended that Akron build a dam and treatment plant in Portage County to collect fresh water from the upper section of the Cuyahoga River.

The $4.5 million project, approved by voters, secured 2,174 acres north of Kent and created 700-acre Lake Rockwell, which was named for Akron Mayor Frank W. Rockwell, a champion of the public-owned water system.

Preliminary work began in 1913 in the new neighborhood of Goodyear Heights on a “distributing reservoir,” which would maintain water pressure in the city. Akron Storage & Construction Co. won the 1914 contract with a bid of $114,000 (about $2.6 million today).

“Unusual difficulties” were reported in the reservoir’s construction. A rock formation wreaked havoc with the pouring of concrete, forcing workers to dig deeper and deeper to find a solid foundation.

Division engineer Charles B. Cornell halted the project after accusing the contractor of using inferior concrete. George Crisp, president of Akron Storage, strongly objected to the work stoppage.

The two men exchanged words. Fists began to fly. The engineer was pounding the executive into the ground when workers broke up the fight. Summoned to City Hall, the two apologized for their confrontation, but then someone said something that the other didn’t like, and they started punching each other again.

Cornell apparently got his point across: The infrastructure has stood for a century. The concrete basin was topped with a concrete roof supported by massive columns. The roof was then covered with earth and grass by state decree.

With great fanfare, Akron opened the floodgates on its new waterworks in 1915. Water from Lake Rockwell was filtered, treated, purified and pumped through 11 miles of steel mains to the Goodyear Heights reservoir, which the Beacon Journal dubbed “Akron’s 20 million gallon water jug.”

No longer would residents fear typhoid — or polliwogs.

The reservoir supplied “a fairly constant pressure” of 70 pounds throughout the city. If the Lake Rockwell plant pumped more than what was used in Akron over 24 hours, excess water was stored in the reservoir.

A few years later, when radio was in its infancy, the city installed one of the area’s first low-wave wireless transmitters to send hourly reports to the pumping station about the reservoir’s level.

The Goodyear Heights mound, then known as the water­works, was a neighborhood attraction. The hill wasn’t barricaded from the public, so children somersaulted down it in the summer and sledded down it in the winter. It was a favorite spot for Sunday picnics and afternoon hikes.

Seiberling Elementary School opened in 1922 on the other side of Brittain Road. While new houses sprouted around the neighborhood, land near the reservoir was mostly untamed — except for a baseball diamond known as Waterworks Field.

In the mid-1930s, the Goodyear Heights Recreation Association proposed turning the 10-acre wasteland into “a model play center.” The city water department invited the Works Progress Administration to build a stone shelter house while Richard Barnhardt, super­intendent of parks, supervised landscaping.

Initially called Water­works Park, the name soon changed to Reservoir Park. The city added baseball fields, horseshoe courts, tennis courts, a wading pool and a playground.

The dedication in June 1938 was a major event attended by 10,000 people. Led by the Goodyear boys band, a parade of 500 children marched to the park. Boy Scouts held a flag-raising ceremony. Politicians gave speeches. Youngsters feasted on ice cream and cake.

Wendell R. LaDue, superintendent of the waterworks department, officially turned over the park to the recreation department. Goodyear co-founder C.W. Seiberling broke ground on an amphitheater.

The day’s activities included 12 acts of vaudeville, three boxing matches and a concert.

The biggest attraction by far, however, was Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, 19, who served as umpire of a youth-league baseball game and delivered the ceremonial first pitch. Tribe pitcher Bill Zuber and Indians pitching coach Wally Schang cheered from the stands.

Indians radio announcer Jack Graney and broadcasting partner Pinky Hunter called the play-by-play action over the public loudspeakers.

“This playground is a dream come true,” A.J. MacDonald, president of the Goodyear Heights Recreation Association, told a newspaper reporter. “Four years ago, our youngsters were forced to play in the streets. There was no such thing as organized recreation in our district then.

“When we get our program functioning, we hope to bring to Goodyear Heights some of the old-fashioned community spirit that has been lost in the rush and hubble of this modern life.”

The city maintained its control of the reservoir, which was fenced off permanently during World War II as a precaution against sabotage. Other water basins were built in Akron, taking the pressure off Goodyear Heights.

