In 1978, David Giffels watched Devo perform on “Saturday Night Live.” Clad in their trademark yellow Tyvek jumpsuits and sporting square sunglasses, they jerked through a robotic cover of The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” their presence at once bizarre and something entirely new. “It kind of blew my mind,” says Giffels, now an author and a University of Akron distinguished professor. “I connected the fact that they were from Akron … it was like my the Beatles on ‘Ed Sullivan’ moment. So, it kind of imprinted on me.”
Giffels went on to co-write two books about Devo and recently put that knowledge into a single essay about the experimental Akron Sound that emerged in the 1970s.
In 2022, Dave Lieberth, executive secretary of the Akron Bicentennial Commission and president of the Akron History Center, assembled potential authors to discuss the creation of a new Akron history book as part of the Akron Bicentennial celebration. Local history books honoring past city milestones include Karl H. Grismer’s history of “Akron and Summit County” from around 1950 and author George Knepper and photographer Jack Geick’s “Akron: City at the Summit” from around 1975.
Access to extensive archives and more allow this new book to offer not only a fresh perspective on Akron’s history, but a more accurate one.
“We have the availability of science, namely archeology and anthropology, that has allowed us to develop a much more accurate picture of the Indigenous people who occupied this land we call Akron that other previous writers did not have,” says Lieberth.
Released in September, the 27-chapter “Akron at 200” book (The University of Akron Press, $50) includes various topics covered by different authors — including the failure of the Akron Innerbelt, the work of classical Black Akron composer Julia Perry and abolitionist John Brown’s time in Akron. One of the goals of the book was the inclusion of under-covered topics, such as chapters on Akron’s rarely told queer history — as chronicled by activist Fran Wilson — Akron Pros player Fritz Pollard, who was one of the first Black professional football players and the first Black NFL head coach, covered by author Steve Love, and Akron’s servants, written by University of Akron English alum Christi Blythin.
“When you look at Karl Grismer’s book, he has over 500 biographies in the back of the book that are a critical resource for anybody studying history before 1950. Among those over 500 biographies, there are three women, and two of them were opera performers. And there were no African Americans,” Lieberth says. “We needed to have chapters that filled that gap.”
Giffels’ “Akron Sound” chapter features well-known musicians — alongside topics that have rarely been recounted.
“Together, I think it gives it a collage, rather than an entire singular narrative,” Giffels says.
Giffels went into the process already having researched the Akron Sound era and local bands, such as Tin Huey, in the past.
“The era that Devo emerged from, the 1970s, was an important moment in Akron’s history because we were starting to lose our sort of international identity as the Rubber Capital of the World, and at the same time, all of these sort of weirdo underground musicians were finding each other in the city, and several new wave and punk bands formed and created this new identity for Akron,” Giffels says. “And so there became this term, the Akron Sound.”
There were some aspects, however — such as radio host Alan Freed’s time in Youngstown and Akron — that Giffels had not previously covered.
“Framing it specifically in the rock ‘n’ roll era helped me narrow it,” he says. “It wasn’t just what was happening here but the pieces of this story that sort of broadcast our image as a musical town to the rest of the world.”
Giffels’ chapter starts: It began in the radio, when radio was a piece of furniture in virtually every Ohio household, a portal to worlds unknown. It began in the voice of Alan Freed, an eager young announcer playing music that had never been heard on the airwaves and giving it a name: Rock ‘n’ roll.
“Akron, if we look at it from the outside, is very often either overlooked or misunderstood, and so we have a tendency to rely strongly on any individual or icon that is recognized outside of here,” he says. “Akron’s music has done that.”
Lieberth’s chapter covers the 1968 Wooster Avenue disturbances — a period of civil unrest in Akron partly fueled by the dispossession of homes under urban renewal — that Lieberth witnessed firsthand as a 21-year-old news editor at WHLO Radio.
“My first night as a radio news editor was the third night of the disturbances,” Lieberth says. “I had a personal interest in it, and it had also never been really documented in any book form before, and it’s an important chapter in Akron’s history, not only in terms of our Black history and history of Black neighborhoods, but in the history of racial reconciliation that we have been continuing.”
One of Giffels’ favorite chapters is “Akron, Home of the World of Make-Believe,” by author Sharon Moreland Myers. Its playful view of Akron’s toy history captures the book’s kaleidoscopic nature — multiple perspectives on Akron’s history create a new, original view.
“It doesn’t try to tell a comprehensive history. Instead, I think this book did a really good job of choosing markers of our identity,” says Giffels. “Specific themes or specific images that say, This is who we have been and who we are now.”
