On a warm, fall afternoon, sitting in her cozy kitchen, Akron’s former Deputy Mayor shared her thoughts on growing up in a large and loving family in Akron during the Depression; her apolitical – and indirect – path to City Hall; her love of cooking (which she inherited from her mother); and the important role volunteering has played in her life.

Some of Dorothy Jackson’s favorite recipes:

SQUASH SUPREME
4 cups of corn bread crumbs (Recipe follows)
1/2 stick (4 tbsp.) margarine, melted
3 cups cooked, mashed yellow summer squash
1 cup sour cream
1 cup condensed cream of chicken soup
1/4 stick (2 tbsp.) melted butter
1 large onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped (can be omitted)
salt & pepper to taste
1 tbsp. sugar

Mix together the corn bread crumbs and melted margarine. Press two cups of the crumbs in the bottom of a greased, 10 by 15 inch baking dish.  Reserve remaining crumbs.

To cook squash, cut into hunks and simmer, skin on, in water until tender. Mash with potato masher and measure out one cup. Combine with remaining ingredients, except for the reserved crumbs, and mix well. Spread in baking dish. Top with remaining crumbs. Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes.

Serves eight to10

CORN BREAD
1 cup milk
1/2 tbsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
salt
1 cup plus 1 tbsp. cornmeal
1 cup flour
1 egg

Combine all ingredients and mix well. Pour into greased 8 x 8 inch baking pan and bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

RENEE' S CARROT SOUP
1 1/2 pound carrots
1 pound parsnips
1 3" piece ginger
1 large onion
8 cups chicken broth
6 tbsp. butter
3 tbsp. brown sugar
Peel carrots, parsnips, ginger and onion, cut in pieces and place in roasting pan, dot with butter and brown sugar, add 2 cups chicken broth.  Bake covered for 2 hours at 350 degrees.

Put remaining broth in pot and, using blender, puree vegetables and simmer for 10 minutes.  Add dash of red pepper.  Enjoy.

LEMON POUND CAKE
3 sticks margarine/butter
1 8 oz. package of cream cheese
6 eggs
3 cups sugar
3 cups sifted cake flour
1tsp. vanilla flavoring
1 tsp. lemon flavoring

Cream softened margarine/butter, cream cheese and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each. Add flour, 1 cup at a time, beating after each.  Add flavorings.

Bake in greased and floured bundt or tube pan at 300 degrees for 1 1/2 hours, or until done.

If you like glaze, mix the juice of 1 fresh lemon with powdered sugar and drizzle over cake while it is hot.

Enjoy!

When and where were you born and raised?

I was born in Akron, Ohio, on November 9th, 1933, on Ardella Avenue in east Akron…It was a mixed neighborhood. A lot of the neighbors were Russian and other nationalities. I still have many of the friends I had growing up.
I was born at home and I’m the baby of seven….After I was born, we moved to a bigger house, but it was still on Ardella….We were poor, but we didn’t know it because mom and dad never gave us the burden of the day.

There were five girls and two boys. My brother [William Junior] was first, then Thelma, then Jasper, then Edna and Annie and Lucille, and then I was born. I have a picture of my baby brother, Alfred, who was born after me, but he passed away as a baby with pneumonia.
My parents moved to Akron in 1928. They came from Oklahoma with several other families to work at Goodyear. My father didn’t want to stay. He always wanted to go back to Oklahoma, but my mother told him that it was better for us if they stayed and we went to school here because we could get better jobs. So we stayed, but every August all the families that had come [in 1928] would drive, five or six cars together, back to Boley, Oklahoma, for the camp meeting.
My mother passed away in 1952. I’d been going to secretarial school [Actual Business College] at night and working in a grocery store during the day, but I quit my job and dropped out of school and took care of her in one room and, because she had been taking care of my brother, I took care of him, too.
My mother was very conscious that she was not going to live, and I remember sitting beside her on the bed when she told us that she’d asked the Lord for one thing and that was to let her raise her children. She was ready to go…[and] told to my sister Annie – who was the only one at that time who’d been saved – to always “remind” mother to the children.

What did your parents, William and Dueallie, do?

