Hungry customers lined up to get inside Parasson’s Italian Restaurant on Akron’s North Hill.

I remember the loud clank of iron rings on wooden doors, the life-size suit of armor that stood in the corner, the medieval decorations, crossed swords, dark paneling, wrought-iron bars, stucco walls, oil paintings and heavy chandeliers.

When I close my eyes, I can still catch that delicious first whiff of garlic, cheese and butter that wafted over the dining room as people waited for tables and booths.

The North Main Street restaurant, which Tony Parasson opened in 1967, was just shy of its 50th birthday when it closed its doors Saturday, citing declining business. For North Hill residents, it used to be a popular gathering place that promised fun times despite the dungeon-like décor.

One of my favorite hangouts in the 1970s and 1980s, Parasson’s was known for good, inexpensive food, hearty portions and friendly service. It was ideal for first dates, family outings, group events and even solo meals.

North High students packed the place following Vikings sporting events, after-school activities, movies and concerts. My ski club buddies and I made weekly visits after Brandywine, and my mother and I enjoyed Sunday dinners.

The Parasson’s menu featured spaghetti, lasagna, rigatoni and pizza for under $2 in the early 1980s. For big spenders, there were fancier choices such as chicken cacciatore, baked rigatoni, baked veal cutlet, chopped steak and fish dinners ranging from $3 to $3.50.

One of my favorite dishes was rigatoni with meat sauce, served with a baked garlic roll and Romano cheese. In its menu description, Parasson’s noted: “Mama called them stove pipes. A generous portion of rigatoni covered with our famous sauce, served piping hot.”

Pizzas could be topped with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, bell peppers, onion, black olives, meatballs, anchovies and hot pepper rings. I’m one of those guys who orders anchovies — much to the chagrin of many servers — but they never complained at Parasson’s.

The menu also boasted a number of submarine sandwiches named after Parasson’s family members, including the Nancy Special (Italian sausage covered with tomato sauce and topped with sautéed sweet onions and bell peppers), Tony Special (ground steak smothered with sautéed sweet onions and mushrooms, topped with lettuce, tomato and melted mozzarella cheese), Mickey Special (butter steak smothered with sautéed sweet onions and mushrooms, topped with melted mozzarella cheese) and Gina Special (ground steak with lettuce, tomato and onion topped with Roquefort or Thousand Island dressing).

Late-night spot

After I graduated from North and went to Kent State, Parasson’s on North Hill was still the place where my friends and I gathered on Friday nights. In those days, the restaurant was open from 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

We’d practically close the place on weekends with our protracted, loopy discussions about pop songs, video games, sports heroes, movie stars and current events.

It’s been more than 30 years, but I still remember the names of waitresses who put up with our hijinks: Mary, Brenda, Sally, Sue, Dee-Dee, Cheryl, Judy, Agnes, Melanie, Maruja, Dineen and Kim. We became friendly with some of the staff and got together for rock shows, house parties and ski outings. Those were fun times.

Place of comfort

That restaurant meant so much to me. When my father died unexpectedly in Florida in February 1988, I mourned for hours with relatives at my grandmother’s house. It was Friday night, though, and I knew where I had to go.

My friends were at Parasson’s restaurant and I needed to be there to find comfort. I’m not sure how many of my buddies knew that my father had died that day — I didn’t mention it — but we joked around like it was just another weekend. It was an unusual way to grieve, but it got me through. I’ll never forget that night at Parasson’s.

I don’t remember when we stopped being regular customers at the North Hill restaurant. I think it was in the early 1990s as my friends found jobs, moved away, drifted apart or got married. Our weekly gatherings ended, although we found time to reunite at Parasson’s when buddies came back to town.

I returned many times over the decades to reminisce about the good old days over a plate of piping hot pasta, but I feel guilty that the restaurant closed. Why didn’t I go there more often?

Although the other three Parasson’s locations will remain open, I will miss that beautiful dungeon on North Main Street.

On Saturday, I had to go one last time. The parking lot was full and hungry customers were lined up. The place was mobbed with people paying a final visit. I bet some of them wish they had gone more often, too.

With every bite of pasta, I reminisced.

Good food, good friends, good memories.

Thank you, Parasson’s.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Welcome to the future. We’ve been waiting all our lives for 2017.

For generations, people have wondered what life would be like in this glorious time. With the aid of library databases, we searched for “the year 2017” in news articles over the past century or so.

Put on your paper clothes and enjoy your breakfast capsules. Let’s journey back to the fascinating future of 2017.

• 1913: Dr. J.H. Kellogg of Denver predicted nothing more than the end of U.S. civilization in 2017 because women were “losing their maternal instinct and the capacity for motherhood.”

According to his calculations, “the fertility of the American wives is decreasing at the rate of 1 percent per year,” and “insanity and idiocy are on the increase.”

By 2017, there would be no babies left, he calculated. The youngest children would be 5 years old.

• 1917: The Scarab Club of Detroit held a dance in which attendees were asked “to attend garbed in the clothes of 2017, A.D.”

The Detroit News predicted that 21st century people would dress “to their caste and estate” because society would be divided between “half-enslaved laborers” and “the monied classes.”

People would “tear open the sealed packet that contains your simple paper garb for the day,” and break open “a couple of hermetically sealed capsules” to “sip your concentrated breakfast.”

Fashions would be unisex. “You might not be able to tell a man from a woman at fifty yards!” the newspaper said. “Perhaps 2017 A.D. won’t want to.”

• 1917: The Butte Daily Post of Montana published this knee-slapper titled “In 2017.” Apparently, you had to be there to fully appreciate it.

“What you are reading about?”

“Ancient customs in 1917. It seems the ancients used to find food very cheap as compared with us. They had dollar dinners.”

“Some of these stories about the ancients we have to take with a grain of salt. There is even a tradition that they had free lunches.”

• 1932: Dr. Samuel A. Mitchell, director of the Leander McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, said the New England solar eclipse of Aug. 31, 1932, would be the last promising opportunity for North American astronomers to gather vital information until Aug. 21, 2017.

“The coming generation may find methods of investigating chromosphere and corona with such success that observations at eclipses will no longer be necessary,” he said.

• 1957: Percival Brundage, budget director of the House Appropriations Committee, said the national debt would be wiped out by 2017 — if the U.S. government paid $9.1 billion every year for the next 60 years.

• 1959: Meeting with 9-year-old Cub Scouts in the White House, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

“Add 60 years to the year in which we now are. That would be the year 2017 when this child, this individual, will be attaining my fairly venerable years. This world is going at such a rapid state he and Americans like him will need to know much more than we do. And they must do it.”

• 1966: With only 13.49 inches of rain, it was the driest year ever recorded in Kansas. As the Hutchinson News reported:

“Clip this little item and file it where your grandchildren can have access to it half a century hence. If you lived in Hutchinson, Reno County, or within a 40-mile radius of same, you had a part in making climactic history — stuff that makes dry reading, but which will interest them in the year 2017.”

• 1967: Dorothy Gray cosmetic company looked into its crystal ball to predict trends for 2017.

Paste-on features would change the structure of a face from neckline to hairline. Toss-in-the-wash wigs would be freshly coiffed in “the supersonic laundry of tomorrow.” Plastic surgery in the form of silicone injections would provide instant youth.

• 1967: Dr. John R. Platt, a biophysicist with the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, predicted that 2017 couples would practice birth control through an oral contraceptive placed in common food such as salt, sugar, bread, rice or beer.

“Of course, any couple that really wanted to have a baby would have to go down the street and buy untreated food from the other store,” he said.

• 1971: The NBC-TV series The Name of the Game featured an episode titled “LA 2017” in which lead character Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) was transported to 2017 when everyone in Los Angeles was forced underground by air pollution.

• 1972: Georgia-Pacific Corp. began helicopter “air drops” of fertilizer across 4,423 forested acres in Oregon “to speed up the harvest” of trees for plywood and lumber products in 2017.

1981: Statistics Canada, a national agency, noted that women’s wages were playing a slow-but-steady game of catch-up with men’s wages and “should be equal by the year 2017.”

“I think it’s encouraging, although we still have a long way to go,” noted Alison Roberts, director of the Ontario labor ministry’s women’s bureau.

• 1982: Lloyd Kaye, an executive at New York consulting firm William M. Mercer Inc., warned that because of inflationary pressures, a man would need $1 million or more in 2017 “to live as comfortably in retirement as he did during his working years.”

• 1984: U.S. Sen. Howard Metzen­baum led a filibuster as the Senate considered a bill to extend until 2017 a Depression-era contract selling electricity from Hoover Dam at half-cent per kilowatt hour. “This is a giveaway,” the Democrat fumed. “It is a throwaway. It is illogical. It is absurd.”

• 1986: Television networks refused to air a W.R. Grace & Co. ad that criticized the “Me” generation for failing to halt the national debt when it was climbing above $2 trillion. The ad showed children in the year 2017 putting parents on trial for not addressing the deficit.

“Are you ever going to forgive us?” one elderly defendant wailed.

• 1987: Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the movie The Running Man about a futuristic TV game show in which citizens were hunted for entertainment. “It is the year 2017, and America is ruled by a totalitarian government that controls the hungry masses with brutality and lots of bad TV programming,” one critic noted.

Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. You can reach him at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

When Edward Conti learned about the death of Hollywood icon Debbie Reynolds, an unusual word flashed through his memory: “Chanticleer.”

The 71-year-old North Hill resident called the Beacon Journal for confirmation of a family legend involving the old Chanticleer Restaurant, a posh dining spot on Ghent Road in the 1950s and 1960s.

Angelo and Virginia Conti liked to point out the Fairlawn landmark to their kids.

“Every time my parents would pass by the Chanticleer, they would tell me this is where Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher had dinner,” he said.

Conti added: “What they were doing in the Akron area, I don’t know.”

It truly was a special occasion. “America’s Sweetheart” and “The Coca-Cola Kid,” perhaps the nation’s most beloved couple at the time, were on their honeymoon Oct. 2, 1955, when they made the stop.

“Wow,” Conti said. “That’s very interesting.”

The singing-and-acting celebrities were recognized as soon as they entered the Chanticleer, the former Ghent Road Inn that chef Michael LoCicero and manager Charles Samie had opened a month earlier near West Market Street. Restaurant workers and about 50 patrons gawked as the stylish couple took their seats at a table.

“Diminutive Debbie was radiant in a blue-grey taffeta blouse and a light-colored skirt. She wore a grey and white-striped scarf at her neck,” Beacon Journal reporter Lloyd Stoyer wrote. “Eddie had on a pair of dark slacks, a green wool sports shirt open at the collar and a grey and brown tweed jacket.”

Belated honeymoon

Following a Sept. 26 wedding in the Catskills of New York, the newlyweds left for a belated, two-week honeymoon at Greenbrier Country Club in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., but there was a little hitch in the plans.

“We were flying to Greenbrier from Chicago, but we were grounded in Cleveland,” Fisher explained. “We don’t have time to take a long trip. After our stay at Greenbrier, I’m due back in New York to go to work.”

So the couple phoned a friend who agreed to drive them to the West Virginia resort. It was a Sunday night and they were getting hungry, so they stopped at the Chanticleer while driving along Route 176.

According to the newspaper, the happy couple “exchanged fond looks” and cheerfully signed auto­graphs for anyone who asked.

“Both ordered shrimp cocktails,” Stoyer noted. “Eddie had chicken noodle soup, a prime rib of beef and a parfait for dessert. Debbie had onion soup, baked potato, Rock Cornish game hen and a parfait. She took along some rye bread and a dozen large black ripe olives for a snack later.”

