Thelma C. Furry, known for taking controversial and unpopular stands, was the defender of those who had no voice in their own defense in Summit County, Ohio, and nationally.
Although little is known about her youth except that she grew up in the Kenmore area, Furry stood as a testimony for women who faced incredible odds when it came to accomplishing their goals. Divorced and the mother of a little girl, Furry dropped out of school to work. She later graduated from The University of Akron and obtained a law degree there in 1940, in spite of difficulty with the administration because she was a member of the Communist Party. This was a decision that made her very unpopular during the 1950’s because of anti-Communist governmental policies in the United States. She later gave up her membership in the organization, although she never stopped believing in the organization’s principles.
Specializing in domestic and juvenile cases, Furry never turned from a difficult task. She often defended those who could not defend themselves and people who had suffered civil rights violations, such as gays and lesbians and AIDS patients. She practiced before the Supreme Court in 1957 and won two cases by unanimous vote.
Furry, who had been influenced by her father’s union stand, became the first female trial lawyer in Akron. She continued her practice until shortly before her death at age 90.
Furry received numerous awards and recognitions in her lifetime, including being listed in the 1983 edition of “Who’s Who in Akron” and the 1989 Outstanding Alumni Award from The University of Akron School of Law. She was honored in 1994, with the Mary Perkins Rodgers Award for Pioneering, presented by the Woman’s History Project of Akron.
In an interview with the Beacon Journal in 1971, Furry said, “I have to be true to myself. I didn’t become a lawyer for the money. I consider myself a people lawyer.”
Flora Flint started out, like many Akron women, as a secretary at one of the city’s rubber companies. She started at B.F. Goodrich (BFG) but Flint had tremendous organizational skill and drive. She soon became executive secretary to the general superintendent of the Tire Division of General Tire. Outside of work, she set up a student counseling service for Akron girls and led the city’s chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
Flora Flint was born in Webster, N.Y., in 1916. She was the third of six daughters of farmer Clarence Flint. Her father died when she was still a child. In 1933 – in the depth of the Great Depression – one of Flint’s older sisters found a job in Akron and the entire Flint family moved to the city. Flora finished her education at North High School in 1934.
Flint always wanted to teach mathematics but, during the Depression, the family needed the paycheck so she went to work as a bookkeeper at the old Yeagar’s Department Store. She did, however, enroll at night school at The University of Akron, majoring in secretarial science. It took seven years but Flint did get her degree, a B.S. in secretarial science, joining Theta Upsilon, the secretarial honorary along the way.
In 1941, she joined BFG; in 1946, she went over to General Tire.
After the war, Flint helped set up a student counseling service in the city’s schools which allowed high school girls get on-the-job experience in business and industry. She also was active in the AAUW, serving as president, vice president and secretary locally and secretary and president of the state organization and chair of national AAUW building fund. The local AAUW named one its scholarships after Flint.
Flint won many work-related victories as well. In 1953, she earned the Certified Professional Secretary award by passing exams in law, accounting, economics, secretarial skills and human relations. She was promoted to vice president of the General Investment Real Estate Holding Company – and was the first woman to earn the right to eat in the executive dining room.
Flint is now retired from General Tire and lives at the Rockynol Senior Citizens Home in Akron with several of her sisters. Those sisters call her the “smart one who always tried to do better than the rest of us.”
As the executive officer of the Board of Trustees and head of staff at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Summit County, Pamela Ferrell is responsible for the administration of a $2.3-million budget and management of three facilities, including 50 full-time employees and 100 part-time staffers.
She also stays busy with volunteer work that includes the Summit County Welfare Planning Committee, Summit County Leadership Exchange Steering Committee and United Way Planning and Allocation Committee. She is chairperson of the United Way Outcomes Advisory Committee and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Coming Together Project. She is a certified trainer for the YWCA. of the U.S.A. in the areas of program evaluation, needs assessment, program development and cultural competency.
Ferrell was employed by the YWCA of Cleveland, Ohio, from 1980 to 1994 prior to her appointment with the YWCA of Summit County in November 1994. She held several positions with the YWCA of Cleveland, including branch director, Association Program coordinator and interim executive director. She was employed by Sagamore Hills Psychiatric Hospital as an activity therapist from 1975 to 1980.
