City of Akron

Former Akron Deputy Mayor Dorothy Jackson wore many hats and put on many faces during the course of a life that ended on the cusp of 88 years. She could separate the chaff from the wheat but had trouble differentiating between the two Akron mayors for whom she worked. Which was the guy with a temper and which was beneficent?

It was not because Dorothy wasn’t  astute. She just knew more than most people about mayors Tom Sawyer, who hired her in 1984 and thereby made her Akron’s first female deputy mayor, and Don Plusquellic, Sawyer’s successor who was smart enough to retain Jackson and for a thousand reasons deeper than the political message it sent.

Dorothy Jackson was a woman who loved and nurtured her family with a relentless, gentle sweetness . . . a woman who gave succor to her city when it was down because  the rubber industry that had made it the Rubber Capital of the World and which had employed her father turned tail and ran . . . a woman who could and would do every dirty, little job—even some she should not have had to do—without seeking credit.

I like to think and will remember Dorothy as signing for the deaf community that found a home in the rubber shops but not in the flamboyant way that seemed to become common during recent pandemic news conferences of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Perhaps that is why I am convinced she might be surprised—though she shouldn’t be—that news of her death made Page One of her newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal.

Dorothy deserved a streamer behind a plane, lights on the Goodyear airship, an entire section of newspaper. She was one of more than a hundred people whom I interviewed when I was writing a political biography about Don Plusquellic. (The Indomitable Don Plusquellic: How a Controversial Mayor Quarterbacked Akron’s Comeback,” The University of Akron Press, 2016.) I had known Dorothy since I came to Akron in 1981 to write a column for the Beacon Journal and she was working for Goodwill industries where, as Doug Livingston reported in her life tribute, she had found “a special joy.”

Actually, it was Dorothy Jackson who gave special joy to the rest of us. The fact that Plusquellic recognized this is what once set him off and sent him tearing off to the Summit County Board of Elections. He wanted the head of the late Alex Arshinkoff, BOE member, Summit County Republican Party chairman, and Plusquellic adversary. If he could have, Plusquellic, a tough-guy former All-State quarterback at Kenmore High School, would have put it on a long stake and paraded it through downtown Akron.

Few messed with Don Plusquellic. No one messed with his deputy mayor without facing The Don’s rage that cannot be evaded, cannot be extinguished, and may not be survivable. That Arshinkoff did survive to succumb to non-mayor causes was a miracle.

The incident happened during a campaign against Michael Callahan, who could not unseat Plusquellic but did go on to a long, distinguished career at many levels of the law. Plusquellic and Callahan were going at it tong and hammer over a Callahan accusation that Plusquellic had taken an illegal campaign contribution from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Dorothy Jackson had arranged for $5 discount tickets with Plusquellic’s photo on it to be circulated to schools and to community organizations. Deputy Mayor Jackson had gotten the idea after seeing photos of other mayors on circus tickets. She said: “Oh shoot, we need to put the mayor’s picture on ours.” Then it hit the fan. “Oh my God,” Dorothy said, “didn’t Mr. Arshinkoff nail us!”

Plusquellic, in an attempt to squelch the brouhaha, asked a well-known Republican big-wig to intervene with Arshinkoff concerning “the craziness.” When David Brennan did so Arshinkoff told him to tell Plusquellic to send someone to the Board of Elections with an explanation. Since it was her idea, Dorothy Jackson went into the lion’s den. She took the blame and pointed out that such tickets were a common practice. Arshinkoff and a fellow Republican board member put Dorothy on a spit and grilled her unmercifully.

Plusquellic being Plusquellic, he went “absolutely out [his] mind thinking who would do that to Dorothy.” Of course, he knew: Arshinkoff. When he asked Dorothy to tell him what had happened, she did. “It’s the only time I ever heard Dorothy swear,” Plusquellic said. “It was just a little, tiny word [but] I’ve never seen her as furious.”

Plusquellic went to the Board of Elections and responded in kind to Arshinkoff’s “guerilla-style politics”—and threw in a couple of orangutans, for good measure. He demanded to know the name of every person working at the Board of Elections who was related to Arshinkoff. Message: You’re next, Mr. Chairman.

Dorothy Jackson never forgot the vehemence with which Plusquellic defended her.

She also never forgot the difference in the ways that the “mean” Plusquellic and the “nice” Sawyer expressed their anger. “Don doesn’t hide it,” said Jackson who saw it enough times to know. “But Tom can put on his grin.” And behind the grin?

“[Sawyer] had a temper,” Jackson said. “Oh, Lord. He hit the table one day and his coffee spilled and started running toward his paper, and I just sat there. I said, ‘I’m not going there. You hit the table. You’re mad at me. You clean it up yourself. I’m not going to clean it up.”

 Dorothy Jackson had a warm smile and steel in her spine. Both allowed Tom Sawyer to conclude that the deputy mayor he had chosen was the perfect one. “There was no one who was able to reach out across government better than she,” Sawyer told Livingston. “[Deputy mayor of intergovernmental relationships] was an undefined role . . . in Akron city government that she defined by her career.”

The “greater good” that Dorothy Jackson did for city may have come “simply by being a genuinely good human being, which she did day in and day out,” Sawyer concluded. “And that was the greatest good she did in public life.”

The greatest good done . . . by one of the greatest women a person could ever know.