“Celebrities or not, they’re wonderful people,” restaurant manager Samie told the Beacon Journal. “That Debbie — she’s beautiful.”

“They’re just two kids in love,” a waitress sighed after the two stars signed her order pad.

Fisher turned down Samie’s offer to pick up the dinner tab.

“I’ll take a rain check,” Fisher said. “We’re coming back this way and we’ll stop again.”

No return as couple

Although the couple entertained audiences in Akron over the years, they didn’t return as a couple. They welcomed their daughter, Carrie Fisher, the future Princess Leia of Star Wars, in October 1956 — a year after the dinner at Chanticleer.

Reynolds was pregnant with their son, Todd, in 1958 when Eddie Fisher left her for Hollywood superstar Elizabeth Taylor, whose husband Mike Todd had been killed in a March plane crash. Eddie’s popularity sank and his career stalled.

But three years earlier in Fairlawn, it could be said that Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher were never happier.

Incidentally, Edward Conti’s parents weren’t dining at the Chanticleer that famous night. They found out about the celebrity visitors through the newspaper article.

“My parents would not go to restaurants like that,” Conti said with a laugh.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

If the imminent threats of atomic annihilation and communist domination weren’t enough of a concern during the 1950s, Americans had to grapple with a diabolical menace from within.

Girls screamed in front of their television sets. Boys slicked their hair and tried to grow sideburns. Kids everywhere started caterwauling and swiveling their hips.

Darn you, Elvis Presley.

A war of words was fought 60 years ago in the pages of the Beacon Journal as Presley’s admirers and detractors wrote letters to the editor in defense (or opposition) to the rising king of rock ’n’ roll.

“Young girls are silly and panic stricken over this knock-kneed hillbilly,” one writer complained.

“One day Elvis Presley will be forgotten while they gripe at some other singer of the next generation,” another asserted.

“If the married men would take a cue from Elvis Presley — Love Me Tender — by loving their wives tender and true, we would have a better world,” a devoted fan rebutted.

In one typical note of opposition, Lee Schroeder groused: “I would like to voice my opinion concerning rock and roll. How can anyone in his right mind admit he actually enjoys this noise and nonsense? The final insult to the musical ear is something called Elvis Presley. It is time to throw in the sponge when someone from the hills can put on shoes, gyrate and utter groans and moans to the wail of a group of silly females and then draw down a fabulous salary of six figures.”

In ardent defense, Linda B. Huber replied: “Why does everyone try to run Elvis Presley in the ground? I am a great fan of his and I think he’s the most. All of us teens admire him greatly and really dig his cool songs. Frank Sinatra was the rage when most of our parents were teenagers. This is no different. Why don’t some of you selfish adults let us have our chance?”

In January 1957, University of Akron students decided to settle the question once and for all with a Forensic Union public debate titled Resolved: That Elvis Presley Is a Menace to American Society.

The debate, which took place in Kolbe Hall’s green room Jan. 10, two days after Presley’s 22nd birthday, covered such points as:

• Was Presley a product of the times?

• Was Presley an expression of freedom or license?

• Was he a reflection of what happening among youths?

• Did he leave children on the path of unrighteousness?

In announcing the forum, Professor Frank Alusow, faculty adviser, noted: “This is well worth discussing since Presley is the center of controversy in newspapers and magazines.”

Students Paul Tussing and Stefanie Novak argued in the affirmative — that Presley was a menace — while Bill Fisher and Teenie Shahmouradian upheld the negative. Dave Davis served as chairman.

In opening remarks, Tussing and Novak derided Presley as “indecent, sensuous, vulgar and detrimental,” blaming him for an increase in juvenile delinquency and a decline in morals and manners.

Not so fast, Presley’s defenders retorted. All that hip-swiveling was merely an indication that the Mississippi-born singer was an exhibitionist, not a vulgarian.

Shahmouradian recalled reading stories that Presley was a “home-loving, church-going young man” who was deeply devoted to his parents, Gladys and Vernon. He gave his mother a new Cadillac and bought a $35,000 home for his family.

“This type of person can’t be called a menace,” she said.

On the contrary, Tussing said he had witnessed a teenage girl flail around on the floor and scream hysterically when Presley performed on television.

“He is imperiling the morals and behavior of minors,” Tussing insisted.

Presley represented “nothing more than the epitome of what American stands for — the freedom to like and dislike,” Fisher said.

“And as for myself, I don’t like him either.”

That’s right. Even though Fisher and Shahmouradian were arguing that Presley wasn’t a threat to American society, they weren’t too crazy about him either.

They must have been persuasive, though, because the motion to declare Presley a menace was rejected.

“Despite the defeat of the motion, Elvis ‘The Pelvis’ emerged from the debate with little more than a moral victory,” Beacon Journal reporter Paul Spindler wrote. “Both negative and affirmative team members said they ‘can’t stand’ his hillbilly-like singing nor his bump-and-grind contortions.”

With that issue resolved, it was time to settle another issue once and for all.

The Forensic Union scheduled its next debate for February 1967: “Is the American Press Fair to Both Political Parties?”

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Some celebration.

Summit County residents are observing the 50th anniversary of Sears at Chapel Hill Mall by clearing its shelves during liquidation sales.

Sears announced this month that it would close 42 stores nationwide, including the one at the struggling mall in Akron. The last remaining Sears in the county is expected to shut down within two months.

Older residents remember when cars jammed the parking lot and shoppers swarmed the aisles.

“A fabulous new Sears store is coming to Akron!” the retailer advertised before the grand opening in September 1966. “It’s going to be big and beautiful, complete with everything from rolling pins to mink coats, from spark plugs to a custom tailoring shop for men, from diamonds to clothespins to carpets. Complete and convenient for one-stop family shopping.”

Predictably, the shiny new building was the beginning of the end for the old Sears store on South Main Street in downtown Akron, which quietly shut down March 1, 1967, as customers flocked to the suburbs.

Sears arrived in Akron with great fanfare 85 years ago — another anniversary that is being overlooked in 2017. Although the nation was wallowing in the Great Depression, the Chicago retailer proudly announced in April 1932 that it would open its 29th Ohio store in the Rubber City.

“Akron is financially and economically sound,” explained C.B. Roberts, assistant vice president of the company.

Beyond catalog

Akron residents had ordered from Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs since the late 19th century, but this was their first opportunity to shop at a brick-and-mortar Sears. The company chose the former Kirk Furniture Co. building at 265 S. Main St. next to the new Mayflower Hotel and spent more than $19,000 (about $344,000 today) to remodel the two-story structure and basement.

“Akron’s newest retail store, really eight specialty stores under one roof and management, will be opened tomorrow morning,” Sears advertised June 15, 1932. “Sears, Roebuck and Co., famous purveyors of first-quality merchandise for nearly half a century, brings to Akron a new kind of retail store.”

Akron City Council President Ed S. Rose served as master of ceremonies at the grand opening. Rose introduced H.F. Murphy, district manager for Sears, who introduced store manager O.B. Kemmerer to the large, waiting crowd. Rose unlocked the door and customers streamed inside, where 65 employees cheerfully greeted them.

“The main floor offers a bright display of washing machines, electric refrigerators, fishing tackle, golf equipment and beach attire,” the Beacon Journal reported in 1932. “Automobile tires, brushes, paints, varnishes and enamels are also exhibited. Ascending the broad staircase against the south wall, the shopper finds furniture groups and rugs on the second floor.

“The downstairs store is brilliantly lighted with a display of electrical goods; there are bathroom fixtures, a furnace exhibit, and equipment for the poultry raise and dairyman.”

Customers could find just about anything in the store: a steel hammer (95 cents), a push mower ($4.95), a 50-pound mattress ($3.95), a corn broom (19 cents), a Kenmore washer ($49.50), a 2-gallon can of motor oil ($1), an electric fan (89 cents), a 12-quart pail (10 cents), a Peerless bicycle ($19.95), work overalls (59 cents), a garden hose (79 cents), a gas range ($29.75) and an electric refrigerator ($99.50).

“We understand the needs of the American family,” Sears boasted during a three-day opening sale. “We guarantee satisfaction or your money back.”

Store expands

Business was so good that the store opened a third floor within a year, adding clothing and shoe departments for women and children. Still crunched for space, Sears moved in February 1948 to a brick, two-story building across the street — where Canal Park stands today.

“O-o-o-s and ah-h-hs will be heard far and wide when you folks of Akron and surrounding communities step through the welcome doorways of your new enlarged Sears store at 290 S. Main St. next Thursday morning!” Sears advertised Feb. 15.

“Never have you seen such eye-catching beauty … such modern display technique … such glorious coloring in a retail store. It is truly the last word in what an up-to-the-minute shopping center should be!”

Within two decades, the downtown store was obsolete.

Chapel Hill beckoned from afar, promising 150,000 square feet of retail bliss and free parking for Sears shoppers.

“Sears at Chapel Hill will be Akron’s newest, most fashionable department store … a convenient one-stop shopping center opening very soon!” the retailer advertised in 1966.

Soon all we’ll have left are memories — and questions.

How could a store survive the Great Depression but shut down when the stock market is high and unemployment is low?

And if consumers fled downtown for the suburbs, but then abandoned the suburbs, too, where do we go from here?

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

“This Place, This Time” is pausing to remember.

Today’s feature is devoted to providing updates on local history stories that appeared recently in this space.

Thank you for reading.

Eulogy for a veteran

Kim Stover wanted us to know that her friend and hero Jim Ripley, 71, of Canal Fulton, died Jan. 20 after a long illness.

Last month, we wrote about the 50th anniversary of the letter she wrote as a 7-year-old girl to Santa Claus, asking if he could stop the war in Vietnam. After the letter appeared in the Beacon Journal, she received a Vietnamese doll from overseas and a note from Ripley, then 21, a soldier in the U.S Army.

“I want to thank you for the wish you asked Santa Claus for,” he wrote. “I am here in Vietnam, and I would like Santa Claus to stop the war over here so I could be home with my family.”

The two became lifelong friends.

After exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, Ripley endured a lifetime of illnesses, including depigmentation of his skin, a heart condition and eventually dementia, but he always remembered to call Stover on her birthday.

Stover had a nice visit with him in 2016 when she traveled here from her home in Columbus, Ind. She returned Wednesday for the funeral.

“I know he’s relieved of his suffering, but I am shocked that he died so soon,” Stover said. “And just about a month after your article about him and me appeared in the ABJ. I am even more grateful now for all that you did to help us celebrate him while he was alive.”

Ripley is survived by Linda, his wife of 49 years, son and daughter-in-law Jim and Sheri Ripley, daughters and sons-in-law Sally and Doug Hartline and Melanie and Eddie Torres, and grandchildren Nick, Nathaniel, Jarod, Courtney, Kinsey, Kendra, Kyle, Liberty and Landry.

Ripley was buried at Ohio Western Reserve National Cemetery. The family suggests memorials to the Ohio Veterans’ Memorial Park in Clinton, where a granite tribute to Ripley’s service was unveiled last year.

Brush with celebrity

Jay Carano was a bus boy at the Chanticleer Restaurant on that night in 1955 when newlyweds Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher stopped for dinner en route to their honey­moon in West Virginia. We wrote about the visit in a Jan. 9 column.

“It was quite a treat to see them,” he recalled. “They received a lot of attention, and patrons were taking menus to their table for autographs. Chanticleer was a classy place and had elaborate and expensive menus.”

When manager Charles Samie saw what was happening, he ordered Carano to go to the hostess station and remove all the fancy menus.

