The elderly man sat next to his bed, slowly pondering the black-and-white images, sometimes squinting to see the faces in front of him.
“That’s my brother, Babe … . That’s Uncle Horace … . That’s my mother and father … . That’s my cousin, her name is Ethel Solomon … . That was a bowling alley at one time … . I guess that’s the story of me, huh?”
Inside 44 storage boxes are more than 45,000 negatives from photographic images taken by Horace and Evelyn Stewart, who meticulously documented mid-20th century life and the news in Akron’s Black community in the years before the Innerbelt tore through once-thriving neighborhoods.
As University of Akron archivists painstakingly digitize the files and upload them online, details about who or what the images show are scant. It’s even harder to find out when they were taken during the couples’ long and prolific career.
What little information is available can be gleaned from handwriting on notecards in nine drawers of an old card catalog system that the Stewarts used and a spreadsheet that students have been working on, archivist Mark Bloom said in an email.
But inside a Tallmadge nursing home, 82-year-old Roy Hodoh has the knowledge and memory to fill in some of the gaps.
Hodoh family members, businesses featured in archived images
In the decades before Hodoh became a leader for United Auto Workers Local 856 and a local Democratic Party power player, one of the Stewarts photographed him inside his family home on 125 Belmont Ave., in what is today called the Cascade Valley neighborhood, in the mid-1940s, sitting with his family and petting his dog, Teddy.
Hodoh’s family members, their businesses and childhood stomping grounds are featured among the many thousands of photographs uploaded by the university.
“It takes me back because all my siblings have gone,” he said of his 10 brothers and sisters as he reviewed some of the Stewart photographs dating back to the early 1940s.
“I’m the only one left, and I’m 82 years old. You miss your siblings, talking to them and spending time with them. That’s who they were.”
Hodoh’s father Rufus was close with Horace Stewart — the two worked together advocating for civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s. Stewart’s photos and writing about the elder Hodoh and the Akron branch of the Future Outlook League, which fought for jobs and rights for Black residents, were regularly published in the Call and Post, a Black newspaper based in Cleveland.
Rufus Hodoh was a mainstay around North Howard Street — the location of the Stewarts’ photography studio — after arriving in town from Georgia until his death in 1955. Rufus Hodoh was a local civil rights leader and a thorn in the side of businesses in Black neighborhoods that didn’t hire Black workers. He was also a restaurant owner, a “numbers” runner, and so much more.
“Rufus Hodoh performed more acts of kindness and helpfulness than many of our so-called professional people,” one family friend wrote to the Akron Beacon Journal in March of 1955, chastising the paper for only focusing on the man’s gambling arrests in the article reporting his death.
“Many homes have been heated by coal purchased by him anonymously. Hungry families have found mysterious baskets of groceries at their doorsteps. … Many of his other acts of goodwill are unknown to me, but God knows and will judge him accordingly.”
Signal Akron — after coming across Stewart photograph collections that mention “Hodo” and “Hodoh” in their titles, and after discovering photographs of businesses tracked back to people with the last name of Hodoh — met with Roy Hodoh to learn about the family and what life was like in Akron when the Stewarts were photographing them.
Life on Akron’s North Howard Street
“When I was young, I used to spend time on Howard Street, trying to hustle and do some work,” said Roy Hodoh about the early 1950s. “I still got my shoe shine box that I used to walk with up and down Howard Street on a Friday and Saturday night to see if guys wanted a shoeshine — it costs 25 cents.”
Cultural life on the street was centered on North Howard, north of Market Street, on stretches that were later razed.
“It was booming. Booming,” Roy Hodoh said, explaining that he’d spend his shoeshine proceeds on fruits and candy. “People came from all over to be on Howard Street. They had pimps, prostitutes down there. Everything. If people wanted to party, go down to Howard Street. They had pool rooms, they had barber shops, all that. Pool slicks, when they came into town, they stopped on Howard Street to get a game going. They had a theater on Howard Street. It had everything, man.”
