One day a year Kinsman celebrates its literary and cinematic legacy.
Don Sutton hopes that event can help preserve that history for future generations.
The township will celebrate Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett Day on Saturday.
Brackett wrote ''Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back,'' arguably the best-loved movie in the sci-fi franchise, at their home in Kinsman. She also wrote the screenplays for several movies directed by Howard Hawks - "The Big Sleep'' with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and "Rio Bravo'' and "El Dorado'' starring John Wayne - as well as acclaimed science fiction novels and short stories.
Her husband, Edmond Hamilton, also was a successful science fiction author and worked for DC Comics, writing stories for Batman and Superman and creating some of the minor characters featured in the Justice League books.
Sutton, organizer of Saturday's event, plans to keep the event free and open to the public, but he wants to use money raised from raffles and other activities surrounding the event to record oral histories from residents who knew Brackett and Hamilton when they lived in the area (Hamilton died in 1977 and Brackett died the following year). Those stories will be lost if they aren't collected now.
''In the last year, we lost a couple of old timers,'' Sutton, 55, said. ''We should have been doing this (recording oral histories) when I first started. When I was in high school, there was a guy who knew Clarence Darrow. I could have interviewed him and gotten the inside dirt.''
Saturday's festivities will start at 10 a.m. and will include a Star Wars convention, costumed characters and a raffle of Star Wars merchandise. Sutton will portray Hamilton, and there will be a viewing of the couple's personal slides.
Steve Haffner of Haffner Press, a specialty publishing house that is reprinting Hamiltion's and Brackett's books, will speak at 4 p.m. Saturday.
''Some of these stories haven't been reprinted since they were first printed in the 1930s,'' Sutton said.
And the day will conclude with a toast at their grave site at 5:30 p.m.
Because of the devotion of the Star Wars fan base, many of the events Saturday are tailored to that crowd, but Sutton would like to expand the event to include the couple's other literary contributions in the future. The 75th anniversary of Superman will be in 2013, and Sutton would like to do something with the superhero that year since Hamilton wrote for the comic books.
Activities are planned around Kinsman Presbyterian Church, 6383 Church St. For more information, call 330-876-3178 or 330-240-8094.