Over the decades, Reservoir Park added a swimming pool, basketball courts, community center and other amenities. The “model play center” remains a hub for sporting events, club meetings, family celebrations and holiday festivities.

In the “rush and hubble” of this modern life, it’s comforting to know that Goodyear Heights still maintains a reservoir of summer fun.

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

BRIMFIELD TOWNSHIP: Jodi Ashcraft, a 28-year-old Kent city school teacher, doesn’t have a lick of German blood in her, but she was there in the kitchen of the German Family Society, alongside a group of women many years her senior, stuffing cabbage leaves full of spiced pork and rice.

In October, Ashcraft will marry her longtime boyfriend, Nicholas Bohnert, but she already has said “I do” to his family’s longstanding tradition of membership in the German Family Society of Akron.

After dating for 12 years, Ashcraft of Stow knew how much the society meant to Bohnert’s family, and she was happy to embrace its traditions, working alongside her fiance’s mother, Theresa Bohnert, and grandmother, Theresia Guld.

On this particular day in early June, the kitchen at the society’s center at Donau Park on Ranfield Road was filled with about 20 women who would spend the day turning 350 pounds of cabbage and 300 pounds of ground pork into more than 1,250 stuffed cabbage. They would be frozen to be served at the society’s Old European Days & Bierfest, which takes place Saturday and Sunday.

“I love it,” Ashcraft said, as she used an ice cream scoop to portion out meat for the cabbage rolls. She was encouraged to get involved by her fiance’s aunt, Helga Hippich of Lake Township, Theresa Bohnert’s sister.

“We’ve got three generations here today,” said Sandy Clark of Akron, a member of the association’s board of trustees, who helped to gather volunteers for the cooking.

This is one of the few kitchens in town where if you call the name Helga, more than one woman will turn her head. “We’ve got a whole bunch of Helgas here,” Hippich laughed.

Hippich, who is ladies group president and has been in charge of food at the society for the past 13 years, explained that the group uses all pork in its filling, not a mix of pork and beef that others may use. The filling is seasoned with onions, salt, pepper and garlic and lots of paprika before being rolled up into the cabbage leaves. Cayenne pepper gives the filling a little kick.

In preparation for the festival, the group also made schnitzel: taking slices of pork loin, pounding them flat, and seasoning with salt, pepper and garlic powder. The cutlets were then dredged in flour, dipped in beaten egg, and coated in bread crumbs before being deep fried in hot oil.

“They use very little beef in Germany,” Hippich noted.

Because wars and treaties made for fluid borders in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, society members claim their roots in countries like Slovenia and Croatia, as well as Germany.

Many were part of a group of Germans known as the Donauschwaben, originally from Swabia in southwestern Germany. They headed down the Danube to eastern areas of the empire, where they melded their culture with those countries that eventually would become Yugoslavia. Their name, Donauschwaben, means Swabians of the Danube.

After World War II, many headed to the U.S., and in 1955, local Donauschwaben founded the German Family Society in the basement of St. Bernard Catholic Church in downtown Akron.

The group has a lot of members like Guld, Hippich and Bohnert’s 85-year-old mother, who identifies herself as Croatian, but lived in Austria and Germany before emigrating to the U.S. in 1951.

But there are new families too, like Christina Dreher-Redesheim, 41, of Tallmadge, who met her husband when visiting Germany. After attending one of the society’s Oktoberfest celebrations, the couple decided to join so that her husband could maintain a connection to his homeland, have a place where he can speak German, and expose their children to the culture. The couple’s 5-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter both take part in the society’s youth dance groups, she said.

A high school history teacher, Dreher-Redesheim said she enjoys helping out in the kitchen during the summer because she doesn’t have the time during the school year. “It’s a great place to be; we’ve met so many wonderful people here,” she said.

While history, song and dance all play a role in keeping their ethnic traditions alive, area residents who attend the society’s public events — Old European Days in June and Oktoberfest in September — know that the ethnic food is one of the main reasons to go.

In addition to stuffed cabbage and schnitzel, the crew will prepare homemade sausage, sauerkraut, rotisserie chickens and potato salad.