According to Carano, Samie said: “These people have no idea how expensive these menus are. Go up front and gather up as many as you can find. I’ll go find some old ones in the back and put them out until the Fishers leave.”

Carano said he was a little surprised, but after thinking it over, he saw Samie’s point. “I wonder if anyone still has one of those menus,” he said.

Hello, Debbie

Maxine Samie, 87, the widow of Charles Samie, was surprised to open the newspaper and see a photo of her husband, who passed away in 1967 at age 51.

She said she really appreciated the article.

“It certainly did bring an awful lot of memories back to me,” she said. “The Chanticleer was really a beautiful place, and the food was superb there.”

She wasn’t present the night that Debbie Rey­nolds and Eddie Fisher dined, but she did run into Reynolds in the early 1960s.

“We went to Florida one winter, to Miami Beach, and we went there to see Frank Sinatra live at the Fontainebleau.”

They were waiting in line to be seated when Sinatra’s bodyguard Ed Pucci, a Canton native, strolled into the hotel and saw Charles Samie, a friend from Ohio.

“He went over and talked to the maître d’ and got us a wonderful seat,” she said. “Guess who was sitting right next to us?”

Debbie Reynolds and her second husband, Harry Karl.

Reynolds was pleasant as could be, and, yes, she remembered dining at the Chanticleer.

Dellwood revisited

Copley musician Gene Miller enjoyed the Dec. 26 story about Ange Lombardi and his orchestra.

“I had the good fortune to fill in on trumpet a number of times in his band at the Dellwood,” Miller said. “I knew nothing about his background, so your article was fascinating to me. I remember him as a kind man and an excellent musician. The book was fun to play. The arrangements were well done — easy to play and sounded good.”

“Most of the dancers were excellent as well. Entire ballroom dance classes would come to the Dellwood to practice. I memorized most of the music so that I could watch them dance. Everyone would dress up, go there, have dinner and dance. It was a wonderful time. Too bad that people don’t do that any more.”

North Hill’s loss

Akron native Michael Kolody, who now lives in Nevada, was saddened to learn about the closing of the Parasson’s restaurant on North Hill.

As a 1967 graduate of North High School, he has many happy memories of dining at Parasson’s. Every time he came back to Ohio, he would stop at Parasson’s.

“In 2015, we had a North High reunion at Stonehedge on Cuyahoga Falls Avenue,” he said. “I traveled back to Akron from Henderson, Nevada, and I was in Akron for about six days. I probably got to Parasson’s about four times during those six days.”

“The place just always treated my family and friends so well, the prices were great, the food was great, and we always felt so comfortable in there. I’m really going to miss it.”

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

They sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Brave pilots helped tame the skies for airship travel during the early 20th century, but the risks were as high as the thrills.

The Goodyear blimp Columbia lost a battle with nature 85 years ago in a spectacular wreck that was witnessed by thousands. There was nothing anybody could do. Not even the pilot.

Built in Akron in 1931, the silver airship was the latest addition to the Goodyear fleet, which included the blimps Defender, Mayflower, Reliance, Puritan and Vigilant. The Columbia was 141 feet long, boasted a gas capacity of 112,000 cubic feet, cost $65,000 to build (about $1.1 million today) and required a $6,000 supply of helium ($105,000 today).

“It will carry six passengers in addition to the pilot,” the Beacon Journal reported in 1931. “It is tastefully outfitted with brown leather chairs and upholstering and walnut woodwork in the cabin. It has a gasoline capacity of 100 gallons and a flying speed of 60 miles an hour and is equipped with two Warner Scarab motors of 110 horsepower each.”

The christening ceremony was scheduled for Tuesday, July 14, at the Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock near Akron Municipal Airport. Two days before the celebration, an ominous event occurred.

A violent storm ripped sister ship Mayflower off its moorings at Kansas City Municipal Airport on July 12, 1931, slamming it into a hangar roof and tangling it in power lines. With its gas tanks leaking, the blimp ignited.

Two passengers leaped from the gondola to safety. Goodyear pilot Charles E. Brannigan, 35, was trapped in the cabin, though, and suffered serious burns. Co-pilot R.H. Hobensack braved the flames to free his companion, but Brannigan died July 17 of his injuries and was buried in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Akron christening

As Brannigan lay dying in a hospital, the Columbia was welcomed in Akron with a 200-piece band and a 200-voice chorus. At the christening, Gertrude Harpham, wife of Fred M. Harpham, vice president of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., broke a bottle of liquid air over the control cabin.

She was assisted by Rebecca Huber, Minnie Stewart, Elizabeth Crouse, Nina Williams and Elizabeth Noble, the wives of executives and chamber leaders. Pilots Karl Fickes and Arthur Cooper took the women on the inaugural flight over Akron.

“This occasion marks another step in the march of lighter-than-air development,” Lt. Frank McKee, Ohio director of aeronautics, told the crowd at the ceremony. “The faith which Akron has placed in this new industry will be justified.”

The Columbia left in August for New York, where it was based at Holmes Airport in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. Goodyear ran a sightseeing service in which passengers paid $3 for 15-minute flights around New York City.

In a famous stunt, the blimp picked up a bundle of newspapers in September at the New York Evening Journal and delivered it to a man atop the new Empire State Building as a test to see if airships could anchor on the skyscraper’s mast.

Seven months after its debut, the Columbia met an untimely demise following three uneventful flights on the morning of Feb. 12, 1932, a day that began clear and calm until the wind kicked up at 10:30 a.m.

Pilot Prescott Dixon, 23, and Goodyear chief mechanic John Blair, 32, unexpectedly encountered gusts of 50 to 60 mph while trying to land at the Queens airport. Seeing a ground crew of only six, Blair scribbled a note, wrapped it around a wrench and dropped it to the ground. It was a request for more men.

The blimp circled Flushing Bay for an hour before running low on fuel and trying to land again as a ground crew of 20 men gathered. Sensing the ship was in distress, thousands of New Yorkers stopped what they were doing to watch.

About 50 feet up, the Columbia ran into an unexpected vertical current that smashed it into the ground, tearing off its landing gear and bending its propellers. As Dixon shut off the engines to avoid a fire, an unexpected updraft lifted the wrecked blimp and ripped it from the hands of the ground crew.

Desperate plan

The pilot hoped to ditch the free-floating airship in the water after three hours of high winds.

“I thought that Flushing Bay was the best bet, and the wind was carrying us straight for it,” he later told a reporter. “We figured on coming down on the water, and hopping out of the gondola.”

But the wind swept the Columbia back over land, and Dixon decided to dump the helium before getting swept out to sea. He ordered Blair to pull the ripcord.

“That opens up a 25-foot gash in the top of the bag, and in any ordinary circumstances that would cause the ship to fold up and hit the ground,” Dixon later explained. “I saw him reach for it, but the wind was so strong that it held the bag in place and the gas did not come out immediately.”

The blimp shifted and Blair fell out of the cabin door, plunging 50 feet to his death as onlookers watched in horror. The Columbia then knocked two men off a warehouse roof, crashed into a gravel company and knocked down power lines before settling along the electric tracks of the Long Island Railroad about 1:30 p.m.

“Hundreds were now rushing up from all sides,” the New York Times reported. “Dixon could be seen peering out of the gondola windows. The gondola had perched at a teetering angle on a pile of rubbish, and pieces of the motor and of the bag were twisted around in such a way that he could not get out.”

Spectators dug through the debris and pulled the dazed pilot out of the wreckage. He and the men who fell from the warehouse were rushed to a hospital with minor injuries. Blair was pronounced dead on arrival.

Police guarded the blimp to make sure no one would take souvenirs. The envelope, motors, tail-fin assembly and gondola were shipped on flat cars to Akron as salvaging ended Feb. 15.

Goodyear sped up construction of its new blimp, Resolute, to replace the Columbia.

Osee State, the wife of Goodyear engineer William C. State, broke a flask of liquid air over the gondola at the christening in late April 1932.

Another brave pilot, the latest in a long line, prepared to fly the blimp to New York.

“It will leave tonight if conditions are favorable,” the Beacon Journal noted.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Frederick Douglass had never before been invited to speak at a graduation ceremony. When the letter from Hudson, Ohio, arrived at his abolitionist newspaper in Rochester, N.Y., he greeted it with suspicion.

What were the intentions of the sender? Was it some kind of trick? Was it some kind of trap? After pondering the invitation, Douglass courageously decided to accept, and that is how he came to deliver the 1854 commencement address to literary societies at Hudson’s Western Reserve College, a center of anti-slavery activity and a forerunner of Case Western Reserve University. Today, the campus is home to Western Reserve Academy.

Some Ohio newspapers criticized the college for inviting a black man to speak at the formal event — even if he was one of the greatest orators in American history.

Douglass, 36, was only 16 years removed from slavery when he made the journey to Ohio. He was born in Maryland circa 1818 and escaped to New York in 1838, where he published an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

The summer heat was stifling July 12 as an audience of 3,000 waited for the distinguished guest beneath a giant tent at the Hudson campus. Seven years before the Civil War, Douglass took the stage and delivered a passionate, two-hour address on slavery and humanity.

“I engage today, for the first time, in the exercises of any college commencement,” Douglass told the assembly. “It is a new chapter in my humble experience. The usual course, at such times, I believe, is to call to the platform men of age and distinction, eminent for eloquence, mental ability and scholarly attainments — men whose high culture, severe training, great experience, large observation and peculiar aptitude for teaching, qualify them to instruct even the already well instructed, and to impart a glow, a luster, to the acquirements of those who are passing from the halls of learning to the broad theater of active life. To no such high endeavor as this, is your humble speaker fitted; and it was with much distrust and hesitation that he accepted the invitation, so kindly and perseveringly given, to occupy a portion of your attention here today.”

Although it was a sweltering day and the audience sat for hours on seats without backs, Douglass commanded the attention of the large crowd.

“He has a rich, full, mellow voice, capable of ranging through a wide scale, and of expressing every variety of emotion,” reported the Ohio Observer, a Hudson newspaper. “There were in his discourse eloquent passages, keen hits, clear and cogent statements. We noticed no bad grammar, no exaggerated metaphor — none of that sort of talk, and those expressions which the public have appropriated to his race.”

John Teesdale, publisher of the Summit County Beacon, was equally impressed with the address.

“The Manhood of the Black Man, or African, was the theme of Douglass,” Teesdale wrote. “To say that he discussed it ably would convey but a faint idea of the power displayed. The address was written, and in point of scholarship and literary merit it will rank — should it be published — with the most successful efforts of the ripest scholars. Yet, Douglass is an uneducated, or rather, a self-educated man.”

Douglass also gave talks in Cuyahoga Falls and Akron that week, but those addresses were not preserved. As Teesdale had hoped, Lee, Mann & Co. of Rochester, N.Y., published the Hudson speech in an 81-page tract later that year. The passages captivated listeners in 1854 and continue to resonate today.

On race relations, Douglass told the Hudson crowd:

“The relation subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the vital question of the age. In the solution of this question, the scholars of America will have to take an important and controlling part. This is the moral battlefield to which their country and their God now call them. In the eye of both, the neutral scholar is an ignoble man. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy.”

On basic humanity, Douglass affirmed:

“Men instinctively distinguish between men and brutes. Common sense itself is scarcely needed to detect the absence of manhood in a monkey, or to recognize its presence in a Negro. His speech, his reason, his power to acquire and to retain knowledge, his heaven-erected face, his habitudes, his hopes, his fears, his aspirations, his prophecies, plant between him and the brute creation, a distinction as eternal as it is palpable.”

