Local history: Sheriff’s son gathers clues about father’s life

As a kid, Tom Smith spent a lot of time in Summit County Jail.

He wasn’t a delinquent.

The boy was there to visit his father, Robert L. Smith, the county sheriff from 1944 to 1952.

It was an unusual playground.

He remembers accompanying his mother, Lady Martha Smith, and his sister, Rosemary, on shopping trips to O’Neil’s and Polsky’s in downtown Akron. That wasn’t his idea of fun, so he’d walk up the hill to the old stone jail next to the courthouse between South Broadway and High Street.

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Little Tommy would enter the side entrance and walk through the kitchen where jail cooks Bess Gilligan and Pearl Feldman would fuss over him and offer him food. The sheriff’s office was around the corner to the right.

“I’d go in and report to my dad,” recalled Smith, 82. “He’d say, ‘Stay out of trouble.’ ”

Sometimes his father would unlock the basement storage area so the kid could play with illegal gambling equipment confiscated in county raids.

“My usual frolic was at the slot machines or pinball machines,” Smith said.

There was a lot of strange stuff down there, and he didn’t know how to use most of it. If he was really bored, he might take a stylus and open a few compartments on the punchboards with the full knowledge that he couldn’t win a darn thing.

“I think one of the reasons Dad got the Catholic vote all the time was because roulette tables were in there,” Smith said. “St. Vincent or St. Mary would say, ‘We’re having a bazaar with gambling,’ and my dad would loan the gambling equipment out to the church. He did them a favor. After it was used, it came back to the basement of the jail.”

Playing catch at county jail

Little Tommy usually brought his baseball and glove when he visited the jail. He would beg trusties — the trusted inmates who had duties outside their cells — to play catch with him.

Eventually, Sheriff Smith or Deputy Dan Scanlon, the jailer, would give the nod of approval: “Yeah, you can go outside and play catch.”

The boy enjoyed tossing the ball around with the inmates, and they probably liked the fresh air.

“They in essence were my playmates,” Smith said.

Smith was never allowed to go inside the cells, so he has no recollection of them, but he does remember the rodent problem at the wooden garbage bins out back.

“If it got dark enough, you’d go back there and the rats would come out,” Smith said. “I remember looking at those things. They were the size of small cats.”

Smith, a former Silver Lake resident who’s lived in Arizona for nearly a decade, returned to Ohio this month to visit friends and share some of the research he’s done on his father. On Aug. 5, he donated the Robert L. Smith Collection, a three-binder set with more than 200 pages of articles, photos and notes, to Special Collections at Akron-Summit County Public Library.

Sheriff Smith (1895-1963) was “a man of few words,” so his son got to know him better through years of visiting libraries and courthouses, checking archival records and online sites, and interviewing relatives and friends.

“He was uniquely humble,” Smith said. “I had to dig for all my information on my dad.”

Who was Sheriff Smith?

Baseball is what brought Robert Lowery Smith to Ohio.

He had quit high school and left his family’s farm in Sparta, Tennessee, to play semipro ball for the Crystal Springs Bleachery Co. in Chickamauga, Georgia. His father, Woodson Smith, had protested: “No man should make a living playing a game. That is not what God intended.”

The strapping young man moved to Nashville and earned $225 a month on the I.E. DuPont team before relocating to Akron in 1915 and working and playing for International Harvester. He was the catcher and cleanup hitter for most of the ballclubs.

“I never knew he was a semipro baseball player,” Smith said.

After serving in the Army in World War I, Bob Smith returned to Akron and became a streetcar conductor for the Northern Ohio Traction & Light Co., where he also played baseball.

In the 1920s, he persuaded his siblings to move from Tennessee to Ohio, promising them they would “make a fortune” in the boomtown of Akron.

“He was intensely loyal to his family,” Tom Smith said. “He brought all of his brothers and sisters up to Cuyahoga Falls to live with him in a house that he built there.”

Bob eventually talked his dad, Woodson, into joining them, too, as long as he left behind his third wife, whom the kids didn’t like too much.