Beverly Sensius, 74, of New Franklin, is in charge of potato salad production for both festivals. This weekend’s event is an easy one for Sensius; she’ll make only 1,000 pounds of potatoes. In September, that figure will double to a ton.

This is authentic German potato salad with sauteed onions, fried bacon, and an oil and vinegar dressing. Ask Sensius how much vinegar and how much oil to use to make it at home, and she just laughs.

“You just go this way and that way,” she said, demonstrating with her hands as if she is pouring oil and vinegar back and forth over cooked potatoes. “That’s how it was passed down to me,” she said, noting that she already has showed younger members the “go this way and that way” method.

Over the years, the group has gotten their recipes written down and even have them ready in a computer file to print out. The only problem is they are in quantities to make hundreds of servings. Breaking them down to a reasonable amount for making at home is a challenge, as Sensius notes when she tries to calculate how much oil and vinegar to use for the potato salad.

Sensius will begin boiling and peeling potatoes Friday morning, but her recipe (or a pretty close breakdown) is included below along with the society’s recipe for stuffed cabbage, which was adapted from one that would make about 500 rolls.

STUFFED CABBAGE (SARMA)

1 to 2 heads cabbage (see notes)

1½ cups water

2 eggs, slightly beaten

3¼ tbsp. paprika

2½ tbsp. salt

1 tbsp. pepper

¾ tsp. cayenne pepper (optional)

1½ tbsp. garlic powder

5 to 6 lbs. ground pork

2 cups diced yellow cooking onions

2 to 3 cups cooked rice (use converted rice)

For the sauce:

2 cups tomato sauce or juice

6 cups water

2 jars (32 oz.) or bags of sauerkraut, drained and rinsed

1 cup chopped yellow cooking onions

A few days before making, place heads of cabbage in freezer. When ready to make rolls, thaw and leaves will be soft and pliable to cut off the core. Alternatively, place cabbage in pot of boiling water and remove leaves as they soften. Drain leaves on paper towels before rolling.

Whisk together water, eggs, paprika, salt, pepper, cayenne and garlic powder.

In a large bowl using your hands, or in a stand mixer, combine meat and onions and mix for a minute or two to combine. Add water/spice slurry and continue mixing for 3 to 5 minutes more, mixing as you would for a meatloaf.

Add cooked rice and mix until evenly combined.

At this time, you can fry a small portion of the meat to test it for seasonings.

Portion about ½ cup of meat mixture for each cabbage leaf. Place meat on leaf near stem end, fold up bottom, fold in both sides and roll up remainder of leaf.

Mix tomato sauce or juice with 6 cups of water into a loose sauce.

In a bowl, combine sauerkraut, onions and a cup or two of the loose tomato sauce. Layer about half of this mixture into the bottom of a large roasting pan. Line up cabbage rolls in pan. Sprinkle tops with paprika. Spread remaining sauerkraut mixture on top.

When pan is full, pour remaining loose tomato sauce over cabbage rolls until it reaches about two-thirds of the way up the sides of the rolls. You may not need it all.

Cover roaster with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 1 to 2 hours, until meat is cooked through.

Makes about 30 to 35 cabbage rolls.

Notes: This recipe can be halved. Number of rolls may vary depending on size of cabbage heads and size of leaves.

— The cooks of the German Family Society (Helga Hippich)

GERMAN POTATO SALAD

5 lbs. russet potatoes

2 to 3 medium yellow cooking onions, chopped

½ lb. bacon (about 8 slices) cut into small pieces

1 cup canola oil, plus more for sauteing

1 cup white vinegar

1½ tbsp. salt

1 tbsp. pepper

1 tbsp. sugar

1 cup hot water

Boil potatoes with their skins on. When cool enough to handle, peel and cut into chunks.

While potatoes are boiling, saute onions in oil until soft and golden. Fry bacon until crisp. Drain both.

Combine the 1 cup oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and sugar in a jar and shake well to combine.

In a large bowl, while potatoes are still warm, combine potatoes, onions, and bacon. Pour dressing over and mix well. If salad is too stiff, loosen with the hot water. You may not need it all, or you could need more, depending on the potatoes.

