Sakal has a lot in common with that storied, but long-gone gridiron team from West Dayton and not because he once was a Dayton Daily News sportswriter before embarking on a career of non-sports journalism in Arizona and northeast Ohio; working as a public information officer for the city of Goodyear, Arizona; and now substitute teaching in the Northridge school system.
From 1922 to 1941, the Dakota Street Football team – which was made up mostly of Hungarian players – brought immense pride to the large influx of Hungarians immigrants who’d come to Dayton to work, especially at the Dayton Malleable Iron Works and later the Barney and Smith Railway Car Works.
Far from their homeland, working hard jobs and initially facing discrimination, the Hungarians found a sense of community, pride and enjoyment in the Dakota Street club that for two decades was the best semi-pro team in the Dayton Daily News-Gem City Semi-Pro League.
They had several undefeated seasons, including 1940 when they went 8-0 and outscored their opposition, 167-3.
The Dakota footballers made their fellow countrymen proud to be Hungarians.
Now, a century after the football team debuted, Sakal is stoking that same pride in people with Hungarian roots.
His two-volume set brings all those old stories – of the sports teams, the Hungarian churches, the thriving shops, restaurants and clubs, and especially the people themselves – back to life.
You saw the appreciation in the rapt attention, smiles and nods people gave as he talked, and you especially heard it in their conversations as they passed through the book-signing line:
- Kari Seibert told how her grandmother had gotten homesick for Hungary and part of the family was on the RMC Carpathia on its way back to Europe that April night in 1912 when their transatlantic steamship worked its way through the massive ice field and came upon the frantic survivors of the sunken Titanic.
Seibert’s grandparents gave up their beds for some of the 705 people the ship rescued.
- Carole Hansberry told Sakal how her grandmother had been booted from the Kossuth Colony – the controversial North Dayton enclave behind 12-foot walls that essentially was company town with a company store mandated by labor contractor J.D. Moskowitz – because she’d bought something for a few cents cheaper in an adjacent neighborhood.
- Patti Kinney and her two sisters, Peggy McConnell and Helen Draughn, brought along a copy of USA Today from 1986 that showed a photo of their mother and two of their aunts as little girls.
They were first generation Hungarian-Americans and their photo is part of the Ellis Island archives. Kinney and the others also had the Declaration of Intention their grandfather signed in 1919 when he became a U.S. citizen
- Bo Segi brought along a photo of his dad, Pete, when he served in World War II.
- John and Mark Spirk talked sports. Mark coached 17 years at Northmont; and his brother Steve was the Hall of Fame soccer coach at Wilmington College.
A couple of days after the book signing, Sakal and I met in the Oregon District to talk about his book and the reception it’s gotten.
He’d had as similar response when he’d signed copies at A World A’Fair a week earlier in Xenia.
When I suggested he’s given folks a wonderful gift that makes them feel connected to their heritage, he suddenly went silent, and his eyes filled with tears.
“They just have such great stories that no one has really told publicly before,” he finally managed to say.
And it’s taken him over 30 years to tell those stories he first started collecting in the early 1990s.
Although he’d conducted nearly 200 interviews that filled 100 cassette tapes, it wasn’t until the past few years that he found adequate funding to complete his labor of love thanks to the eventual backing of the Old Troy Pike Community Church – formerly known as the Hungarian Evangelical and Reformed Church – as it was contemplating closing its doors after selling its buildings and land to the Ahiska Turkish Community.
The debut of his book comes at a meaningful time with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly events opening here in four days. It shows another of the many ways the Dayton community is intertwined with the world at large.
Sakal’s work details the unique experience of the some 6,000 Hungarians who came to Dayton. The earliest arrivals lived in West Dayton, but a second group brought over by Moskowitz were housed in the isolating Kossuth Colony and were paid in script.
That launched a debate that was fueled by two Dayton newspapers.
The Journal Herald backed Moskowitz’s attempt to keep the workers he’d brought from Hungary from being poached by other companies, but the Daily News said the wall should be torn down and the people should be given free choice.
In the end, the 1913 Flood took care of the wall. What wasn’t washed away was used to make rafts to keep people alive.
Among the many Sakal stories – including how West Dayton Hungarians helped fund the airplane engine of their neighbors, the Wright Brothers, for the historic Kitty Hawk flight – the ones that resonate for this column are about the many sports personalities that arose from the Hungarian community then and now.
Besides the Dakota Street team, a Hungarian hero in the 1930s was Lou Barney, the Ohio middleweight champ, who fought veterans like Henry Firpo, Tony LaRosa, Bobby Kraft and the Alabama Kid, as well as local fistic heroes Buddy Knox of Dayton and Springfield’s Tiger Joe Walker in a dozen different fight arenas here.
Before their deaths some 30 years ago, Sakal interviewed Alex “Moose” Rado who went from the Dakota Street team to the NFL’s Pittsburgh Pirates – later called the Steelers – and Andy Nagy, who took the same path to the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the Canadian Football League.
There’s a segment in Volume One on the Hickory Bar-B Que restaurant on Brown Street that beloved Hungarian immigrants Joe and Irene Kiss opened with Irene’s brother Steve Kolb and his wife Sylvia in 1962.
Joe had a passion for racing thoroughbreds and helping people and he did both when he staked Jim Morgan, the All-American Louisville basketball player from Stivers High, to be his trainer.
Morgan went on to become Ohio’s most successful trainer before his death six years ago.
Today, the Hickory honors Morgan and many local sports legends – especially Dayton Flyers basketball figures – with its photo-filled Sports Room that Don Donoher called “ a mini sports museum.”