On slavery and oppression, Douglass noted:

“Pride and selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify them—and when men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression. Ignorance and depravity, and the inability to rise from degradation to civilization and respectability, are the most usual allegations against the oppressed. The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defense.”

On enlightened society, Douglass concluded:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am not superstitious, but I recognize an arm stronger than any human arm, and an intelligence higher than any human intelligence, guarding and guiding this anti-slavery cause, through all the dangers and perils that beset it, and making even auxiliaries of enemies, and confounding all worldly wisdom for its advancement. Let us trust that arm — let us confide in that intelligence — in conducting this movement; and whether it shall be ours to witness the fulfillment of our hopes, the end of American slavery or not, we shall have the tranquil satisfaction of having faithfully adhered to eternal principles of rectitude, and may lay down life in the triumphant faith, that those principles will ultimately prevail.”

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t expect to dodge cannon blasts during his train trip from Springfield, Ill., to Washington, D.C., for the presidential inauguration in 1861.

Then he arrived in Ravenna, Ohio.

More than 1,000 people, including 100 schoolchildren, waited three hours in the cold at the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad Depot in Ravenna to catch a glimpse of the president-elect’s train Feb. 15. Most of the town’s 1,777 residents were gathered as the train approached around 3 p.m.

Col. Charles S. Cotter, a Middlebury native, called out the Ravenna Light Artillery to give Lincoln a thunderous salute.

“The approach of the train was greeted with a double-loaded cannon, which boomed its welcome far and wide,” the Cleveland Herald noted.

It had earlier been announced that Lincoln wouldn’t speak in Ravenna, but the excited crowd was so insistent that the 6-foot-4, gaunt, bearded president-elect felt obligated to step onto the train’s platform.

Feeling a bit under the weather and nursing a hoarse voice from too many speeches along the train trip, Lincoln still managed to deliver a five-minute address in Portage County.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I appear before you merely to greet you and say farewell,” Lincoln began. “I have no time for long speeches, and could not make them at every stopping place without wearing myself out. If I should make a speech at every town, I should not get to Washington until some time after the inauguration.”

The Ravenna audience laughed. The inauguration wasn’t until March 4.

“I am, however, all the time sensible of the deepest gratitude to the people of Ohio for their large contribution to the cause which I think is the just one,” Lincoln continued. “There are doubtless those here who did not vote for me, but I believe we make common cause for the Union.”

Here, according to a Portage Sentinel transcript of the address, spectators interjected such comments as “That’s so!” and “We are with you there!”

“But let me tell to those who did not vote for me, an anecdote of a certain Irish friend that I met yesterday,” Lincoln said. “He said he did not vote for me, but went for [Stephen] Douglas. ‘Now,’ said I to him, ‘I will tell you what you ought to do in that case. If we all turn in and keep the ship from sinking this voyage, there may be a chance for Douglas on the next; but if we let it go down now, neither he nor anybody else will have an opportunity of sailing it again.’ Now, was that not good advice?”

The crowd interjected enthusiastically: “Yes! Yes!” and “That’s the talk!”

A light snow fell as Lincoln wrapped up the speech amid cheers and applause: “Once more, let me say goodbye.”

Before departing, Lincoln’s train picked up Ravenna banker Horace Y. Beebe, one of five delegates from Ohio who switched their vote to Lincoln at the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Lincoln rewarded Beebe’s allegiance with a train trip to the Washington inauguration.

Ravenna native William R. Day, who served as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1899 to 1903, was a 12-year-old boy who witnessed Lincoln’s 1861 speech in Portage County. As Day recalled during a 1910 visit to his hometown:

“The reverberating echoes of the guns of Cotter’s battery gave a welcome salute to the appearance of the tall form of the newly elected president on the platform of the car … his quaint suggestion if he tarried too long at stopping places he wouldn’t make it to Washington until after his own inaugural.

“Who was wise enough then to foresee that we looked into the face of one whose patient strength and gentle but prevailing wisdom were to lead this nation through four years of deadly strife to final triumph for the Union?”

Before the train chugged out of Ravenna, the Ravenna Light Artillery delivered another thunderous volley. Maybe a bit too thunderous, really. It startled everyone on the train, including the president-elect and his wife.

“As the train moved, the cannon gave a parting shot,” the Cleveland Herald reported. “So loud were the discharges that a window in the forward car, and another in the rear car by which Mrs. Lincoln was sitting, were shattered to pieces.”

If it hadn’t been for the train’s drawn shades softening the concussion, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln could have been showered in jagged glass. Security guards upbraided the artillery for firing the cannon too close to the train. Lincoln left Ravenna with the town’s appreciation ringing in his ears.

The location of Lincoln’s 1861 visit is easy to overlook today on the western edge of downtown Ravenna. The depot and tracks are long gone.

A small plaque near the Arby’s restaurant at 417 W. Main St. pays tribute to one of the most memorable days in the city’s history: “At this site on February 15, 1861, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural train stopped at the Cleveland & Pittsburgh RR station to pick up Horace Y. Beebe of Ravenna. Beebe’s convention vote had ensured Lincoln’s Republican nomination in 1860.”

The Portage County Historical Society dedicated the marker in 1985 to the memory of local historian Dudley S. Weaver (1908-1984).

A Lincoln impersonator attended the dedication and Civil War re-enactors from the 16th Artillery Battery of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry fired a cannon.

Fortunately, no windows were shattered.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

The most joyful noise to childhood ears was the metallic sound of the world shaking.

When I was a boy in the 1970s, my parents gave me a toy bank of the globe, a pressed-tin sphere that had a coin slot somewhere over the Arctic Circle. The multicolored bank, manufactured by the Ohio Art Co. of Toledo, was about 5 inches in diameter and stood on a red base.

When the world got heavy enough, when enough coins had been deposited, I unscrewed the stopper at the bottom to raid my life savings and spend it on comic books, trading cards and dime-store candy.

This economical model worked surprisingly well during elementary school, but when I started receiving a weekly allowance in middle school and began stuffing the toy globe’s slot with currency, my mother took me to First National Bank of Akron to open a savings account. Her parents had taken her there as a girl, and now it was my turn, the third generation of our family to bank at First National. My paternal grandmother even worked there as a bookkeeper.

Oh, I still bought comics, cards and candy, but I learned to deposit the extra cash and let it accumulate in the bank. I also learned about checking accounts while watching my mother diligently balance her First National checkbook, and she helped me when I finally got my own.

First National is where I took my first paycheck, got my first credit card and took out my first bank loan for a car.

In the early 1980s, First National is where I was introduced to the wonders of automated teller machines. How I fondly recall the ATM at the bank branch at State Road Shopping Center in Cuyahoga Falls.

It spoke — honest to gosh — with the friendly accent of a British woman. Or maybe she was Scottish. Do you remember this? “Welcome … Please enter your secret number … Please select the service required … Please wait while your transaction is processing … Thank you for banking with us.”

Only she didn’t say “processing” the way Americans usually say the word. The ATM pronounced it as “PRO-sess-ing,” a quaint accent to these Ohio ears.

It was a difficult adjustment when First National Bank was renamed FirstMerit Bank in the mid-1990s. Customer service was unchanged, but that name!

What exactly is a FirstMerit? It took several years before I felt comfortable calling First National Tower in downtown Akron by its new name, FirstMerit Tower.

I have been a loyal customer for more than 40 years, but I have to admit that FirstMerit did some things that made me pause. In recent years, it closed several of my favorite branches in Summit County while expanding in other states, seemingly turning its back on its hometown clientele.

A few years ago, FirstMerit got rid of banking slips in its lobbies. Then it installed a new computer system that couldn’t print account balances on receipts. If you wanted a record of your balance, tellers had to go back into the system to print another slip to go with the first receipt. Not very efficient.

The news last year that Columbus-based Huntington was acquiring Akron-based FirstMerit in a $3.4 billion deal sent shock waves through the community and my family. I spoke with young people, however, who didn’t seem to think this was any big deal. They had already changed banks several times in their young lives and didn’t have any brand loyalty or generational ties with FirstMerit.

But my little world was shaken — just like my toy bank from childhood. In the words of that long-ago ATM, I am still PRO-sess-ing the transaction.

I made my final visit Friday afternoon to FirstMerit, where a busy teller assured me the transition was going well. FirstMerit officially converts into Huntington on Tuesday. Although my family briefly considered taking its business to a different bank, we’re going to stick around to see what happens and hope for a smooth transition.

Goodbye, FirstMerit.

Thank you, FirstMerit.

Welcome to the family, Huntington.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

You’ve probably never heard of Benjamin Sherman Crothers, so you’re unlikely to know he was born in Terre Haute, Ind.

If you’re of a certain age, however, you might know his stage name: Scatman Crothers. Did you know that his alias was born in Akron?

The bald, raspy-voiced entertainer, whose career peaked 40 years ago with recurring roles in television series such as the NBC sitcom Chico and the Man (1974-1978), voice-over work on Saturday cartoons including CBS’ Harlem Globetrotters (1970-71) and ABC’s Hong Kong Phooey (1974), as well as memorable parts in Hollywood movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Shootist (1976) and The Shining (1980), gained fame as a nightclub entertainer in Northeast Ohio.

Crothers was 27 when he visited Akron in 1937 for a limited engagement during the Great Depression. He ended up staying about eight years.

“I made Akron my headquarters in those days, living at the Green Turtle Hotel on Howard Street,” Crothers recalled in a 1975 interview with the Beacon Journal. “Even in those tough times, we filled the Kit Kat Club on North Main Street. And me and my combo played a regular gig on radio station WADC.”

In his act, Crothers sang and played several instruments, including piano, guitar and drums. WADC hired him to perform a live, 15-minute show from 1:45 to 2 p.m. five days a week, but a station manager didn’t think “Benjamin Sherman Crothers” was a name that listeners would remember.

“Well, out of a clear, blue sky I said, ‘Call me Scatman,’ ” Crothers recalled. “They laughed, said, ‘Why that?’ And I said ‘ ’Cause I do quite a bit of scattin’. Man, the requests I used to get on that show.”

“Scat” is a jazz style in which a singer improvises made-up words. “Skippity-zappity. Boppity-bippity-bip-a-dee-doo.”

“WADC’s Scat Man and his swing band is rating considerable notice by dialers,” the Beacon Journal noted. Crothers added a 9:30 p.m. radio show, which most likely was a remote broadcast from clubs because “The Scatman” was in big demand.

Harry A. Panago­poulos booked Crothers at Harry’s Black and Tan, an Akron club at West Bartges Street and Rhodes Avenue that endured vice raids for allowing dancing on Sundays. “Scat Man and His Black and Tan Band” performed at Brady Lake Park in Portage County while “Scat Man and His Original CBS Swing Band” played at Akron’s Merry-Go-Round on South Main.

Crothers met his future wife, Helen Sullivan, a Steubenville native, at a 1936 gig at Canton’s Commodore Hotel. He was black and she was white. They fell in love and got married in Canton in 1937.

“When he went away again, I missed him so much,” Helen Crothers recalled. “He missed me, too, so we decided to get married. He was playing in Akron, and I was still in Canton. … He got his blood test in Akron, and I got mine in Canton.”

Society was less accepting in those days, but Crothers said the interracial couple encountered few problems because they didn’t “make no big, flaunting issue of it.”

“Color don’t mean anything,” he insisted. “People gonna try to put you in a place one way or the other.”