Makes 12 to 15 servings.

— The cooks of the German Family Society (Beverly Sensius)

Lisa Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or at labraham@thebeaconjournal.com. Find me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @akronfoodie or visit my blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/lisa.

Russell M. Bird didn’t mind being a lame duck.

As the shortest-serving mayor in Akron’s history, he still managed to accomplish the goals that he wanted — and do more than what most constituents expected of him.

Bird, a Republican from Goodyear Heights, was the city executive for only six months in 1953. It was a caretaker’s post, to be sure, but he refused to be just a ceremonial mayor.

“That’s a big responsibility and you can’t take the job lightly,” he explained.

Bird completed the term of Mayor Charles E. Slusser, a fellow Republican who resigned after 9½ years when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him as a public commissioner in the Federal Housing Administration.

As president of the Akron City Council, Councilman-At-Large Bird automatically succeeded Slusser. It was a job he had long coveted, although he had hoped to win it fair and square at the ballot box.

“I believe Mayor Slusser has given Akron an efficient administration,” Bird said. “But I think there are a few things here and there that can be improved.”

Bird was a salesman for Lea Drug before buying the Heights Service Store at Goodyear Boulevard and Newton Street. The drugstore featured a soda fountain and specialized in “patent medicines, cigars, candy, film and baby supplies.”

He and his wife, Nyda, and their son, Roger, lived nearby at 460 St. Leger Ave.

Friends thought Bird was too nice for politics, but he ran for City Council in 1945. He was elected Sixth Ward councilman and re-elected twice before winning the at-large race in 1951.

Bird wore glasses, a mustache and closely cropped hair. A meticulous dresser who owned six suits and a never-ending rack of colorful ties, he enjoyed politics but disliked being called a politician.

He was a meat-and-potatoes guy who expressed a fondness for melted cheese.

The Summit County Republican Party and Chairman Ray C. Bliss thought Bird was too easygoing to win a mayoral race, so they backed another candidate, attorney J.P. Riddle, in the November 1953 election.

Crestfallen but loyal, Bird announced he would seek a second term as at-large councilman in the fall.

“I would like to run for mayor at some later time,” he said.

Bird, 54, took the mayor’s oath June 30 at City Hall before a small gathering of relatives, friends, officials and reporters.

His first act was to sign a letter for his son, who was serving in Guam with the U.S. Navy.

“Roger, just a few moments ago I was sworn in as Mayor of the City of Akron,” he wrote. “This is an honor that few men enjoy. Since circumstances would not permit you to be present for the ceremonies, I thought it appropriate that you have my first official signature as Mayor for a keepsake. Loads of love, Dad.”

Bird went to work July 1. He made weekly visits to every city department, talking with employees and supervisors “to see if they have any ideas on how to better the efficiency.”

He promised the public that he had an open-door policy. “No secretary will have to make excuses that the mayor is too busy to see anyone,” he said.

One of his first edicts was to keep City Hall open during lunch hour. He discovered that offices were closing while employees ate. He ordered lunch breaks to be staggered so offices were always staffed.

“A number of Akron residents working downtown can only come to City Hall on their lunch hours,” he said. “We should accommodate them by remaining open.”

Bird’s goals in office were to campaign for a new bridge on Mill Street, set up an Akron Civil Defense Office, arrange for construction of a fire station in Firestone Park and study improvements in Akron Transportation Co. bus service.

He also urged public officials to stop “bickering and feuding” so the city could move forward with construction on the Akron Expressway.

“I understand there is a bad feeling about the city’s highway program,” he said at one meeting. “I’m not too much interested in why. But we won’t get anywhere if it continues.”

Akron residents wanted the highway program completed as fast as possible, he said.

“Now let’s start at the ground floor, forget the past and do the job,” he said.

The mayor’s effectiveness surprised local politicians. He was getting things done.

In one month, Bird was credited with a 37 percent reduction in the number of complaints in the garbage department by meeting weekly with employees and working to solve problems in service.

After receiving complaints about a numbers racket in Akron, Bird appointed police Lt. Carroll Cutright to oversee a “special detail squad” to crack down on illegal gambling.