Bob Smith went to work as a deputy at the Summit County Sheriff’s Department in 1932 under Ray Potts. Around 1935, he landed a job as a guard at the London Prison Farm and became a certified fingerprint expert, returning to Summit County in 1937 to serve as chief deputy for Sheriff Walter O’Neil and run the fingerprint bureau.

He met his future wife, Lady Martha Keaton (1912-1994), a Tennessee native, when she was visiting friends in Akron. They married in 1935 and raised their childre, Tommy and Rosemary, on a farm in Springfield Township before moving to Highbridge Road in Cuyahoga Falls.

When Sheriff O’Neil unexpectedly died in 1944, Smith was appointed to fill the term. The Democrat won the election two years later and then got reelected to a four-year term after that.

Altercation in the street

Tom Smith said his dad was a tough, principled man who never drank or swore. He remembers the time they were working in the yard when two motorists got into a loud altercation and began cursing each other in the middle of the street. His dad stared them down until they drove off.

“He looked at me and shook his head,” Smith said. “I could tell the disgust that he had for these two men.”

One of the lawman’s friends was Liborio “Whiskey Dick” Percoco, the former bootlegger turned bail bondsman. Percoco would enlist Bob Smith’s aid to help capture fugitives.

“I’d say to Mom: ‘Dad’s been gone a couple days. Where is he?’ ” Smith recalled. “I can remember one time Mom said that he went to Brownsville, Texas. He and Dick Percoco went across the border into Mexico to apprehend a bond jumper down there.”

The sheriff led investigations into murders, robberies, assaults, thefts, gambling, bootlegging, vandalism and other crimes. There were even a few jailbreaks at the crowded, crumbling jail.

In his spare time, he sponsored an amateur baseball team, the Smith Sheriffs, a powerhouse in the Greater Akron Baseball Federation. The team mowed down local competitors and played for the national championship in 1949, falling to a New York insurance company. Each year, he would hold a Shriners benefit game to help children, bringing in Cleveland major leaguers as celebrities. He was inducted into the Greater Akron Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.

“He was so modest that I never knew some of his accolades,” Smith said.

Unexpected announcement

In 1951, Bob Smith, 55, made the surprise announcement that he wouldn’t seek reelection the following year, saying that his physician advised against it.

“It is wholly a matter of my health,” he explained. “My doctor told me it was physical condition or my job, and in a case like that, physical condition comes first.”

The sheriff thanked “the good citizens of Summit County, irrespective of political affiliation, who have elected me to office and given me active continuing support and encouragement to enforce the laws without fear or favor and thus make Summit County a better place in which to live.”

He left office at the end of 1951 after supporting Chief Deputy Ray Woodard’s successful campaign to succeed him. Then he accepted a less-rigorous job as supervisor of traffic and safety for Summit County Engineer Leslie Wolfe, a post he held for more than a decade.

Lt. Tom Smith was training to be an Army artillery officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, when his parents called in 1963 to say that his dad was going to have cardiology tests at the Cleveland Clinic. The lieutenant jotted off a note and mailed it to his father.

“I’m just hoping I wrote a caring letter to him because it worried me,” Smith said.

He was firing 155 mm Howitzers at the Fort Sill reservoir when a sergeant told him to report to headquarters. It was urgent.

“As I go in, I’m afraid this is what I’m going to hear,” he said. “And sure enough, it’s what I heard.”

Former Summit County Sheriff Robert L. Smith, 67, died of a heart attack June 19, 1963.

His son was only a few months from getting out of the service when his father died. He had been looking forward to coming home.

“I’m finally at the point where I had become a man,” Smith said. “I wanted to talk to him man-to-man and let him know that I loved him. Let him know that every time he instructed me and I resisted, he was doing it for my own good.

“The biggest regret of my life is that I never got to say that to him.”

Tom Smith, the former kid who used to play at the county jail, learned a lot about his dad through years of research. Copies of his findings, compiled in three binders, are secure at the Main Library in downtown Akron.

“I wanted my kids and their kids to know of the man I called ‘Dad,’ ” Smith said.

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Summit County Jail was unusual playground for sheriff’s son