Scatman and Helen moved to the Green Turtle, an Akron hotel owned by Leonard and Oda Forman on the southeast corner of North Howard Street and Federal Street (later Perkins Street and, still later, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).

“They were really nice people there,” Helen Crothers recalled. “I spoke to everybody.”

The Sorosis Club booked Crothers as musical entertainment for a formal dance in February 1939 at the Canadian American Legion Hall. “Swank in top hats, tails and white tie, backless and in many instances strapless evening gowns the elite of Akron Negro society last night made merry at their gala ball of the year,” the Beacon Journal reported.

Crothers made $150 a week (about $2,600 today) at clubs. His band performed three shows a night for more than a year at the Blue Star Inn on Route 224 between Barberton and Wadsworth. “Come Out Tonight,” the club advertised. “Scat Your Worries Away.”

As part of the act, Crothers liked to serenade couples in the audience. “I was the first black cat to ever do that,” he said. “From table to table with my guitar. That’s called strolling. They used to call me the man with a thousand tunes.”

Jitterbug Jamboree, a dance contest featuring “Scatman and His Joy Boys,” was held Dec. 3, 1942, at the Akron Armory. Admission was 75 cents. “The hottest hepcats in town turned up to dance to the music of one Sherman Crothers — ‘The Scatman’ — and his orchestra,” the Beacon Journal reported. “Whites and Negroes shared the floor in harmony; there was no ‘mixed’ dancing.”

The Kit Kat Nite Club at 581 N. Main St. hired Crothers’ orchestra as the house band in 1942, and he performed there for a year before traveling to California to test the waters. When Crothers returned in April 1945, the Kit Kat had moved to 34 N. Main St.

“He’s back again!” the club advertised. “The one and only Scatman and His Hollywood Orchestra. ”

Crothers and his wife moved that summer to California, where he found a lucrative career as an actor, dancer, singer and musician with nearly 200 credits to his name.

He wasn’t sure what the future held, but he wasn’t too concerned.

“I got simple tastes,” he said. “Don’t go in for all that flashy business. I tell other people: You don’t go by what somebody drives or wears. You can be dressed the best and have a wicked heart.”

For the first time in 37 years, Crothers returned to Akron in 1982 as a celebrity guest of the All-American Soap Box Derby. Other visitors included Star Trek actors James Doohan and George Takei, KC and the Sunshine Band singer Harry Wayne Casey, CHiPs actor Brodie Greer and Father Murphy actor Richard Bergman.

“I’m just wondering if I can get my bowlegs into the car,” Crothers joked before rolling downhill.

Four years later, Scatman Crothers died Nov. 22, 1986, in Van Nuys, Calif., after battling lung cancer. He was 76.

“My philosophy has always been about like what Paul said in the Bible,” he told the Beacon Journal in 1975. “He said the race isn’t given to the swift. It’s given to the one who endures to the end. The Bible. Anything you want to know is in that book. Anything.”

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Welcome to the Guinness edition of This Place, This Time. Today, we’re looking back at ordinary people who did extraordinary things in the 1970s.

In an era of lava lamps, pet rocks, platform shoes and black-light posters, the general public seemed obsessed with being included in The Guinness Book of Records.

Here are some record-breaking feats from a wild, wacky decade.

No pain, no gain

Wooster entertainer Vernon Craig, 40, who performed under the name Komar the Hindu Fakir, punctured the world record for lying on a bed of nails in July 1971.

Craig spent 25 hours and 20 minutes resting on a board of 20-weight penny nails spaced 3 inches apart. The old record, 25 hours and nine minutes, was set in Australia.

“There’s not really much discomfort,” Craig explained to the Beacon Journal. “It’s more like intense pain.”

Let’s get cracking

Dave O’Karma, 18, of Cuyahoga Falls, gulped down 45 hard-boiled eggs in a record-shattering eight minutes and 10 seconds in a July 1974 contest at Lakemore Plaza.

Hundreds of spectators egged on 26 contestants as they tried to crack a 30-minute, 44-egg record.

The secret to success was “to be a little crazy and have a big mouth,” O’Karma explained.

(Yes, this is the same guy who, under the nickname “Coondog,” would go on to win many speed-eating contests and other feats of gastric endurance.)

A glazed look

Eighth-grader Eric Stone, 14, gobbled 23 doughnuts in 14 minutes and 44 seconds in March 1975 before 60 students and teachers at Manchester Middle School.

That put a hole in a 1974 record of 20 doughnuts eaten in 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, Stone didn’t realize the record had been topped in the 1975 book: A California man, 27, had eaten 37 doughnuts in 15 minutes.

“All those doughnuts for nothing,” Stone sighed. But then he brightened. “Maybe, at least, I set a record for kids under 18.”

Keep on rocking

GlenOak High School sophomores Charlene Dawkins and Jennifer Anderson, both 15, set a rocking-chair record in 1975.

With pillows as cushions, the girls rocked for 324 hours and 21 minutes. The previous record was 307 hours and 30 minutes.

They raised $400 as a benefit for arthritis.

Afterward, they said they planned to catch up on some TV and avoid rocking chairs for a while.

Grab a scoop

Ice cream parlor owner Bob Bercaw used hydraulic lifts to whip up a 5,000-pound sundae for a 1976 Fourth of July celebration in Wooster.

The previous record was a 3,814-pound sundae in Washington, D.C.

The three-tiered sundae featured red, white and blue whipped cream.

Bercaw said he’d never try it again because the production was “unreasonably expensive.”

A good yarn

In February 1977, Guinness confirmed that Betty Tafat of Cuyahoga Falls had created the world’s largest ball of yarn.

The 75-pound, crocheted mound stood 4 feet high and stretched 11.09 miles if unraveled — about 8 miles longer than the previous world record.

Tafat started collecting yarn in October 1976 and spent five hours a day, five days a week, wrapping and wrapping.

“I just wanted to see if such a project would get boring,” she told the Beacon Journal. “It didn’t.”

Making a pitch

Six men spent 120 hours pitching horseshoes at Towner’s Woods Park near Kent in May 1977.

Robert Smith organized the marathon with Merrill Evans, Dick Baldwin, Tom Loudin, John Hayes and Harold Lange.

They finished with a resounding clang, breaking a 100-hour record set in Allentown, Pa., in 1973.

Going my way?

Akron attorney Parke Thompson had already been to 229 countries by 1977, and he wasn’t done.

Guinness crowned him “the world’s most-traveled human” after he made it to all 309 countries, territories and island groups.

“The typical tourist is not really interested in travel but in saying he’s been there,” he explained. “I’d rather see a little of a lot than a lot of a little.”

Spinning wheels

Kenmore High School junior Marty Costanzo, 15, spent 26 consecutive hours on a skateboard in a September 1978 stunt at a Stow shopping center.

Breaking the previous record by two hours, Costanzo admitted “it was harder than I thought.”

“Around 5 in the morning, it got pretty boring, and my feet were super sore at the end,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be on the board for a while.”

Hoop-hoop hooray

Ten Springfield High School students played an 80-hour basketball game — five hours longer than the record — to raise money for cancer research in May 1979.

Players Dave Jackson, Scott Dodds, Jodi Kalmar, Keith Byers, Scott Plummer, Mike Hardy, Jerry Morrison, Jeff Taylor, Paul Gilpin and Ron Mile­tich celebrated their victory by napping.

Pass the baton

Nine girls twirled batons for 48 hours in June 1979 in Stow.

The girls, known as the Royal Paraders, were Kim Ellinger, 15, Lori Sommer, 15, Sandy Becker, 17, Lynda Lytle, 16, Amy Barbetta, 15, and Lynn Swartzlander, 15, all of Stow; Kelli Davis, 16, of Tallmadge; Jan Harrington, 16, of Kent; and Karyn Le Page, 17, of Silver Lake.

They broke a 1975 record of 44 hours. As one mom put it, “Those kids went through six bottles of liniment.”

Flipping a disc

It was all in the wrist for the “Five Frisbee Freaks” in September 1979. Canton youths Tina and Tom Knisely, Randy and Kenny McNutt and Tim Schirey spent 20 days tossing a flying disc on Willow­row Avenue, breaking a record in 480 hours and one minute.

For those who gave a flip, the previous mark was 475 hours, 18 minutes.

Just roll with it

Michelle Lake, 21, of South Akron, laced up her skates in September 1979 and rolled into the 1980s.

She zoomed past a 14-day record for longest time on roller skates and lasted 125 days. Under Guinness rules, she could take her skates off five minutes every hour.

“I dream at night about accidentally taking them off,” she said. “I wake up in a panic and feel to see if they are still there.”

As a benefit for United Cerebral Palsy, she spent 2,966 hours and 51 minutes on skates, taking them off Jan. 27, 1980, and soaking her feet in a bucket.

“It feels really strange,” she said. “My feet are sore and it feels like they’re not there, because I’m used to having those things on.”

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Akron added an important word to its lexicon 100 years ago.

Dr. William C. Geer, vice president of the B.F. Goodrich Co., called a staff meeting in 1917 to announce the exciting news that the Akron company would bid on a blimp contract for the U.S. Navy.

Looking around the room, Geer noticed confused looks. Finally, John R. Gammeter, a process engineer, piped up: “What the hell’s a blimp?”

Although Akron residents were familiar with dirigibles, the British slang term “blimp” for a nonrigid airship hadn’t drifted into the local vocabulary. That was about to change.

On March 12, the Navy ordered two blimps for $83,000 from Goodrich and nine for $300,000 from Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., a rival Akron company. The Goodyear blimp is iconic today, but some local residents might be surprised to learn that Goodrich made blimps, too. Gammeter, a mechanical genius who had owned the first airplane in Akron, was placed in charge of aeronautical work at Goodrich just before the United States entered World War I.

“In 1917 I went to Washington with Dr. William C. Gear, chief chemist of Goodrich,” Gammeter recalled years later. “P.W. Litchfield was there from Goodyear, and the Curtiss people from Hammondsport. Commander J.C. Hunsaker of the Navy wanted eight blimps. He agreed to split it. Doc Gear offered to build four blimps, but I kicked him under the table. ‘Two, two,’ I whispered.”

Goodrich brought French aeronautical engineer Henri Juilliot, 60, to Akron to oversee construction of airships. Juilliot, who reportedly was paid $2,000 in gold, gathered a crew of mechanics, chemists, engineers, riggers and seamstresses.

“The United States will need many dirigibles in case of hostilities with Germany,” Juilliot noted upon arrival in Akron. “They are essential for coast defense. The larger dirigibles can go out to sea for 500 miles and watch for enemy fleets.”

Built to Navy specifications, the cigar-shaped airships were 160 feet long, 50 feet high and 31 feet in diameter with a capacity of 77,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. The Curtiss Airplane Co. of New York supplied the gondolas and 100 horsepower engines. The blimps could travel 45 mph and soar to an elevation of 7,500 feet.

“To become an operator of a military dirigible, one must have youth, a month’s training and a working knowledge of physics and mechanics,” Juilliot explained.

The federal government obtained permission to use Fritch Lake near the Portage County line as a testing field for Akron-made airships. Construction of a blimp hangar was expected to take 60 days to complete. Today, Fritch Lake is known as Wingfoot Lake, home of the Goodyear blimp.

After U.S. entry in the war on April 6, 1917, the Navy needed Akron airships to patrol the Atlantic coast and perform anti-submarine duty in the North Sea. Each blimp could carry more than 6,000 pounds of explosives. Overseas, German zeppelins were used to scout enemy positions and carry out bombings.

