Posts from Akron, Ohio
One part of this story begins in the 1980s, when Akron toymaker Michael Cohill met an 18-year-old archeology student named Brian Graham at a party. Michael told Brian that he had been digging up marbles at his toy workshop, which decades before had been a marble factory.
Naturally, Brian the archaeologist was intrigued. They made a date to continue excavating Michael’s factory, and then they expanded the search to dig through the catacombs in downtown Akron for hidden treasure. They succeeded in finding four little clay marbles. But when a parking deck downtown was removed years later, they found the ground littered with marbles and old penny toys. They also found the oldest penny toy in their now large collection, a small Santa figurine.
The other part of this story begins 100 hundred years earlier, in the 1880’s, when a man named Samuel Dyke started the production of penny toys in Akron. Before this time, toys were handmade and very expensive, a luxury afforded only by the rich. With Dyke’s mass production of toys, though, a new toy-buying demographic was created. Kids with a penny or two in their pocket now had something other than sweets to purchase. Samuel Dyke’s business boomed until he was making over a million marbles per day and shipping them around the country.
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“At my age, you don’t want to do anything if its not fun,” said Rose Brudno as she got ready for her interview at the StoryCorps East MobileBooth in Akron, Ohio.
Luckily, Rose seemed to have a pretty good time remembering her many bartending years with her grandson Joshua during their interview. After divorcing her husband in the 1950s, Rose moved to Akron with her three kids and took over the Zanzabar, a tavern in a working-class African American neighborhood where most of the patrons were employed by Akron’s rubber industry. Rose, a white Jewish woman from Cleveland, stood out for more reasons than one. Open 21 hours a day, the bar was filled at 5:00 a.m. with men from the rubber-factory night-shift, singing and dancing and breakfasting at the bar.
The Zanzabar became a center of political activism in Akron. Rose started organizing the hospital workers union, and she was active in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war protests. Rose was arrested on several occasions for peacefully protesting in Washington D.C. and Selma, Alabama. When a so-called riot broke out in the neighborhood, Rose made sure the protesting kids had sodas and sandwiches.
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Akron, Ohio. Birthplace of the rubber tire as we know it. Goodyear. Goodrich. Firestone. The American Trucking Industry. Hometown of Alcoholics Anonymous, Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, the new wave band Devo, and basketball player LeBron James.
We cut the StoryBooth ribbon in this historic city on a cold day in front of the Akron-Summit County Public Library. WKSU, our public broadcasting host, warmed up the crowd with coffee and pastries while former Deputy Mayor Dorothy Jackson and Reverend Dr. Ronald Fowler christened the booth with the first conversation of the day.
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