Today, I’ve realized that my mother was an entrepreneur. She was a good cook and made pies – sometimes 25 or 30 at a time – and my father and my older two sisters would take them and sell them to people working on WPA projects. She took in laundry, sometimes doing six or seven laundries in a day. She sold hair grower and hair grease. She was always doing something.
My father worked at Goodyear as an elevator operator, and he also had a truck, so he’d pick up and haul rubbish. In the summer he’d take us berry picking. In the fall he’d take us apple picking, and we’d glean in the fall, too, gathering the potatoes that were left in the fields.

Growing up, who would you say influenced you the most, your father or your mother.

Both of them. My mother was soft spoken and gentle and my father was a good man. Both of them had “mother wit.” They weren’t school educated, but they knew what they were doing. My father would always tell us to speak to people when you walk into the house, be polite. And he didn’t just tell us what to do, he was a role model, too. He was always a gentleman.
Church [Evening Light Church of God] was important for my parents: they didn’t send us to church, they took us.

What were you like as a child? Studious, quite, boisterous?

All of the above….And I loved to play baseball. [Laughs] The last whipping I got from my father was because I played baseball in the driveway and my ball broke a garage window. We weren’t supposed to play in the driveway, but I told the kids that it was OK that day, and when my mom heard the glass break she came out and told me to sit on the steps and wait for my dad and tell him why I’d decided to play ball in the driveway when he’d told us not to... I sat there, crying, till he came home.

You came of age during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. How do you think that shaped who you are today? Or did it?

Definitely it shaped me. One family in the neighborhood – they’d come from Oklahoma, too – had a TV, so we saw what was happening. We saw the dogs attacking people. We saw the people being hurt. And we saw Dr. King marching and going to jail. Seeing all this, and hearing about it and reading about it, really made you think. And it made you want be the best you could be.

What were your favorite and not so favorite classes in school? In other words, what did you excel at and what not?

I loved school, but I did have a problem: I talked too much. And I was a good student, though I did walk out of class once.

In 9th grade I had a black teacher, Mr. Herbert Bracken. He was the first black hired by the Akron Schools. He taught civics and one day in class he was talking about how white girls go out in the sun to get dark and how black girls go into the basement so they don’t get dark, and how white girls pay to get their hair crinkled and how black girls pay to get theirs straight. Everyone was laughing, except me. I was the only black in the class and everything he was saying was so hurtful. I got so angry that I walked out of class and went home.

My mom asked me why I was home so early and when I told her she walked me back to school and opened the classroom door and told me to go back to my seat. Then she asked the teacher to come out and speak with her. She never told me what she said to him, and he didn’t either. And I ended up really liking him as a teacher.

You graduated from East High School in 1951 – 60 years ago. Given your intelligence, character and focus, and what you’ve done in life, it’s hard to believe that you didn’t go to college. So the questions are: why didn’t you go to college and where did you get the education, training, and organizational skills you so obviously have?

My parents didn’t have the money to send me to a university, and we didn’t know anything about scholarships and loans and grants. But my mother felt that if I had business skills I could get a better job, so I started at a business school, Actual Business College, taking typing, shorthand and bookkeeping…But when my mother became ill I dropped out [of school] and quit the job I had at a grocery story to care for her and then my brother….and then my sister became ill.

And I’m a single parent, and never had child support, so the opportunity to go to college just never came up.

The organizational skills? Those I got from my mother and father. They were very organized.

Your first “big” job was at Goodwill. When did you get that job?

After my daughter was born, I started working as a nurse’s aid at Children’s Hospital. I only had one Sunday off a month, and I needed more Sundays off because of the things I was involved in at church. I went to an employment office and, after taking an aptitude test, the personnel person suggested a secretarial position at Goodwill.

I didn’t want to work at Goodwill. To me that was where you went to get second-hand clothes. I wanted a “glamorous” secretarial job, not a position at Goodwill. They hired me to be the secretary for the public relations director, Florence Pollock, for three months, which was OK with me: I thought my time there would look good on my resume. We became a team: she did the thinking and writing and I did the walking and talking. I became the assistant public relations director and we did everything together: projects, programs, trips...I was there 12 ½ years.

You are well-known throughout Akron as a sign language interpreter: the info you sent me said you once taught sign language on TV. Where did you learn to sign, and more to the point, why did you learn to sign?