“I told Lt. Cutright simply and directly that anything which resembles a numbers operation in this city must be stamped out immediately,” Bird said.

The mayor even presided over the marriage of Barberton couple Peter Chesmar and Katherine Kachur at City Hall.

“This was the biggest thrill for me since taking office,” Bird said. “I always wanted to perform a marriage ceremony.”

Political kingmakers seriously miscalculated the mayoral election that fall. Democrat Leo Berg trounced Republican J.P. Riddle by a vote of 43,529 to 36,180.

Meanwhile, Bird easily won re-election to City Council with 44,750 votes — the most in the election and 1,221 more than Berg.

If Republican leaders had stuck with Bird, they could have kept the mayor’s office. Bird’s term expired Dec. 31.

“It’s going to be tough to come back into council after sitting in the mayor’s chair these past several months,” he admitted.

He returned to the council for six months, but was appointed to an unexpired term as clerk of Akron Municipal Court in 1954. The following year, he ran for the clerk’s post and won it outright.

In 1956, Bird was elected Summit County sheriff. The tumultuous four-year term included jailbreaks, a riot and strife with deputies. He actually felt relieved after being defeated by Robert Campbell in 1960. It was his first loss.

Bird served for two years as a deputy clerk in municipal court before a heart condition and respiratory issues persuaded him to move to Sarasota, Fla., with his wife.

“I’m under a doctor’s orders to retire,” he told the Beacon Journal in November 1963. “I just can’t imagine myself doing nothing. I’ll be stirring around down there — and I’ll find something to do.”

In 1976, the couple moved to South Bend, Ind., to live closer to their son, Roger. Bird made yearly pilgrimages to Akron to catch up with old friends and talk politics.

He was a great-grandfather when he died of cancer Aug. 4, 1979, at age 80. He is buried at Northlawn Memorial Gardens.

Today, Russell M. Bird’s photo looks out from a gallery of Akron mayors on a wall at City Hall.

He didn’t have the job for long, but he made history in the time that he had.

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

I think I may change my title from Lisa, Finder of Lost Recipes, to Lisa, Akron’s Culinary Historian.

Well, maybe that title is sort of implied by my job.

But every time I get a request for a recipe from the past, I end up delving into a bit of Akron history to track it down.

It happened recently with a request I received from Tina White of Stow, who was feeling nostalgic about the former Ed Micheli’s Restaurant in Akron’s North Hill. Micheli’s was located at 1295 E. Tallmadge Ave. for 55 years, before it closed in May 2005.

White was hoping to find the recipe for Micheli’s blue cheese salad dressing. White’s mother, Dixie L. Enlow, had worked at Micheli’s in the late 1950s, and had kept in touch with him until she died on July 20, 2001.

“I used to go buy quarts of the dressing when the restaurant was still open. The salad dressing was one of the last things she wanted to eat before she died,” White said. “A lot of people will agree, it was the best ever. Also, his kidney bean salad was delish.”

Adamo Adelio Giovanni Micheli, known as Ed or Eddie, was born in Akron and lived his entire life in Tallmadge. He graduated from Tallmadge High School in 1947, and enrolled at Kent State University with hopes of becoming a lawyer. But life, and his mother, Angelica, had other plans.

In 1950, she purchased an 18-seat, one-room restaurant near the intersection of East Tallmadge Avenue and Brittain Road, which they named Ed’s Hamburg. He and his mother ran it after his father died two months later, with his sister Anna serving as the curb girl.

His mother kept the place going when he was drafted in 1951, and he returned after two years in the Army with experience as a mess steward.

By 1957, the restaurant expanded to a full-fledged drive-in, and by 1963, to Ed Micheli’s Restaurant. The late 1960s saw the addition of a banquet room, liquor license and lounge, and a name change to Micheli’s Restaurant & Lounge. Micheli remained in business for the next 55 years, retiring in 2005.

He died July 24, 2011, at the age of 82. Micheli’s only survivor at the time of his death was a niece, Michele Zeller of Tallmadge, his sister Anna’s daughter.

When I contacted Zeller, she was surprised to get the request for her uncle’s recipes, and even more surprised because she knew exactly where they were.

