In 1946, when she was 18, Hana Bryant moved from Fort Wayne to New York City to spend the summer with her cousin before starting pre-law studies at Wilberforce University in the fall.

She lived on 123rd Street in Harlem and worked in the produce department at the Weisbecker Manhattan Market on 125th Street across from the Apollo Theatre.

Every day, she walked past the home of her future husband, Harold Stith.

“He was a professional boxer and got up early to train,” says the woman now known as Hana Lee Bryant Stith, a founder and curator of Fort Wayne’s African/African-American Historical Museum, “so he had ample time to hang out on the porch with his friends.”

They began dating, Stith says, and one of the things they did together was attend amateur night at the Apollo every Wednesday.

“We were very poor,” she says. “I don’t know where we got all the money to have the good times we had.”

Now, Stith has mined her memories of the Apollo Theatre and created a unique fundraiser to help celebrate the 11th anniversary of the museum.

“A Night at the Apollo” happens tonight at the Masonic Temple.

It is a re-creation of highlights from seven decades’ worth of the historic music hall’s history and features local singers and musicians portraying legendary ones.

The matchups are too numerous to mention, but one event-within-the-event is worth a special citation: Local legend Al Stiles, who performed in New York City at the Cotton Club, the Apollo Theatre and the Blue Note in his younger years, will return to the stage to portray Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

A dinner of soul food will be served beforehand, Stith says.

Stith isn’t certain, but she thinks there will be someone on hand to assay the role of Porto Rico, the character played for decades by stagehand Norman Miller.

“If people got booed,” Stith says, “(Porto Rico) would come out and chase them off the stage. If they were good, they got to stay.”

Several major Apollo Theatre milestones will be celebrated, Stith says, including the night a girl named Ella Fitzgerald showed up to dance and decided to sing instead because the other dancers’ costumes were fancier than hers.

“A Night at the Apollo” sounds like a surefire entertainment concept, but Stith says entertainment better not be the program’s only attribute.

“Everything we do has to be historically based and educationally based,” she says.

As far as Stith’s personal Apollo Theatre odyssey is concerned, tonight’s fundraiser may be a mere coda.

In 2006, she was in the audience when her granddaughter Hanani Taylor performed on the Apollo stage as part of the TV program, “Showtime at the Apollo.”

She was introduced by Whoopi Goldberg, Stith says.

Stith says that Taylor will soon appear in a public service message for President Obama.

spen@jg.net