When I worked at Goodwill, there was a 20 minute chapel service, and one of my responsibilities was organizing chapel services.
We had 35 deaf people working at Goodwill, and there wasn’t an interpreter for the services and I wanted to learn sign language for them. A Catholic priest came one day, along with someone who was deaf and applying for a job. I told him how much I wished that I could learn sign language so that I could sign for employees. He volunteered to teach me and anyone else who’d give up a lunch hour once a week. He started coming on Mondays, but his schedule got busy and he had to stop…Then I got a scholarship to Gallaudet College for a month of instruction. When I came back I knew 700 words and I started interpreting the day I got back to work. [Laughs] I was so excited, and new at it, that I was telling staff that I’d learned to sign and I was signing to the deaf employees that I’d learned to sin. It took me a bit to figure out why they looked so shocked.

Then from Goodwill you went to Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority?

[Laughs] No, I worked a couple of months at Firestone, and I really didn’t like it. Then I got a call from a friend that they were looking for a person to do the social and tenant service coordination there [AMHA]…She told me I’d be working with Jack Saferstein, and that he was a tough person to work with. But she said that if I lasted 3 months working with him I’d be able to work for anyone.

I called. They set up the interview. I went in, and everything was wrong. He was looking for a man. He wanted someone with a degree. But on a handshake he hired me for three months. And I was there for 16 ½ years. And worked under three different directors.

The last couple of months there I was asked to be on the committee reviewing candidates for the newly elected mayor’s [Thomas C. Sawyer] administration. My boss said it was OK as long as I used my vacation time to do it, so I did. Some of the people on the committee told me to apply for the deputy mayor position [Intergovernmental Relations]. When I read the job description I thought I could do everything except one, be over the police and fire department, so I gave them [the committee members] my resume. But I didn’t fill out the application. I wanted to talk to my pastor first.

He asked me two questions. Did I think I could do the job? I told him I wasn’t sure, and he told me he was glad to hear that because he hated to think that I thought I was so good that I could just walk in and do it.

The other question? If I got the position, would I be able to help more people? And of course I knew I could.

So we prayed…[and] after one other call – from a person who essentially told me I wasn’t qualified for the position – I filled out my application and sent it over to Tom Sawyer’s office.

I knew I was going to be fired – I’d been watching everyone else at the Housing Authority get fired due to changes on in the Board’s make-up – and Tom Sawyer called me the night before I knew it was going to happen to ask me to be deputy mayor. And he told me that he wanted to announce my appointment the next morning.

That night I went back to my office [at AMHA] and, with the help of two assistants, I typed my letter of resignation and other letters to staff and board members, and they made sure they got slid under everyone’s door.

The next morning, the radio was blaring: [Mayor] Tom Sawyer hires first black woman in Akron’s administration.

You became Deputy Mayor for Intergovernmental Relations and held that position for 19 ½ years – under two mayors – until you retired in 2003. How did you manage to be the deputy mayor of Akron and still stay out of politics?

I wanted to help people. I just wanted to do my job. And that’s what I did.

I’ve always had Democrat friends and Republican friends. People never can figure out what I am, so most just give up. I’m just Dorothy and all those years they just let me be just Dorothy.

Do you see a difference between being a public servant and politician?

A lot of the time there isn’t [any difference], but I think I was more the public servant – coordinating programs, serving on committees and boards, representing the city –than the politician.

Thorough the years who were the people who had the most influence in shaping you civically. In other words, who were your civic mentors and role models?

Things overlap. My parents taught me to give by word and example. And my father always told us that everyone was equal. When I began working, my role models were the people who let me do what needed to be done: Florence Pollack and Jack Saferstein and Herb Newman and David Meeker and my pastor, Dr. Ronald J. Fowler.

I didn’t just work with them, I learned from them too.

You left City Hall in 2003 – at 70. What accomplishments did the city make under your watch that you are particularly proud of?

Hum. That’s a hard one. Maybe the Holocaust Arts and Writing Program. A highlight of that was taking kids to Washington to see the National Holocaust Museum to see the consequences of man’s inhumanity to man…[and] the work with National Youth Service Day and increasing volunteerism in the city, too.

Are there any hobbies or passions-put-on-hold that you reconnecting with when you retired?