His favorite place to hang out in the neighborhood, though, was his father’s restaurant, which his dad opened in the mid 1950s after buying and converting a bowling alley. Members of the Hodoh family were frequent subjects of the Akron Beacon Journal, which splashed news of their alleged gambling operations.
A May 1954 Akron Beacon Journal article with the headline “Police WIll Watch This Restaurant” quoted an unnamed Akron police vice squad officer who said, “Let’s just say we knew about it and we’ll keep our eye on the place when it opens,” because Roy’s father and one of his brothers “are exceptionally well known to the police.”
“He was in the numbers, my father was,” Hodoh said, referring to what used to be essentially an unsanctioned daily lottery. The operation led to raids, arrests, property seizures, tax evasion cases against Roy’s father and older brothers. Two 1948 Akron Beacon Journal articles about arrests of Hodoh family members featured the headlines of “Hoodoed” and “Another Hodoh Gets in Hoosegow.”
“One time I saw him coming home, he had two police officers as his guards and two pillowcases full of money,” Hodoh recalled. “He took that money and bought the bowling alley and refurbished it. After that, he had a successful business there, and most of his time was spent at the restaurant making sure it was running the way it’s supposed to be run.”
Hodoh remembers Janek’s Grill — named, he said, for a German translation of Hodoh’s brother John’s name — as being packed with people visiting from out of town, regulars from the neighborhood, and workers whose names he still remembers. And he remembers all of Stewart’s photos from inside.
“That’s Chef Lorenzo,” he said, scrolling to a photograph of a man in an apron and hat slicing into a massive slab of meat inside the kitchen. And then there are the photos of his Uncle Horace speaking with Lorenzo in the kitchen, a line of uniformed waitresses smiling behind the counter, five of his older siblings sitting in a booth under a mural and his cousin Ethel at the cash register giving change to a customer.
Newspaper advertisements from 1956s list an Easter menu with $1.50 plates of “Roast Chicken and Dressing,” “Southern or Shack Fried Chicken,” “Pit Bar-B-Cue Ribs,” “‘Hickory Smoked’ Ham Steak,” and a $3 “One Point Choice T-Bone Steak.” It also declares that the dinners come with an appetizer, salad, two side dishes, tea or coffee, homemade rolls and dessert.
Importantly for a bustling Howard Street at the time, advertisements show Janek’s was open 24 hours a day, every day.
When Roy Hodoh was a kid, he’d walk after class at Bryan School to his dad’s restaurant and peel potatoes. He soon had a labor dispute with his father — decades later, he became president of the United Auto Workers’ union local — demanding a raise from his weekly $3 to $5.
“I took the $5,” he recalled, “and after work, I went down to the market across Market Street and bought grapes, peaches, and I spent that whole $5. I’m walking home, eating my stuff, and my father was standing out there on the front porch. He said, ‘What did you do with your money?’ I said, ‘I spent it,’ and he said, ‘Well, you don’t know how to handle your money so I’m cutting you back to $3 a week until you learn how to handle your money.’ Oh man. So I wasn’t long for there.”
Roy Hodoh moved on to working at a nearby bowling alley. His adolescent stature came in handy as a pin setter.
“Man, those big pins and my little hands,” he said. “We’d get the teams that would come in there and they’d be throwing the hell out of that ball, man. And the older guys, they’d jump two lanes and they could sling them pins in the thing just like that. I couldn’t — I’m still young yet — and they sort of took me under their wing.”
Janek’s Grill, particularly the kitchen and behind the counter, remained his refuge.
“I used to go back there and get whatever I needed. I felt like a king,” he said. “Then I’d go behind the counter of the restaurant and make milkshakes. I put eggs in them and all that.”
He also remembers playing around with and being taught to fight by a former professional boxer known as Kid Chocolate, whom his father hired to help around the restaurant.
In the interview with Signal Akron, Hodoh recalled nicknames from back in the day: Kid Chocolate, the boxer; his dad’s pal “Whiskey Dick” the bailbondsman and former moonshiner; his friend Sleepy; and the Barefoot Boy from Georgia, his football teammate in the military.
Home life in Akron
The Stewarts also photographed the Hodoh household several times both before and after Roy was born.