“I was just looking at them the other day,” she said. Recently, Zeller had been going through some of her uncle’s belongings and had the recipes — the exact ones that White was looking for — in hand just days before my call. That sweet serendipity makes my job such a delight.

Zeller couldn’t recall Enlow, but knew that her uncle would have. Micheli was known for keenly remembering all of his customers. “Even after he retired, we would run into people and he would know where they sat and what they drank and what they ordered,” she said.

She did recall the dressing, noting that her uncle made it with Italian Gorgonzola, which made it just a little different than other blue cheese dressings out there. It was his secret ingredient. It also included some bottled French dressing, which gave it a pinkish color, she said.

Zeller and I agreed that allowing me to reprint the recipes would be a nice tribute to her uncle and would help to keep the memory of his restaurant alive.

The bean salad recipe already was converted to a reasonable amount for a home cook, but the salad dressing recipe made six gallons. I have broken it down to make one quart.

Unfortunately, the dressing contained a commercial cheese flavoring extract that is probably going to be difficult for most folks to find. It is available for purchase, but only by the case. So unless you want 12 quarts of cheese flavored extract, my advice is to just leave it out. The dressing won’t be exactly the same, but it probably will be close enough.

Here are his recipes.

ED MICHELI’S

BLUE CHEESE DRESSING

3½ cups mayonnaise

4 oz. crumbled Gorgonzola cheese

4½ oz. dry cottage cheese (see box)

2 tbsp. dried parsley flakes

⅓ cup white vinegar

¼ cup bottled French dressing

Seasoned salt, to taste

2 tbsp. Cheeztone liquid cheese extract (see note)

Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl. Mix thoroughly. Pour into container and keep refrigerated.

Makes about 1 quart.

Note: Micheli used a commercial product called Cheeztone, which is a soy-based liquid extract of vegetable proteins and cheese flavors used as a flavor enhancer. It is available from restaurant suppliers and can be ordered at www.amazon.com, but only in cases of 12 quart-sized bottles. Liquid cheese extracts are not readily available in most grocery stores.

ED MICHELI’S BEAN SALAD

5 cups cooked kidney beans

¾ cups diced celery

¾ cup diced Spanish onion

1 cup diced sweet pickles

½ tsp. salt

1 tsp. white pepper

½ cup mayonnaise

2 tbsp. sweet pickle juice

Rinse and drain the beans thoroughly. Combine with other ingredients and mix well. Chill before serving.

Makes 10 servings.

Lisa Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or at labraham@thebeaconjournal.com. Find me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @akronfoodie or visit my blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/lisa.

If Akron is the heart of local history, Portage Path is the aorta. It’s the main artery connecting the past to the present.

From time immemorial to about 1805, Indians carried canoes on the ancient trail while trudging seven miles between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. The well-worn route served as the western boundary between the United States and Indian nations in the late 18th century.

With such a grand reputation, its place in history should have been secure.

That’s why Summit County scholars howled in outrage when local authorities wiped Portage Path off the map and renamed it Cobb Avenue in the late 19th century. The battle over the street’s name lasted more than five years, pitting neighbor against neighbor and leaving a trail of hard feelings.

Akron officials were powerless to intervene because Portage Path, which had only a half-dozen residents, was in Portage Township on the outskirts of the city.

In 1896, Summit County historian Samuel A. Lane, a former mayor, sheriff and journalist, decried the renaming as “the most flagrant monstrosity in the way of street nomenclature.” And he was friends with the namesake!

Charles Bassett Cobb was the 1830s proprietor of Pavilion House, a hotel at the northwest corner of Howard and Market streets — then the main crossroads of the village of Cascade.

When Lane arrived in town in 1835, he stayed at the inn and earned his board by tending bar, waiting on guests and doing odd jobs. Cobb later owned the Ohio Exchange, an inn at Market and Main streets.

The businessman was regarded as one of Akron’s oldest and best-known residents when he died in 1892 at age 82. He left behind a son and daughter, J. Marshall Cobb and Fannie Cobb Bloomfield, and an 18.6-acre estate with a “substantial brick house” that fronted the west side of Portage Path a few hundred feet south of West Market Street.