Several recent stars from the Miami Valley have Hungarian roots, including Milton Union High‘s soccer All American Jenny Szakal and Jeff Reboulet, who went from Alter High and Louisiana State fame to a 12-year career in the Major Leagues with Minnesota, Baltimore, Kansas City, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Pittsburgh.
One of his shining moments was a home run off Seattle fireballer Randy Johnson in Game Four of the 1997 American League Divisional Series that gave the Orioles the series win.
Today he runs the acclaimed Reb Sports Academy off Linden Avenue with two of his sons.
Sakal tells how Reboulet’s Hungarian immigrant great grandparents, Laszlo and Julia Ann Belme, bought the Hungarian Clubhouse on the corner of Mack and Notre Dame avenues and ran it as a grocery store and bowling alley.
“I don’t know a lot about my Hungarian roots,” Reboulet admitted the other evening.
He knows a few Hungarian sayings, said cabbage rolls always have been “a mainstay,” and on his birthday he said his wife Jana, who’s not Hungarian, gave him quite a gift:
“She made chicken paprikash…It was great.”
A church‘s legacy
Sakal – who like Reboulet is half Hungarian – didn’t initially know a lot about the Hungarian story in Dayton either.
His grandmother would babysit he and his sister once a week and make soup with csiga noodles and other Hungarian staples. And as a kid, he went to the annual Grape Festival dinners with his parents and the Hungarian Freedom Day dinners, too.
But that’s about it.
Then one day he came into work at the Dayton Daily News and was met by Wilbur Curtis, the sports raconteur who lived next door at the Embassy Suites apartments and once was recognized as the fastest schoolboy in Dayton after he won the 100-yard dash for Roosevelt High at the 1934 City Championships.
He’d talked to Sakal before, but only knew him as Mike.
When he learned Sakal’s last name, he asked if he was related to Ernie Sakal.
Mike said he was, and Curtis proceeded to tell him about what a “great player” Ernie had been on the Dakota Street team.
Sakal had never heard of the team.
Curtis told him they’d been the best in the city and said that would be a good story for him to pursue and gave him names of players who still were living.
Sakal got together with six of them at Mac Bulko’s home in Kettering and they filled him with stories.
“They told me when they won a game they could eat free at the Hungarian Village or the Budapest Café,” Sakal said. “I said, ‘Where were those places? I don’t know about them.’”
He wrote a story about the Dakota Street team for the Daily News in 1992 and Hungarians throughout the Miami Valley took notice.
When he went to the main branch of Dayton Metro Library to talk to Nancy Horlacher, the manager of the Dayton History Room, she suggested writing a book about the Dayton Hungarians.
He brought a framed copy of the Dakota Street story to the late Dave Boston who ran the Sports Page, the first sports bar in downtown Dayton.
Boston’s heritage was Hungarian and he suggested Sakal come to a meeting at the Magyar Club, the Hungarian group that met monthly, because: “There are a lot of people who want to meet you.’”
Sakal presented his book idea to the club and asked if people had old photos of their families, Hungarian businesses, the old neighborhoods, street scenes, anything
Soon he was getting as steady stream of pictures, stories and insights.
The two Hungarian places of worship – St. Stephen’s Catholic Church and the Hungarian Evangelical and Reformed Church – initially offered some financial backing for the book, but eventually those promises evaporated.
Although he’d conducted many of his interviews, Sakal was forced to shelve the project and get on to other things in his life.
A few years ago, as Old Troy Pike Community Church was ready to dissolve with just four remaining members, it decided to offer him the financial support to finish the book.
Sakal’s account would give the church a legacy, especially since some proceeds of the book sales are going to the formation of a Wright State scholarship for study abroad.
Several people helped work on the book, most notably Dave Arnold of Connexion Marketing and Design in Vandalia, who handled much of the layout.
The two-volume set can be purchased at the New & Olde Pages Bookshop in Englewood or by contacting Sakal at michaeljsakal@gmail.com.
All the love
Sakal’s conversation with “Moose” Rado that day at Bulko’s house in 1992 is one of my favorites.
“When I was playing for Pittsburgh in 1934 we finished with 17 players,” said Rado, who’d been a 200-pound halfback. “In a game against the Giants, a guy came through the line and hit me with a judo chop and broke my nose.
“They took me out, stuck some cotton in my nose and told me ‘Get back in there. We don’t have anyone to take your place.’”
After her stellar swimming career at Northmont High and Wright State, Maria Haffner Schreiber focused on coaching, which she did for 37 years, many of them at Northmont High where she was the named the Greater Western Ohio Conference Coach of the Year four straight years, 2018 through 2021.
She retired from coaching three years ago – her daughters Delaney (head coach) and Hannah (assistant) now coach the Northmont swim team – but she continues to teach fourth grade.
After her parents divorced, Maria was raised by her Hungarian/Albanian grandmother Blanche Haffner who taught her how to make crepes.
“My grandmother would make crepes for breakfast and keep (extra batter) in a dish with a little plate on the top,” she told me the other night. “When we’d get home from school, she’d whip up the rest and make us some more.
“I can’t make cabbage rolls like she did, but I can make crepes. And to this day, if we have a snow day at school, our two daughters – we’re all teachers – they come over. I make them crepes in the morning, and it brings back so many memories.”
When Sakal was chronicling Hungarians in Dayton, he interviewed Rose Vegso, who lived on South Williams Street. She once had sung with the Budapest Philharmonic:
“I asked her why she came to America, and she said, ‘We came to America to work, worship, eat, dance…and love.’”
That’s the perfect answer and those pursuits come to life in Sakal’s book.
Especially, all the love.
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