University Times

Fletcher Hodges Jr., the first curator of the Foster Hall Collection at the Stephen Foster Memorial and noted expert and scholar on the life of Pittsburgh native Stephen Collins Foster, died of pneumonia March 13, 2006, at his home in Oakmont. He was 99.

Hodges was preceded in death by his wife of 73 years, Margaret Hodges, a former Pitt faculty member. (See Jan. 5, 2006, University Times.)

A 1928 graduate of Harvard College who majored in English, Fletcher Hodges began working three years later with pharmaceutical giant Josiah Kirby Lilly, managing and building a collection of Foster materials that Lilly later donated to Pitt. The collection included Foster’s original sheet music, writings, artifacts and memorabilia.

Hodges came to Pitt in 1937 to oversee the installation of Lilly’s collection in the Stephen Foster Memorial, the first university research collection for American music anywhere, according to Deane Root, who succeeded Hodges as curator in 1982.

Root said he regularly finds visitors who fondly recall the impression Hodges made when they visited decades earlier.

“So many people remember him as the spirit of the building,” he said.

In an interview Root taped with Hodges shortly after he retired, Hodges recalled the beginnings of his career. “I was told there was no place in the drug business for me,” Hodges said of his initial meeting with Lilly. “As I was leaving, he pulled a sheet of music out of his desk and he said, ‘Do you know anything about this?’ It was a copy of ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ and I believed that it was the work of Stephen Collins Foster. Mr. Lilly said … that he was engaged in working on a collection of Foster’s music and that he would be pleased if I might help him for three months…. Those three months turned into 51 years.”

Throughout his career, Hodges was active in efforts to honor Foster and preserve his memory and music across the nation and worldwide.

Prior to his arrival at the University, he distributed reproductions of Foster sheet music to libraries in the United States and Europe and commissioned the U.S. Marine Band to record a Foster medley, which he sent on 78-rpm records to radio stations nationwide.

After installing the Foster collection at Pitt, he served as a background expert for the 1939 movie “Swanee River,” based on Foster’s life.

Hodges also was instrumental in the development of the Stephen Foster Memorial State Park along the Suwanee River in Florida, the election of Foster to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans in New York City, the coining of a Foster half-dollar and the issuance of a Foster postage stamp.

In 1999 the University honored Hodges with the establishment of the Fletcher Hodges Jr. Curatorship at the University Library System’s Center for American Music, housed in the Stephen Foster Memorial. The position was the first endowed chair in the library system, Root said.

Former colleague E. Maxine Bruhns, director of Pitt’s Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs, recalled a warm professional relationship with Hodges. “We were on the same staff under (former Vice Chancellor) Dr. (Albert) Van Dusen,” said Bruhns. “We had these wonderful staff meetings. Fletcher was just so convivial.”

Hodges is survived by three sons, Fletcher Hodges III of New York City, Arthur C. Hodges of Essex, Mass., and John A. Hodges of Washington, D.C.; nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be scheduled in the spring.

Memorial contributions may be made to the University, designated for the Foster Hall Collection, c/o 271 Hillman Library, Pittsburgh 15260.

—Kimberly K. Barlow