Ruth Emma Alderfer Oenslager’s contributions to the Akron area can be seen on many different levels. She helped found and became the first president of Junior League in the city; she’s been generally credited with saving Akron’s Loew’s Theater (now the Civic) from destruction; and she donated her 102-acre family farm to the Medina County Park District (now the Alderfer-Oenslager Park). Notwithstanding all those contributions, she preferred her occupational affiliation best – painter.
Born in Katytown, Medina County, on Nov. 12, 1892, she was the daughter of John Melvin and Estella Santee Alderfer. Her father ran a mill in Medina County. Well educated for the day, she attended Oberlin College. She then went on to study still life at the Cleveland School of Fine Arts. She continued to paint throughout her life.
Alderfer never fit neatly into social expectations for women of the day. She went to Columbia to be trained in occupational therapy. When World War I broke out, she went to France as an occupational therapist.
After the war, she returned to Akron. In 1923, she along with Mrs. George Crouse Jr. and Mrs. R.G. Shirk started the Junior League of Akron. The early Junior League appeared to have some sort of association with Blanche Seiberling’s Babies Aid Society which assisted the Mary Day Nursery/Children’s Hospital Women’s Board. Many of the women of the Babies Aid Society along with Alderfer, Crouse and Shirk became the core of the Junior League.
The influence of the Babies Aid Society can be seen in the initial work of the Junior League. The organization was committed to three types of work — with the sick and unfortunate in the hospitals, with the working and foreign girls in the city and with children. By 1930, the Junior League had taken over responsibility of running the Mary Day Nursery, which was a part of the Children’s Hospital organization. All members had to volunteer 75 hours of work each year. Alderfer became the first president.
During the 1920s and 1930s, when Alderfer was especially involved, the Junior League was involved in many activities. In the 1920s, members worked in City Hospital, establishing a patient’s library and making surgical dressings. In the 1930s, the group provided occupational therapy at Goodrich School.
Alderfer also served as one of the founders and an early president of the Women’s Overseas Service League in Akron (Mary Gladwin Unit) and a board member of Goodwill Industries.
In 1939, Alderfer, 47, married 66-year-old George Oenslager, a prominent chemist with Goodrich Tire and Rubber.
Throughout her life, Alderfer Oenslager traveled the world and painted. After her husband died in 1956, she split her time between Akron and the family farm in Sharon Township.
In 1965, she was generally credited with saving the beautiful Loew’s Theater in Akron from the wrecking ball. When campaigners couldn’t raise the money needed to save the theater, she stepped in to make up the difference. Bill Vielhaver, an accountant who participated in the fund drive, remembered that the group needed $22,000 to buy the building and set up the foundation. Oenslager stepped in, held the mortgage and eventually forgave the debt.
In 1975, she donated her 102-acre family farm in Sharon Township to the Medina County Park District. Alderfer-Oenslager Park remains a testament to her generosity.
When Oenslager died in 1992, the Beacon Journalremembered her many contribution to the Akron area.
–Kathleen L. Endres