Goodyear was the first to make test flights in June 1917 with pilot Ralph Upson and engineer Herman Kraft aboard. During a voyage from Fritch Lake to Akron and back, Upson waved from 500 feet up when he spied his wife on the porch of their Goodyear Heights home.

“On the buildings and lawns of Akron a strange shadow was cast Monday morning, as between the city and the sun silently glided one of the big factors of war, a dirigible balloon,” the Beacon Journal reported June 25.

“As Akron people gazed upward there came to the minds of many the realization of the feeling of fear and awe which must fill the hearts of those in England and France when a shape similar to the one that sailed over Akron rains death and destruction.”

Although Goodyear’s blimp flew first, Good­rich’s blimp was the first to win approval from the government. The air bag was built in Akron and towed to Chicago for inflation at a hangar. Gammeter designed a pressure-relief valve that became the standard for U.S. blimps for decades.

“One morning I came out to the hangar and snapped my finger against the blimp,” Gammeter recalled. “ ‘Ain’t she a beauty?’ I said to the cop. ‘Keep your hands off that,’ he said. ‘It belongs to Uncle Sam.’ ”

Goodrich hired balloonist Roy Knabenshue to test a blimp for the Navy in a secret night flight over a nameless big city on the Atlantic coast.

“Over the metropolis the monster hovered, unobserved, unsuspected by the moving hordes of pedestrians, for eight hours,” the Beacon Journal reported Sept. 22, 1917. “Below, Roy Knaben­shue, the pilot of this giant craft, saw the twinkling lights, saw the illuminations thrown out by the theaters, the cabarets, the restaurants — the drama of night life as enacted by dots, by a blurred mass.”

The government accepted Goodrich’s blimp and deployed it for homeland defense. Blimp A-247 was stationed at Montauk Point on Long Island, N.Y., where it established a record of 17 months and four days in service, covering 23,000 miles at sea and guarding convoys of U.S. ships against enemy attacks. When it was retired in March 1919, the Goodrich blimp was a hit attraction at an aeronautical expo in New York.

In all, Goodrich built eight blimps and 360 smaller observation balloons during the war. When the conflict ended, Goodrich ended its program over concerns about profitability. Its competitor Goodyear was far more enthusiastic, constructing at least 60 airships and 1,000 balloons during the war, and turning the blimp into a beloved corporate symbol.

Despite its proud service, the Goodrich blimp was reduced to a joke in the 1970s. The company hired Grey Advertising Co. of New York to launch a campaign titled “We’re the Other Guys!” “If you see an enormous blimp with somebody’s name on it, we’re the other guys,” Goodrich noted.

The company produced posters showing empty blue sky and the caption: “A picture of the Goodrich blimp.”

The University of Akron’s Archival Services division in the Polsky Building has preserved a fragile scrapbook with rare photos of the Goodrich airships being constructed 100 years ago. Tucked inside the cover is a note from executive William C. Geer to a blimp builder: “You might like to have a memento of the part you played in the enterprise.”

The Goodrich blimp was never a joke to those who worked on it.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Inside the tiled walls of Amelia Flats, the cycle of life was in full rotation. Newlywed couples moved in, welcomed babies, raised families, entered middle age, retired from jobs and ultimately died there.

The five-story building, which stood on Park Street across from picturesque Grace Park, was one of the city’s earliest apartment houses when it opened in 1901.

Houses were nearly impossible to find as laborers flooded Akron for jobs at the city’s bustling rubber factories in the early 20th century. Newcomers had to rent rooms, live in boarding houses or stay at hotels.

Businessman Horace B. Camp (1838-1907) saw an opportunity to develop upscale suites in a desirable neighborhood where prominent families such as the Barbers, Buchtels, Bierces, Firestones, Howers, Seiberlings and Schumachers maintained beautiful homes. Camp and his wife, Amelia (1852-1938), lived in a 10-room home at North Union and Park streets.

“Mr. Camp is a very unobtrusive man, of quiet and retiring habits and dislikes any notoriety or publicity very much,” the Beacon Journal noted in a 1902 profile. “He is not at all desirous of parading the fact that he has risen to the position of trust, confidence and esteem he now holds, from a comparatively lowly and meager beginning. He is very reticent about talking concerning his early life or his various business interests.”

The Tuscarawas County native owned the H.B. Camp Co., which manufactured vitrified clay conduits for underground wires for telephones, telegraphs and electric lights.

Camp was president of the Akron Fire-Proof Construction Co., Akron Clutch Co., Akron Coal Co. and Faultless Rubber Co. He built the Ashland & Western Railroad and Lake Erie Terminal Railroad, organized Colonial Sign & Insulator Co. and helped build the Colonial Theater on Mill Street in downtown Akron.

Despite all of those interests, he still found time to develop housing.

Camp purchased “a considerable block” of real estate on Park Street near the railroad tracks and chose a site overlooking Union Depot off East Market Street for his “flats.” Cleveland architects Frank B. Meade and Abram Garfield submitted plans in January 1900 for “a thoroughly equipped, up-to-date apartment house built upon metropolitan principles.”

“The building will be made of hollow brick, such as are manufactured in Mr. Camp’s plants, and the interior will be handsomely finished,” the Akron Daily Democrat reported. “The structure will be provided with an automatic elevator, which does away with the use of the old time elevator boy.”

Building rises

Excavation began in January 1901 on a five-story building 85 feet long and 60 feet wide. Each floor would be divided into two suites of rooms, allowing 10 families to occupy the building. Camp named the complex Amelia Flats after his wife, the former Amelia Babb of Cuyahoga Falls.

The fireproof structure’s exterior walls were built with “hard-burned vitrified tile” and its floors were composed of Sandusky cement and ground wood “troweled down smooth and level.” In addition to ceramic tiling, the building’s most notable characteristic was its bright red awnings over every window.

As Amelia Flats arose, anonymous critics began a whisper campaign that Camp’s building was unsafe. The Akron Fire-Proof Construction Co. derided the “untrue and malicious stories in circulation,” and offered a $100 reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone “guilty of promulgating such reports.”

The apartment house at 218 Park St. began to fill with well-heeled tenants by February 1902. Camp was so pleased that he announced plans in 1903 for a twin five-story building, Campania Flats, at 279 Park St. The sister complex, which featured four suites per floor for a total of 20, was named after a British ocean liner but it also was a play on the family’s surname. The Campania opened in 1904.

After battling heart disease for five years, Horace B. Camp died Nov. 21, 1907, in his North Union Street home with his family at his bedside. The 69-year-old businessman was survived by his wife, Amelia, daughters Grace Armstrong and Laura Mosher, and sons Louis W. Camp and Henry H. Camp. He was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Cuyahoga Falls.

Properties deteriorate

In 1920, real estate developer A.F. Stuhldreher took a 99-year lease on the Amelia and Campania along with the Camp estate at the northwest corner of Park and Union streets. Amelia Camp sold the property in 1926.

Generations of families lived there. For more than 40 years, vacancies were quickly filled at the apartments, but the buildings fell into disrepair in the 1950s amid changing ownership. Longtime residents began to move out, and many of those who remained were on relief or had criminal records.

The Campania’s owner went to prison in the 1960s for receiving stolen goods and selling marijuana. In 1961, a man leaped to his death from a third-floor window. In 1963, the city evicted 14 families, including 30 kids, “in the interest of saving lives.”

“I could go on all day about that place,” city building inspector Ott Salzwimmer told the Beacon Journal. “It is a menace and a fire hazard. The wiring and plumbing are bad. It is filthy.”

The Campania stood for another 20 years, even serving as the Haunted Apartment House in October 1975. The city condemned the complex four times, citing more than 50 building code violations. Finally, the Akron Wrecking Co. leveled the vacant building in 1981.

The Amelia, renamed Grace Park Apartments, was divided into efficiency apartments and also endured problems. There were stabbings, shootings and muggings. Two men beat and robbed the manager in his office in 1969.

The former Amelia lingered until the late 1980s. Vandals stripped plumbing and wiring, smashed windows and punched holes in walls. Wreckers eventually put the building out of its misery, showering the ground in glass and vitrified tile.

Today, empty lots are all that is left of Horace B. Camp’s dream of upscale suites on Park Street.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

How did Akron residents spell relief?

“Po-Ca-Ta-Lo.”

That mysterious word conjures up memories of South Main Street in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

Kids who grew up in the neighborhood or drove past in automobiles, streetcars or buses might remember a life-size, papier-mache mannequin of an American Indian standing on a porch at South Main and Bachtel Avenue.

For 20 years, the garishly painted figure served as an eye-catching advertisement for the Po-Ca-Ta-Lo Indian Medicine Co.

Operated by Frank D. Adams (1869-1964), a businessman popularly known as “Doc” Adams, the South Akron company manufactured 75 natural remedies and operated a factory in Canton. Adams billed himself as “The Indian Medicine Man” and claimed to be “In Business for Your Health.”

Despite an English surname, Adams wasn’t fibbing about his heritage. He was born Iris Diet Nouche to Kickapoo parents in Salamanca, N.Y., grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and graduated from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Adams said his birth name translated to “Beautiful Running Water,” but his parents, Lenora and N.H. Adams, chose to adopt Anglicized names.

Young Adams crisscrossed the country with his father, who operated a traveling medicine show in the 19th century. They passed through Summit County around 1889.

“I remember my first visit to Akron as though it were yesterday,” Adams recalled in a 1941 interview with Beacon Journal columnist H.B. “Doc” Kerr. “We pitched our show on South Main Street near the old Merrill pottery works — where the big M. O’Neil Co. store now stands. I liked the town at first glance and decided that if I ever went into business for myself it would be in Akron.”

Adams wore his black hair in a 37-inch braid when he moved to Akron about 1914, but he cropped it a few years later. He opened the Po-Ca-Ta-Lo remedy company in the early 1920s at his home at Bachtel and Main about a block from West South Street.

Po-Ca-Ta-Lo probably was derived from Chief Pocatello (1815-1884), a Shoshone leader and namesake of an Idaho city. When asked about the brand’s name, Adams said it meant “Big Chief.”

Healing treatments

Ingredients were closely guarded secrets, but the company assured that its remedies were all natural and could cure everything from headaches to muscle soreness to insect bites.

“Po-Ca-Ta-Lo Indian Medicine Acts Directly on Kidneys, Liver, Stomach.”

“Are You Hitting on All Four? Take Po-Ca-Ta-Lo Indian Medicine.”

“Overhaul Your System — Take Po-Ca-Ta-Lo Indian Medicine Made of Pure Roots and Herbs.”

The most popular remedy was Po-Ca-Ta-Lo Treatment No. 2 (“Known for many years as a reliable medicine. Used in the early days and handed down to the present time.”)

Customers were directed to “SHAKE WELL BEFORE TAKING,” and to take one tablespoonful before breakfast. “Increase or decrease dose as your condition may require to move bowels two or three times per day,” the label noted.

In addition to operating a successful business, “Doc” Adams sponsored bowling and basketball teams. The South Akron All-Stars changed their team name to the Po-Ca-Ta-Lo Indians.

The papier-mache Indian figure, which depicted a robed, long-haired man holding a tomahawk, became so popular that it served as an unofficial mascot for South High School students who passed it every day on the way to class.

When “Doc” Adams closed the business about 1946, he sold the Indian figure to a Medina antiques dealer.

It changed ownership many times — for years, it was located in the Mustill Store in Akron — before being sold for $2,300 to an anonymous collector at a 1981 auction in Canton.

Frank D. Adams was 93 years old when he died in 1964 at his Bachtel Avenue home.

“I have prospered and have made many friends,” he once said. “What greater reward could anyone ask?”

