Georgia native Edward Scrutchings arrived 100 years ago in Akron with the goal of finding steady work and building a better life for his family.
He succeeded at both.
Scrutchings and his wife, Lillian, and four sons Roy, Sherman, Alfred and Fred were scratching out a living in Milledgeville, Ga., when the family patriarch, a farmer, took pen and paper and made a fateful decision to address a note to Akron Postmaster A. Ross Read.
“Papa wrote a letter to the postmaster to ask him about work in Akron,” said daughter Ophelia S. High, age 92, a resident of West Akron. “Postmaster Read. And he wrote Papa back and said ‘Yes, there’s plenty of work in Akron,’ and for you to come. So Papa came to Akron. He got off the train at Union Depot on Jan. 1, 1917.”
Lured by job openings, Scrutchings joined a mass migration to Akron, a decade in which the population surged from 69,067 in 1910 to 208,435 in 1920. Scrutchings sent for his wife and sons to join him, so the African-American family traveled from the South in segregated train cars until reaching Ohio.
The family rented a house off Howard Street on Beverly Court, a street that no longer exists, but soon bought a brand-new Colonial home on Homestead Street when East Akron was mostly farmland. They were one of the first black families in the neighborhood.
“386 is still there,” High said. “That’s where we were all born. At one time, it was 382 until the city come by and said our numbers were wrong.”
The Scrutchings family welcomed seven more children — Hazel, Edward, Walter, Marion, Ophelia, Chris and Willie — and built a second house on Homestead to handle the overflow.
“We used to go out and sleep on the back porch,” High recalled of summers past. “You know what my brothers would do? All of us little ones were out there. Then they’d come and throw water on us. ‘It’s raining! It’s raining!’ We’d pick up and run in the house, and then they’d go out there and sleep on the back porch.”
Edward Scrutchings always worked hard to keep a roof over his family’s heads. Akron factories offered good pay but the work was gritty, sweltering and dangerous. Safety rules were vague and industrial accidents were common, as Scrutchings painfully discovered.
“The first job I know that Papa talked about was at the International Harvester,” High said. “He got hit in the head by an automatic wrench at that time. Then he went to Firestone, and he fell in the shakeout pit.
“If you look that up, you’ll find he’s probably the only person that survived it. That was a fire, and he was in the hospital a long time. He had a raincoat and hat and all, and when they pulled that off, that pulled the skin off.”
Scrutchings healed, but he developed arthritis and lost strength. Not working was unthinkable, so he started his own business.
He hitched his horse, Ruby, to a wagon and traveled around Akron neighborhoods to haul trash or help people move. The rubbish man became a familiar sight in town as he collected bottles and other cast-off items.
“People would go to the house and ask him to come move them,” High recalled. “Or he would go around if you had junk and trash in your yard. He would go down to the dump on Hazel Street.”
She recalls how her father deftly coaxed Ruby to back up the wagon to reach sheds on the Homestead property. Such a graceful maneuver.
“And then I guess Ruby got old and they said they would take her to the soap factory,” High said. “And all of us were crying.”
Scrutchings bought an REO truck that he never did learn how to operate, but his sons helped with the driving. “You pulled a string and a wooden hand would go out to let you know I’m going to turn left,” High recalled.
She said her father couldn’t drive well, but that didn’t stop him from driving. “I remember him coming down Fifth Avenue, right across from Robinson School, and two wheels were up on the lawn and two were on the street,” she said.
She also recalls taking the truck as a child to buy a 25-pound bag of ice at a store at South Arlington Street and Fifth Avenue. She couldn’t have been more than 10 years old and her brother Chris was two years younger.
“Chris knew how to steer, and I would sit close to him and I did the clutch and shift the gears,” she said. “I bet Chris was 6, 7, 8 at the most, and we were driving that truck to pick up ice. ... I’d say, ‘Chris, turn! Turn!’ And me, I’m shifting gears and the clutch.”
Obviously, it was a different era. Laughing at the memory, High paused to say: “Sometimes I wonder: Did I do anything in life? Then when you get to talking, ‘I guess you did have a life, huh?’ ”
Edward Scrutchings continued to make rounds and got to know customers well. L.E. Devore, an executive with Citizens Savings & Loan, enjoyed chatting with the rubbish man and sometimes sent him home via chauffeur.
“Papa was a philosopher,” High said. “People loved to talk with him.”
And her mother, Lillian, was the perfect match for him.
“Mama was sweet,” she said. “In fact, her nickname was Sug.”
She remembers how Scrutchings would sit on the couch, read his newspaper and look up when his sons would leave the house for a night out.
“Papa would say, ‘Be right.’ ” High said. “He didn’t say ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ He would just say ‘Be right.’ You know, when somebody tells you that, that’s covering everything.”
It was difficult seeing her hard-working father age. High remembers living across the street on Homestead and helping Papa get dressed.
“Tie his shoes up, pull his collar out and make sure it was straight, and finish buttoning up his buttons because he couldn’t bend his fingers,” she said.
After a long illness, Edward Scrutchings died in 1957 at age 80. His wife, Lillian, died in 1972 at age 84. They are buried at Glendale Cemetery.
The Scrutchings family championed hard work and education and watched a parade of children and grandchildren attend Robinson School and East High School. Ophelia High has a great-grandchild at Robinson nearly a century after the first Scrutchings son attended there.
Believe it or not, High’s grandchildren still live on Homestead Street.
“We’ve been on that one street for 100 years,” she said with pride.
And it all began with a letter to the Akron postmaster.
Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.