A collection labeled “Hodoh Party” shows a man, now identified by Roy Hodoh as his uncle, Horace, with a big smile, a big birthday cake on the table in front of him with relatives and other family members gathered around the table. The photographs were taken before Roy Hodoh was born in 1943, but he rattles off the names of many of the people in them, including his parents and some siblings.
Another collection, labeled “Mr. Rufus Hodo’s children” (sic) shows Roy’s oldest sister Juanita behind a birthday cake, surrounded by 18 other kids and toddlers, including other siblings. THe photograph was taken around 1940. Another shot from the same day shows Juanita and his brother Sam on a chair.
Rufus Hodoh, civil rights and the Future Outlook League
Another photo shows a sharply dressed man and a woman standing behind a birthday cake. The man has his arm around her and smiles.
“That’s my father and that’s my mother,” Roy Hodoh said, pausing and smiling.
“He had a good heart,” Hodoh said of Rufus. “He was as kind as you could be. And he was a businessman, always doing good things for people. He’ll buy them things, buy them groceries, pay their rent, all that type of stuff. He was president of the Future Outlook League.”
The Future Outlook League was a civil rights organization that began in Cleveland in 1935 to help Black residents obtain jobs. Rufus Hodoh was the president of the organization’s Akron branch and close friends with the organization’s founder, John O. Holly.
Roy Hodoh proudly recalls pickets at an Ohio Bell facility that he said led to the company hiring its first Black worker. Two Stewart photographs show two men outside a grocery store with sandwich board signs reading “THIS STORE IS UNFAIR TO NEGROES.” Another shows a man in a suit and fedora picketing outside a market.
“He figured that since you have a white store in a Black community, at least have somebody Black working for you,” Roy Hodoh said.
A March 1955 article in the Ohio Informer, published one day before Rufus Hodoh died from what was was publicly declared a heart attack, boasted of him holding FOL meetings at his home and working on campaigns for “recreation and entertainment facilities for youth, better housing, employment in plants with defense contracts, and improved school-home relationships.”
The FOL, the paper reported, was starting an effort to “curb police brutality and improprieties in the Howard St. area” and that Janek’s, Rufus Hodoh’s restaurant, would host an event for kids and a “pre-Easter party.”
J.D. and Uncle Horace
The Stewarts also took studio portraits of Hodoh family members.
One photograph, labeled “Mr John Hodoh,” shows a sharply dressed young man in a pinstripe suit with a pocket square.
“That’s my oldest brother J.D. — John David Hodoh,” Roy Hodoh said. “Matter of fact, my father, from my understanding, my father named the restaurant after him. But instead of calling it ‘JD’ they called it Janek’s in German.” (“Janek” is actually Polish for John, according to Google.)
Roy is 19 years younger than J.D. He still remembers meeting him for the first time in the mid-1940s.
“I was at home under the table,” he said. “I must have been a year old. And this guy comes in the house with a peacoat on and he had his hand in his jacket, and he was making it sound like a chicken. Scared the hell out of me… Come to find out that was my oldest brother and he had been in the service.”
Another studio photograph is titled “Mr. Hodoh.”
“That’s Uncle Horace, my father’s brother,” Roy Hodoh said. “When my father died, he took over as far as taking care of the five kids that were left at home … he tried to be the father figure.”
“He was a very good person, he would buy groceries and take them around and give them to people back in the day because they didn’t have welfare. My father did the same thing.”
Editor’s note: The Horace and Evelyn Stewart Studio archive, digitized by the University of Akron is open for anyone to search. If your family lived in the Akron area in the mid-20th century, you can search for family, church, or organization names using the search box on the top right corner.
Note that there may be misspellings in the file names because the Stewarts’ records were handwritten — that may cause issues with the search or make it more difficult to find what you’re looking for.
For example, one of the Hodoh albums contains a typo: the last name is spelled “Hodo,” so a search of the full name wouldn’t show the album, but a search of “Hod*” — that’s the first letters of the name with an asterisk — brings it up because the asterisk serves as a placeholder for search engines.
If you find photos of your family, please email us at hello@signalakron.org and tell us about it.