Fletcher Hodges Jr., who died March 13 at a retirement home near Pittsburgh, was curator of a massive archive who spent five decades preserving the memory of composer Stephen Foster.

Hodges had scant musical aptitude when he took over the Foster job in 1931.He was a recent Harvard graduate reduced, during those early Depression years, to sweeping slaughterhouse remains at a Chicago meat-packing plant. One day, he interviewed with Josiah K. Lilly, owner of the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co.

“I was told there was no place in the drug business for me,” Hodges, an Indianapolis native,once said.”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.”

Initially engaged for three months to work on Lilly’s growing collection of Foster mementos, he instead spent 51 years amassing documents that underscored Foster’s musical and cultural influence.

Hodges curated what is now called the Foster Hall Collection at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for American Music. The repository commemorated the author of popular American songs such as “Old Folks at Home,” “Oh! Susannah” and “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair.” Foster, known to have written 201 original songs, died a pauper in 1864 at 37.

Under Hodges, the collection – the most comprehensive of “Fosteriana” – grew to include about 30,000 items, including photographs, sound recordings, and sheet music. He also found rarities such as Foster’s own rosewood flute as well as wallpaper with a design based on a Foster song theme.

To create wider interest in Foster during the swing era, Hodges sent Foster sheet music to libraries nationwide and hired musicologist John Tasker Howard to write the first authoritative Foster biography in 1935.

Hodges provided background materials and research for Twentieth Century Fox’s biopic “Swanee River” (1939) starring Don Ameche as the composer. He later grumbled about the film’s artistic license.

By organizing a national letter-writing campaign, he persuaded the Post Office Department to put Foster on the penny stamp in 1940.The next year, he successfully pushed for Foster’s election as the first musician in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, now at Bronx Community College. And for much of World War II, he disseminated copies of the Foster songbook to the armed forces as a morale builder.

He also collected forged Fosteriana, which became increasingly popular as Foster’s reputation solidified.

Hodges, the son of a general practitioner and a teacher, was born August 6, 1906. At Harvard, he was a member of the boxing, wrestling, and track teams and competed unsuccessfully for a place in the 1928 Olympics in the 100-yard dash. He was also turned down when he applied for a spot on the 1928 Antarctic expedition led by explorer Richard E. Byrd.

For much of his life, Hodges rejoiced in reading about famous train wrecks, statistics on the heights of mountains, and tyrannical world leaders. A robust man, even after a near-fatal car crash in 1953, he liked organizing trips to places with few amenities, including the Arctic Circle.

His partner in his adventures was his wife of 73 years, Margaret Moore, a Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book author who died in December. He once told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that on his wedding day, he treated himself to a professional shave, only to have the barber tell him: “Marriage is like sticking your hand into a bag that has 99 rattlesnakes and one eel – we all hope we grab the eel.”

On his first anniversary, Hodges ran back to the barber to relay an update: “Nick,” he told the barber, “I got the eel!”

Survivors include three sons, Fletcher Hodges III of Manhattan, N.Y., Arthur Hodges of Essex, Mass., and John Hodges of Washington; nine grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.