He took his secret recipes to the grave at Greenlawn Memorial Park. For decades, older Akron residents used to call the Beacon Journal’s Action Line column in search of Po-Ca-Ta-Lo ingredients.

Recipe revealed

In 1979, Harry Porter, the son of Adams’ housekeeper, Abbie Porter, gave one secret recipe to Cuyahoga Falls resident Edith Veenman, who cooked up a batch in a 50-hour process.

“My phlebitis improved as soon as I started taking the medicine again,” she told the Beacon Journal. “I am not using my crutches and canes as much either. The medicine is bitter as the dickens, but I feel good all over!”

The previously secret ingredients included gentian root, cape aloes, rhubarb root, mandrake root, sassafras bark, galangal root, ruchu leaves, uva ursi, sassafras bark, capsicum, bitter almond, sodium salicylate and soluble saccharin.

Basically, the remedy was a strong laxative.

It was purely coincidental that Adams named it Treatment No. 2.

Seeing the ingredients in the newspaper in 1980, Dr. Edward B. Truitt, head of pharmacology at the Northeast Ohio Universities College of Medicine (now known as NEOMED), felt compelled to issue a warning that Po-Ca-Ta-Lo could produce “intense diarrhea and fluid disturbance.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it for any human being or animal,” he said. “It results from an old-time idea that a drastic cleanout cures something. It doesn’t. It’s dangerous, especially to an elderly person.”

Oh, no.

That’s Po-Ca-Ta-Lo.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Calling all doughboys. The 100th anniversary of U.S. entry in World War I will be commemorated with a collaborative effort titled Summit County and the Great War.

Beginning next week, a series of community events will be held to mark the centennial of the U.S. declaration of war April 6, 1917.

Here is the schedule:

• The Summit County Historical Society will kick off the series with a ceremony at 11 a.m. Monday next to Charles Goodyear Park at The Spirit of the American Doughboy statue at 174 S. High St. outside the Summit County Courthouse in downtown Akron. Featured speakers will include Summit County Executive Ilene Shapiro, Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan and State Sen. Frank LaRose. A Salvation Army brass choir will provide music at the free event.

• An exhibit honoring Akron soldiers of World War I will open Monday inside the courthouse and remain on view for the rest of the year. A map of memorials, cemeteries and events relating to the county’s involvement in the war is available at www.summitWWI.org. It will be updated throughout the year.

• The Summit County Historical Society and Summit Metro Parks will sponsor a downtown walking tour on Great War veterans from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. April 18. Participants should meet in the Polsky Building lobby off High Street for the free event. The society also will make its Over There program available to groups who request a speaker. For more information, call 330-535-1120.

• Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens plans a World War I program from noon to 4 p.m. May 21 at 714 N. Portage Path in Akron. The event will include a talk by Kevin Kern, an associate professor of history at the University of Akron, historical displays and first-person interpreters. F.A. and Gertrude Seiberling’s son Fred Seiberling served in France during the war. Guests to the estate can see a permanent exhibit, The Seiberling Legacy, which will run from mid-April through December. For more information, call 330-836-5533 or visit www.stanhywet.org.

• The University of Akron Archival Services is granting public access to hundreds of documents and photos from American Legion Post 209, whose members served during World War I. An inventory of the collection is available at www.uakron.edu/libraries/archives/. More information is available at the uakronlibraries Facebook page.

• Akron-Summit County Public Library’s Special Collections Division will sponsor a free class, “Discovering Your Military Ancestors,” from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 5 at the Main Library auditorium at 60 S. High St. Military historian Eric Johnson and genealogist Michael Strauss will discuss research techniques. Registration is requested. For more information, call 330-643-9030 or email speccollections@akronlibrary.org.

The library is also planning a Nov. 11 screening of the 2010 documentary For Love of Liberty: The Story of America’s Black Patriots. Times will be announced for the two-part, four-hour film.

The news wasn’t entirely unexpected. The war had been raging for nearly four years in Europe and it seemed increasingly likely that the United States would get drawn into the terrible conflict.

Akron residents braced for the inevitable.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called Congress into “extra­ordinary session” to seek passage of a war resolution against Germany.

“With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States,” Wilson said.

In a front-page proclamation published the next day in the Beacon Journal and Akron Evening Times, Mayor William J. Laub issued a proclamation to reassure immigrants that no harm would come to them.

“I take this means of declaring to all foreign-born residents that they will be protected in the ownership of their property and money, and that they will be free from personal molestation so long as they obey the laws of the state and nation and the ordinance of the city,” Laub noted.

“I urgently request that all our people refrain from public discussion which might arouse personal feeling, and that they maintain a calm and peaceful attitude toward every one, without regard to their nationality.”

On April 6, the United States declared war on Germany. The Great War — it wouldn’t be known as World War I until its sequel arrived in the 1930s — was heralded as “The War to End All Wars.”

Patriotic fervor swept Akron. U.S. flags fluttered everywhere, and citizens rushed to the aid of their country. Rubber factories ramped up production of military tires, gas masks, reconnaissance balloons and other products for American troops. Citizens planted victory gardens in their backyards to help feed a nation at war. Gasoline was rationed.

Mayor Laub organized the Home Guard, a volunteer regiment to protect Akron against German saboteurs and spies. Within two weeks, 1,000 volunteers stepped forward. One of the first things the group did was to guard the city’s water supply at Lake Rockwell near Kent.

The government took control of wireless operations and telegraph lines. Unnaturalized Germans were forbidden to carry weapons or make threats against the government or get too close to military plants. German language newspapers, including Akron Germania, were not allowed to write articles about the war.

German potato salad was renamed Yankee potato salad, sauerkraut became victory cabbage, Vienna bread was called New England bread. While Ohio towns such as Vienna, Dresden and Leipsic considered changing their names, one Stark County community actually did so. The residents of New Berlin petitioned to change their town’s name to North Canton.

Hundreds of enlistees flooded military recruiting offices in Akron. The Navy and Marines were stationed on South Howard Street while the Army held forth on South Main Street. The Ohio National Guard’s Company F recruited from the Summit County Courthouse while Company B welcomed enlistees at City Hall. The National Guard’s machine gun company occupied the Hamilton Cigar Store at Main and Mill streets.

“This is the time for the young men of Akron to show their patriotism,” said Capt. W.C. Yontz from Company B. “They should enlist voluntarily, so that the state and country will see they do not wait to be drafted. If they don’t enlist, it will merely mean that the drafting system will be put in force at once.”

The government called for unmarried men ages 18 to 35 to join the Army and Navy. Within a week, the age restrictions were relaxed to ages 16 through 40. Black recruits initially were turned away at Akron offices until the government ordered that the men be enlisted for “colored regiments.”

Sgt. R.J. Pyatt, commander of the Navy office at 37 S. Howard St., was pleased with the recruiting efforts in Akron. “It’s different than in times of peace,” he said. “Then recruiting was from among a class many of whom were loafers and riffraff. Now it is a serious business, and it is the good fellows who are going.”

All 160 male students at the University of Akron were given compulsory military training. Coach Fred Sefton, a captain of the Home Guard, led drills three days a week.

“I believe that the man who goes to the front knowing just how to use a gun and who is familiar with military tactics is infinitely more useful as a soldier than the untrained man,” UA President Parke R. Kolbe said.

Meanwhile, female students formed a Red Cross unit to learn how to roll bandages and take care of wounded soldiers. Amon B. Plowman, a biology professor, and Sarah Stimmel, home economics instructor, led the training.

“If the boys start military training, I’m for ’em,” UA student Loretta Jones said. “I think every girl ought to crowd the work along and we’ll become Red Cross nurses if they want us.”

More than 500 soldiers conducted drills at Camp Akron at Silver Lake. The men pitched eight-man tents near the amusement park and spent the summer training before leaving for Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Ala.

According to historian Karl H. Grismer, more than 65,000 Akron men registered for the draft and 8,988 were selected for service, “more than from any other Ohio city except Cleveland and Cincinnati.” Most trained at Camp Sherman near Chillicothe.

Big crowds waved goodbye as troops boarded trains at Union Depot off East Market Street.

“During the war, 304 Akron men made the supreme sacrifice,” Grismer noted. “Of this number, approximately two-thirds died on the battlefield or from wounds and the other third from disease.”

“The War to End All Wars” ended with the signing of an armistice on Nov. 11, 1918.

Since then, we’ve had six more wars.

That’s something to reflect upon as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of U.S. entry in World War I.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Some scientific breakthroughs are recognized immediately for their significance. Others take time before their importance is fully appreciated.

Here are 10 early mentions of world-changing inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries as reported in the Summit County Beacon (and Akron Beacon Journal). Imagine reading about these concepts for the first time!

Photography

Two traveling salesmen — identified only as Crane and Boyd — set up a temporary studio in February 1842 at the Ohio Exchange at Market and Main streets to allow Akron citizens “an opportunity of procuring” daguerreo­type miniatures. “For accuracy, nothing can exceed them, as it is nature herself who is the artist,” the Summit County Beacon noted. “Messrs. C. & B. have made an improvement upon the old plan which renders the portrait perfectly indelible. We would recommend all who wish a perfect likeness of themselves or friends to patronize these gentlemen.”

Horseless carriage

In December 1850, Capt. John Ericsson, a Swedish-American engineer, was said to be “engaged in producing a steam carriage” in New York “for use open plank roads, by which immense bodies may be transported, at a good speed with small cost.” According to an item in the Buffalo Courier: “There seems to be no good reason why steam power cannot be successfully used on our plank roads, and we have no doubt it soon will be.” Alas, Akron didn’t see its first automobile until nearly 40 years later when circus performer Achille Philion drove a homemade steam carriage through town in 1889.

Telephone

A year after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, the Summit County Beacon published this breezy explanation of the device in February 1877: “The telephone may be said to consist of three parts: one in transmission of simple melody, which is received upon a magnet; another is the transmission of either cords or discords — composite tones — which can all be received on a single instrument; and the third is received on instruments that analyze and pick out the one to which each instrument is attuned.”

If phones were that boring today, people would have a lot more time on their hands.

Phonograph

The Scientific American trumpeted Thomas Edison’s phonograph as “the most wonderful invention of the day.” According to a November 1877 article in the Beacon: “Nothing could be more incredible than the likelihood of once more hearing the voice of the dead, yet the invention of the new instrument is said to render this possible hereafter. It is true that the voices are stilled, but whoever has spoken or whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may be produced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust.”

Incandescent lamp

Two years later, Edison returned to the limelight with his “triumph in electric illumination.” In December 1879, the Beacon published this news from the New York Herald: “The new light, incredible as it may appear, is produced from a little piece of paper, a tiny strip of paper that a breath would blow away. Through this little strip of paper is passed an electric current, and the result is a bright, beautiful, mellow light.”

Airplane

A decade before the Wright Brothers made their first flight, another inventor believed he was close to taking off. “Mr. Hiram Maxim, the American inventor, is still busy at Crayford, England, in constructing his flying machine, or rather, his apparatus ‘for ascertaining how much power is actually required to perform flight with a screw-driven aeroplane,’ ” the Beacon Journal reported in April 1892. Spoiler alert: His machine didn’t fly.

Motion pictures

Edison’s kinetoscope promised a new era in scientific discovery. “The kinetoscope is a camera which takes pictures or a series of them of a person or body in motion,” the Beacon Journal explained in March 1894. “The number has reached as high as 45 a second. By means of the kinetoscope, the development of a laugh or a yawn can be made the subject of the closest study.” By the end of the year, though, the newspaper lamented: “It is said that certain machines of comparatively recent invention that exhibit moving pictures of prize fights, dancing, etc., have been tampered with by renters and grossly immoral and obscene views substituted.” Well, that didn’t take long.