Well, I was able to do more cooking. And I was able to do more volunteering at Haven of Rest, a homeless shelter for men, women and children that’s in downtown Akron. It’s really grown and now they have a shelter for women, too.

Eight year’s into “retirement,” you are constantly on the go. Where do you get all the energy?

The Lord. He is the strength of my life: I put Him first. I try to have my devotions in the morning and pray and ask God to order my steps. And I make sure I get to a Bible study meeting.

And I’ve been [energetic] all my life. My parents were, too. Going, doing, this is what I saw and what my models were, especially my mother. She was always busy, always cooking. When we went to camp meetings she cooked for 200 people.

MythBusters is all about successful aging. What’s your definition of successful aging?

I’ve never really thought about that. But I guess it would be keep going and living and giving. When you do that, you are never giving yourself away. By that

I mean you don’t lose anything when you give, you only gain.

But you have to invest in yourself, too. And by that I mean take time for yourself.

Are you doing anything on a regular basis to ensure you are aging successfully? In other words, what are Dorothy Jackson’s rules for successful aging?

I try to eat right. I try to get enough sleep. And all my friends will all tell you that I do. I can doze off in a minute. And it can be anyplace – and I’m ashamed to say it – even church. I’ll just drop my head and I’m asleep.

I usually wake up around 4 am. I’ll get up and do my devotions, then [waving a hand around a sun-lit kitchen that would make Martha Stewart jealous] I may make a cake, or two, or rolls. Then, around 6, I’ll go for a walk. Lately I’m walking with a friend and we’ll go about 2 miles.

It seems you have always been innovative and open to new ideas, to alternative ways of doing things. Do you think that’s an important characteristic to aging well?

Yes! Nothing stands still. You have to learn to grow on. I’ve learned to grow on with the computer, but I have to admit that I haven’t with my cell phone. [Laughs] It can do so many more things that I can.

At 78, your volunteer activities are endless. You now or did serve on the boards, committees and councils of dozen’s of agencies and non-profits, including the NAACP, United Way of Summit County, Akron General Medical Center, the American Diabetes Association, the YWCA, Catholic Youth Organization and, of course, your church, Arlington Street Church of God. And you were also appointed to the Governor’s Commission on Volunteerism. Why do you think it’s important at your age – at any age – to volunteer?

I know what comfort means. I know what serving means. I know what compassion means. And that’s because people gave to me and so I want to give back. My daughter calls that “paying forward.”

When you volunteer you aren’t giving yourself away, you are just giving….And you have to give back. You can’t just receive, receive, receive. You get so you can give back. That’s why you have hands, to give back.

I do a lot with our church’s funeral ministry. I can’t sing or preach, but I can wash dishes, so in the funeral ministry, more times than not, I’m in the kitchen washing dishes, serving people.

But there’s another thing about volunteering that most people don’t talk about. Volunteering is doing and learning…often from experts. When you volunteer it’s like you are in a university without walls because you are working with people who know how to do things, what needs to be done. [Laughs] Just about every place I ever volunteered, I took notes.

In the 1980s, you wrote a cookbook for a guy you were dating. He’s history. What became of the cookbook?

I thought we might marry, and he didn’t know how to do anything, so I decided to teach him how to cook and made him a cookbook for a Christmas present. I called it “How to Boil Water and Other Things Too Good to Miss.”

When I took it in to work, people at City Hall wanted a copy, and when I took it to be bound, the people at the print shop wanted a copy. I didn’t put all my best recipes in it, but when I gave it to him he loved it…[W]e are still friends, but now he’s cooking for someone else.

[Paging through her copy of the cookbook] These are all good recipes, and I know I should get it published. It’s just – well, there are so many things on my to-do list. (see sidebar for some of Dorothy’s favorite recipes)

I think I got that – my love of cooking – from my mother. She loved to cook and she loved pretty dishes and she loved to have cloth tablecloths and napkins on the table.

What did I not ask that I should have?

About my daughter Renee and her husband David, and my granddaughter.

My daughter is an international flight attendant for United Airlines. When she was a little girl, she was digging a hole in the yard. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was digging a tunnel to China. Of course I told her she wasn’t going to China, and of course she’s been there, and she’s taken me there, too. She’ll tell you today that I no longer have a daughter, just a granddaughter.

My granddaughter, Anja, is 16 and her grandmother’s heart.

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