Don Ash left a lasting Akron impression that all who knew him could see

Akron Beacon Journal file photo

Though it is nearly impossible to imagine being blind—the feel of it, the sound of it, the smell of it, the thought of it . . . because what else is left?—circumstance can create a moment. Mine came in the form of Douglas Ash’s email inquiry about his grandfather.

Ash is researching the life of his grandfather Donald “Don” Ash and he wanted to know if I remembered Mr. Ash and what my experience had been when I met him. Doug Ash is digging into genealogy—his grandfather, and his part in the family history. Through the website newspapers.com, he had located a column I had written in the early 1980s when I had first come to Akron and Don Ash was preparing to leave.

Do I remember Don Ash? Doug Ash’s simple question blindsided me. Out of the blue it came and through the haze of too many years gone by, too many columns and stories written. It left me unable to call back specifics of meeting Mr. Ash. Though I had a general impression of the feeling with which he left me, Doug’s question thrust me into a dark room, its door slammed shut on yesterday and the memories I might find there.

In other words, I felt blind. Or, at least what I thought it might feel like to be blind, because that was what Mr. Ash had been since he was 10 years old, and for the entirety of the 32 years he ran the coffee shop/concession stand in the basement of Akron City Hall. His business was a regular stop for City Hall denizens, visitors, and even mayors, all of whom were customers. (John Ballard bought cigars from Mr. Ash.)

If I still worked at the Akron Beacon Journal I would have visited its library—if there is one in its new and smaller digs in the AES Building (former Goodrich Plant 41)—to find the old columns. I clipped and saved stories, but not all of them, and over the years even some of those in my personal files disappeared. Usually, that presents no problem. The Akron-Summit County Library offers an electronic archive of Beacon Journal stories. I visit it so frequently that I long ago memorized my 14-digit library card number and it has become so deeply embedded in my brain that I expect it will be the last thing to escape my memory. I won’t replace my worn library card because it would come with a different number. That electronic archive began in the mid-1980s. Fortunately, Doug sent me the Don Ash column, and it was as if I could again see.

I already had emailed Doug Ash my impressions of the great value I found in the coffee/concession shop that gave Mr. Ash the independence he sought. It was part a program that trained the blind to run businesses in public buildings such as City Hall. I told Doug that I thought his grandfather had been “a positive presence in many lives, a man both recognized and appreciated. He did more than provide his customers a service. He offered an example of what hard work and an appealing personality can do to help anyone succeed, blind or not. While it can be wrong to try to identify a person as representative of how a life situation—his blindness did not handicap him—can be turned around, [Mr. Ash] proved in a most visible way what an important, contributing member of society all of us can be if given an opportunity.”

The column reminded me of specifics I had forgotten from 40 years ago. Mr. Ash recognized his regular customers by their voices. The late Kenneth Nichols, a legendary Beacon Journal columnist, once offered an even more stunning example of Mr. Ash’s voice-recognition abilities. On a trip to Marietta, Mr. Ash and his wife stopped to ask directions of a man standing at a curb. Before the man had spoken a dozen words, Mr. Ash recognized his voice. They had attended the Columbus School for the Blind at the same time but hadn’t spoken in eight years.

After the two men reminisced for a few minutes, Mr. Ash asked his wife if she had stopped on some railroad tracks. “Yes,” she told him. “Can you imagine? The tracks are in the street.” Mr. Ash told her she should move. “There’s a train coming.” Mrs. Ash could see no train, but moved the car. In a few minutes a freight train huffed past.

And Mr. Ash harrumphed: “Tracks in the street. Craziest town I ever listened to.”

Mr. Ash’s fingers were almost as magical as his ears. As I suggested after watching him work, it was as if his fingers had eyes. He probably made fewer mistakes than a sighted person would have while accommodating his customers more quickly.

I spoke with Debbie Spataro, one of Mr. Ash’s three children, about her blind father’s decision at age 52 to move to Columbus to run a larger, cafeteria-style concession at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles building in the Ohio capital. “People outside the family may find his decision surprising,” Debbie Spataro told me, “but I don’t. And I’m not sure people who have been around him all his work life will, either. I don’t think they’re any longer amazed by what he can do.”

Well, I was. He never missed a beat. Want a small drink? Mr. Ash fluidly and flawlessly grabbed the correct cup, took a step back and to his right, tapped the ice machine to fill the cup, and handed it to the customer to fill with the cold beverage of the person’s choice. “From waiting on people to scrubbing down the place,” Mr. Ash said, “there’s nothing I don’t like about this work. I just felt I was in a rut.”

So he did something about it. He bid on the BMV concession and won. “If it doesn’t work out,” he said, “I’ll just try something else. It makes me sad to hear people talk the way they sometimes do about their jobs.”

Don Ash was no whiner. Just the opposite. He had a sense of humor. He made the best of things. He probably didn’t even get angry when one 18-year-old city employee gave me Mr. Ash a $1 bill for a purchase, told him it was a $5, and pocketed the extra $4 in change. This did not seem to please Thomas Powers, who was a municipal judge. Judge Powers sentenced the scallywag to the workhouse.

That’s what should have happened to some of Mr. Ash’s employees in Columbus. Doug Ash’s father told him the BMV cafeteria-style concession was “a nightmare for Don. It was a lot larger to manage and . . . had hot food. And the employees weren’t exactly cream of the crop: Two of them were arrested one time at the 12 o’clock lunch rush.”

As he promised, when things did not work out in Columbus, Mr. Ash and his second wife, Elsie, moved to Georgia, which had been her home. He died April 5, 1992 at 62. The death notice published in the Beacon Journal mentioned he “operated the coffee shop at the Akron Municipal Building until his retirement” (which does not quite coincide with the timeline of Mr. Ash’s work life). It also does not mention that Mr. Ash was an orphan who grew up in a foster home—and that he was a blind and a City Hall icon.

There, apparently, was no news story of the death of this Akron legend, which means someone at the Beacon Journal was asleep at their computer, mainly me. I did not see the death notice but I knew Mr. Ash and do remember him. Was blind, but now I see.