Radio

In April 1903, Akron residents looked forward to sending Morse code messages on radio waves. “Wireless telegraphy in this city is to be not alone a thing to be read of in books and magazines, but a reality,” the Beacon Journal reported. “A wireless telegraph station will be erected in Akron this summer. … When the station here is completed this will mean that residents of this city can communicate with friends who may be en route on the lakes, and Akron people on boats on the lakes will be able to telegraph home to this city.”

Television

Although it would take another two decades before TV sets began to glow in Akron living rooms, the future looked bright in December 1922.

“Television, whereby moving pictures may be transmitted by telegraph or telephone, looms as one of the early scientific possibilities,” the Beacon Journal noted. “… Incidentally, the perfection of the method will one day allow a person telephoning to see the person he is talking to. According to information, work on the problem is far advanced and may result in successful experiments shortly.”

Antibiotics

Beacon Journal reporter George T. Hattie hailed the healing powers of “a new miracle drug called penicillin” in a June 1943 article.

He said the “mossy pale green mold,” effective against venereal disease, pneumonia, diphtheria and staph infections, could be “one of the greatest medical discoveries of the age.” Miracles truly do happen.

Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Pilot Jimmy Doolittle was the courageous hero that America needed.

Still reeling from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States struck back 75 years ago when Doolittle led 80 men in 16 B-25 bombers on a daring raid of Tokyo from the deck of the USS Hornet aircraft carrier April 18, 1942.

“They actually reached Japan and all dropped their bombs,” said John F. Wittibschlager, 89, of Barberton, who delivered the Beacon Journal as a Cuyahoga Falls High School student growing up on Ironwood Street.

After the raid on Tokyo (which U.S. newspapers then spelled as “Tokio”), the Beacon Journal headlines were huge: “American Fliers Bomb Tokio.” “Damage Caused in Yokohama and Kobe.” “Japanese Fear More U.S. Raids.” “Alarms Raise Tokio Jitters.”

The Doolittle Tokyo Raiders gave Americans a morale boost and punctured Japanese beliefs of invincibility. To this day, Summit County residents who recall the early 1940s remain grateful for Doolittle’s service and regard him as a hero.

“Oh, a great man,” Wittib­schlager said. “A great, wonderful man. That was a tremendous accomplishment.”

Jim Skeese, 84, of Stow, lived on Baughman Street in West Akron and attended St. Sebastian in 1942. He, too, was a Beacon Journal paperboy, but also remembers hearing news bulletins on the radio.

“I read headlines while preparing to make deliveries,” he said. “Big bold fonts reported WWII action. Although a good reader and able to comprehend, I didn’t grasp the significance of WWII headlines.

“Gasoline was rationed, butter, coffee, other items limited. Cigarettes scarce, but overall, no discomfort.”

He also remembers viewing newsreels before the feature films at Akron movie theaters.

“More specifically, to the Doolittle air raid, 1942, the significance came to me in 1944 by watching Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, starring Spencer Tracy,” Skeese said.

Doolittle (1896-1993), a California native, was a frequent visitor to Akron in the 1920s and 1930s. He came here to perform in air shows, judge model airplane contests, test aviation equipment, refuel his aircraft and present lectures on the future of flying. He became a close buddy of Fulton Airport founder Bain E. “Shorty” Fulton, whom he described as “a loyal friend” and “a fine American.”

“Lieutenant Doolittle is short in height but rugged in stature,” the Beacon Journal reported during a 1927 visit. “He smiles easily and laughs hard. He is carefree and good natured. He did not get to fight overseas, but he’s the type you could bet would make an ‘ace.’ ”

During a speech at Portage Country Club, Doolittle said: “Development of aviation is no longer a mechanical problem. All that remains to be done now is to educate the people to have confidence in flying and the public is learning fast.

“The question of the airplane’s success is not an uncertainty now, it is a reality. Aviation is here to stay and if Akron wants to be in the national airway route, it will have to have a good airdrome and up-to-date landing field.”

Returning three years later, Doolittle praised Fulton’s airport as “one of the finest in the country.”

After the U.S. entered World War II, Lt. Col. Doolittle, 45, organized a band of 80 volunteers from the U.S. Army Air Forces to embark on a dangerous, secret mission to bomb Tokyo. The five-man crews took off in 16 B-25 bombers from the USS Hornet in the churning Pacific and flew 620 miles to reach their target, which included factories, railroads, refineries and warehouses. Doolittle bravely led the way.

“What made him great was to take off a B-25 medium bomber from an aircraft carrier,” Wittib­­schlager said. “He was the first one off, so he had the shortest runway, you see?”

Lt. William M. Bower, 25, a native of Ravenna, was the pilot of the 12th bomber. As a child in the 1930s, he had gone to the Cleveland National Air Races to see Doolittle soar. Now he was flying behind him. “I’d go anywhere in the world Jimmy said to go,” Bower confided later.

“We flew as low as it was possible for us to fly and that’s why the Japanese anti-aircraft guns which were trained for high targets didn’t get us,” Bower explained.

After carrying out their mission, Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders were supposed to land in China, but all 16 crews had to either bail out or crash-land their planes after running low on fuel. Doolittle’s and Bower’s crews parachuted to safety in China.

“It would be dark as hell in about a half hour,” Bower wrote in his diary. “We held a council of war. I told them we had no chance of landing and would fly until she quit.

“I patted the old boat and went out the hatch. A swish and a bang and I came down to earth gently. Wrapped up in the chute I smoked a cigaret.”

Three of the 80 Americans were killed in accidents after completing the mission. The Japanese captured eight men and executed three by firing squad. A fourth died of malnutrition in prison.

“Our job is to utterly and completely defeat the Japanese nation and everything her warlords stand for,” Doolittle said. “This can only be accomplished by striking at the heart of Japan itself.”

Bower (1917-2011) received a hero’s welcome in his hometown that July as Ravenna celebrated Bill Bower Day. “I can’t see what on earth they are making all this fuss about me for,” Bower said as the town turned out to see him.

Doolittle and his daring band of Tokyo raiders deflated Japanese claims of military superiority and helped give Americans the confidence and resolve to win World War II.

“He gave us a spark,” Wittib­­schlager said.

To learn more about Jimmy Doolittle, visit www.doolittleraider.com. Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

Away from the soot and strife of industrial Akron, “Ohio’s Most Beautiful Suburb” arose like a utopian enclave on the outskirts of town.

Developers promised 100 years ago that 1,000-acre Fairlawn Heights would rival the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights in elegance and attractiveness.

The Akron Development Co., led by President Hugh M. Eaton and Vice President and General Manager Edward O. Handy, announced April 25, 1917, that “a wonderful place to live” would be built on rugged, rural West Market Street.

As the businessmen rather breathlessly explained in their advertising: “Out beyond the smoke, yet only twenty minutes away from the center of Akron, with the serenity and beauty of the country about you — woods, streams, ledges, hills and valleys — yet close to the city and business, you may build a home in Fairlawn Heights — such a home as you have dreamed of all your life, out of the rush and the noise, with the neighbors you would like to have, sure that the beauty and distinction of your surroundings can never be marred, proud to feel that you are living in one of the seven finest residential districts of America.”

Who wouldn’t want to live there?

How it started

A few years earlier, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. co-founder F.A. Seiberling had purchased the late Alfred M. Barber’s 306-acre farm for $150,000 (about $3.6 million in today’s dollars) with plans to develop it for his family’s estate. Instead, he built Stan Hywet on North Portage Path.

Seiberling realized that the West Market property would make an ideal setting for a community of splendid homes and a recreation center dedicated to golf, tennis and lawn games. He purchased adjoining tracts for a total of 1,000 acres: 300 north of West Market and 700 south.

“The proposition is one of the biggest ever attempted in this part of the country,” Eaton boasted. “The fact that we are starting work on an 18-hole golf course there shows the importance of the project.”

The Fairlawn Heights Golf Club filed Ohio articles of incorporation April 20, 1917, with $50,000 in capital stock (about $956,000 today). The incorporators were a who’s who of Akron businessmen: Charles S. Marvel, cashier at First-Second National Bank; John A. Rishel, sales manager at B.F. Goodrich; Francis Seiberling, attorney with Slabaugh, Seiberling & Huber; Irving R. Bailey, department manager at Goodyear; and Charles W. McLaughlin, treasurer of Mohawk Rubber Co.

William B. Langford of Illinois designed the first nine-hole course at the resort now known as Fairlawn Country Club. H.S. Wagner, superintendent of parks, supervised construction.

Goodrich President James D. Tew and Akron Development Co. GM Edward O. Handy played the first match in April 1919, but the formal opening for the club’s 200 members wasn’t until August. Harry K. Harris served as golf pro.

Construction was completed that fall on a $35,000 stucco clubhouse that included lounging rooms, reading rooms, a locker room, kitchen, basement and boiler room.

Taking shape

Across West Market Street, a luxurious neighborhood began to take shape. Boston landscape architect Warren H. Manning, who had designed the grounds of Stan Hywet, also laid out the winding streets and boulevards of Fairlawn Heights.

Lots were available for $2,500 (about $48,000 today) for “no more than 700 residences.”

“Naturally, Fairlawn Heights is highly restricted,” the developers noted. “There must be no crowding. Each home spot must include close to or over an acre of ground. No individual may develop his property in a way to detract one iota from the attractiveness of the whole.”

Arrangements were made for sewer and water systems and for the installation of gas, electricity and telephones. Brick streets were not enough for the enclave. Fairlawn Heights promised to pave its streets with coal tar.

For those who did not own automobiles, a bus service was planned between Fairlawn Heights and the end of the West Market streetcar line. The suburb was a 20-minute ride by automobile to Main and Market streets in downtown Akron.

“Fairlawn Heights is Akron’s new residence district — where you will find your natural associates,” the developers noted. “Elegant, at reasonable prices, and with inviting terms, it belongs to the coming men of Akron and to those who have arrived.”

When completed in the early 1920s, the tree-shaded neighborhood lived up to the hype. Magnificent homes rose from the hill overlooking Fairlawn Country Club. Rubber executives, business professionals and other corporate leaders brought their families to live in the sprawling suburb.

Life was good. For those who golfed or played tennis, it was better.

Disaster strikes

F.A. Seiberling sold the course and property to the club in 1928, the same year they added nine holes, but disaster struck Sept. 24, 1929.

Fairlawn Patrolman Jack Bline noticed smoke pouring from the clubhouse and raised an alarm. The Portage Township Volunteer Fire Department responded to the scene, but the first hydrant was dry. Then the hose burst on the second hydrant.

By the time the Akron Fire Department arrived, the clubhouse was engulfed in flames.

Faulty wiring was suspected. The loss was estimated at $100,000, but the building was insured for only $35,000.

In December 1929, only two months after the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, the golf club’s stockholders approved plans to build a new $157,000 clubhouse near the 12th and 18th greens. Architect C.W. Frank designed the building, whose first social function was a dance Dec. 27, 1930.

And it’s been entertaining guests ever since.

Fairlawn Country Club is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Festivities kicked off last week with a cocktail party.

The private club bills itself as “a family center for long and lasting friendships as well as a spectacular setting for business and social events.”

Fairlawn Heights still remains one of Akron’s most elegant and desirable neighborhoods. With a nickname like “Ohio’s Most Beautiful Suburb,” how could it not?

Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.