“He ever retained what one may say are the angels which stand about the throne of life — honor, unselfishness and sympathy; they are not the smiling angels which youth loves best, but they had a comfort in them by his dying bed,” the Akron Beacon and Republican newspaper eulogized. “The rest of the heavenly troop will very likely come behind them uncalled.”

Neighbors proposed renaming Portage Path in Cobb’s memory. They argued that the street, also known as Trail Road and Indian Trail, was of limited historical significance because it strayed from the actual path. In fact, the ancient trail zigzagged back and forth across the road, overlapping it for short distances.

Despite popular belief, the trail did not cross at the present-day intersection of Portage Path and West Market Street. It originally crossed about 300 feet west of Portage Path — just east of Marvin Avenue.

With the blessing of trustees, Cobb Avenue signs replaced Portage Path signs.

“With all due respect to the memory of my early and always good friend, the late Charles B. Cobb, I submit that the representatives of his estate, in allotting his farm, a small portion of which abuts on the path, have no right to arbitrarily destroy its identity by giving it the name of Cobb Avenue,” Lane fumed in a letter to the editor. “That name would be exceedingly appropriate for the principal street in the Cobb allotment, but is entirely out of place on the thoroughfare in question.”

Cobb’s daughter took Lane’s protest as a personal attack and noted that it wasn’t her family’s idea to change the name.

“A number of the gentlemen living upon ‘Portage Path’ came to me and asked me if I would have any objection to having the path called Cobb Avenue after my father, as he was one of the oldest citizens of Akron and had been identified with the interests of Akron and surrounding country for over 60 years, originally owning so much land upon ‘Portage Path,’ they feeling it a compliment to my father’s memory,” Fannie Cobb Bloomfield responded.

“While I think ‘Portage Path’ a suitable name, and I should never have thought of changing it, I cannot see why Mr. Lane should have made such a severe attack upon the name of a street not in the city limits, nor likely to be for some time.”

Cobb Avenue resident Harvey M. Hollinger, one of the proponents of the change, cited confusion over similar-sounding streets in the neighborhood: Portage Path, Portage Road and Portage Street.

He sarcastically thanked Lane for his high-profile objection, which Hollinger claimed assisted “in having Cobb Avenue so generally known, for it would have taken years in the ordinary way to have informed the people that there was such an avenue in or near Akron.”

An anonymous letter writer, who identified himself as “one of the representatives of the estate,” argued that all Indian names should be cast aside in “the onward march of progress” and “civilized society.”

“We consider it of some importance that the men who cleared the farms, built substantial homes on them, and were important factors in the early development of the county should be remembered than that the lazy Indian who merely wandered across the country with his canoe on his back should claim a place in our memory,” he wrote.

The debate simmered until Akron expanded west in 1900 by annexing the township land.

Justice of the Peace Aaron Teeple, who lived on Cobb Avenue, circulated a petition to restore Portage Path’s name. He collected thousands of signatures, including “nearly every prominent man in town,” and delivered the petition to the City Council in August.

The city adopted a strangely worded resolution in October: “Be it resolved by the council of the city of Akron, Ohio, that the name of the road or street now known as Portage Path, be and is hereby named as Portage Path.” And so it still remains.

In 1901, Akron developer Gus Kasch arranged for an 8-foot arrow to be placed on a post at “the exact point” where the original trail crossed West Market Street. Four years later at the site, he donated an Indian statue that was dedicated July 4, 1905, as a tribute to those who had traveled the old path.

Kasch bought the 6-foot bronze figure for $75 from J.L. Mott Iron Works in Bronx, N.Y. The statue was moved decades later to West Market and Portage Path, where it stands today. By the way, a 2-foot-high arrowhead sculpture in front of PNC Bank at Highland Square marks the original route.

Kasch developed two allotments on the former Cobb farm, carving Ardmore and Elmore avenues into the old estate. While Bloomfield Avenue and Hollinger Avenue are among the streets in the neighborhood, Charles Bassett Cobb somehow got overlooked.

There is no Cobb Avenue. At least not anymore.

“Let the historic and venerated old name, Portage Path, stand forever,” Lane implored.

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.