Ferrell graduated from Firestone High School and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Kent State University. She is also a graduate of the Leadership Akron program, class XV. Ferrell resides in Akron and enjoys horseback riding, gardening and hiking. She has a great interest in supporting issues to protect our environment and the humane treatment of animals.
In 1993 Rita Dove was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, becoming the youngest person and first African American to receive the highest honor in American letters.
Born in Akron in 1952, Dove graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1973 before spending two semesters as a Fulbright scholar at Universitate Tubingen in Germany. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977 from the University of Iowa and has since received 20 honorary doctorates from various universities throughout the United States. She was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1987 for her work on her 1986 book “Thomas and Beulah.”
Dove is a Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, German writer Fred Viebahn, and daughter, Aviva. She is the author of several plays, musical collaborations and books including On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999); Mother Love (1995); Grace Notes (1989); andThe Yellow House on the Corner (1980).
Dove has read her poetry at a White House state dinner, was featured on CNN, on NBC’s Today Show, in a Bill Moyer’s Journal prime-time special on PBS dedicated to her and her work and, also on PBS, on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour (in an interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault), the Charlie Rose Show, and Dennis Wholey’s This is America.
She produced, in collaboration with the Library of Virginia, Shine Up Your Words: A Morning with Rita Dove, a nationally televised one-hour television show with elementary school children about poetry; narrated an NPR program on singer Billie Holiday and the three-part PBS documentary on Southern literature, Tell About the South; filmed a segment with Big Bird for Sesame Street, and appeared repeatedly on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program A Prairie Home Companion.
Catherine Rose Biggs Dobbs, only woman mayor of the city of Barberton, Ohio, built her political career on a platform designed to appeal to the woman voter. Women, she observed, “know that they must have candidates for public office that will campaign for the Moral Health of our Great Nation.” Early in her political career, Dobbs, campaigning against corruption and pornography, experienced enormous success. However, after four successful campaigns, Dobbs’ formula wore thin and voters tired of the message.
Catherine Biggs was born in Shreve, Ohio, into a large Wayne County family. The only girl, Biggs had six brothers. Although she always emphasized in her campaign literature that her family went back five generations in Ohio, the family apparently did not have substantial means. She went to public schools in Barberton, eventually graduating from Barberton High School and then went on to night school at The University of Akron, where she studied journalism and political science. She never graduated.
Biggs moved to Columbus where she was an index clerk in the Ohio House of Representatives and a researcher in the Ohio Legislative Library. While in Columbus, she attended Ohio State University, picking up classes in philosophy, government and history.
Her husband, Roy Dobbs, a Barberton pharmacist, had his own political career. From 1942 to 1947, he was mayor of Barberton.
In 1948, Dobbs started her political career by running for the Ohio Senate. Running as a Democrat, Dobbs won the seat, the first woman ever to do so and only one of eight women in the nation to serve in any state Senate. Ohio had two women in its state Senate: Dobbs and Margaret Mahoney of Cleveland.
Dobbs worked hard in Columbus as chair of the Public Health Committee and vice chair of the Elections and Federal Relations Committee. She also served on the Taxation, Finance, Public Works and Agriculture committees. Her constituency, however, was not impressed. Dobbs lost her bid for re-election.
By 1954, she was ready for another political race, this time for her husband’s old job, mayor of Barberton. Campaigning on an anti-gambling and anti-pornography platform, Dobbs won the day and was re-elected twice. During her six years in office, she was the only woman mayor of any industrial city in the nation. Dobbs liked to compare her job as mayor to running a household. “Running a city is like running a household,” she observed to a reporter. “The people depend on me to keep the city running smoothly, just as a family depends on a woman to run the household competently.”
Although she often had a stormy relationship with city hall, she did seem to run the city of Barberton competently. While she was mayor, the city grew in population and physical size. Dobbs oversaw the annexation of the A.O. Austin estate, which included the original Barber mansion, and other key areas. When she left office, Dobbs identified her greatest successes as mayor: completion of Rt. 224 through the city; building of the Tuscarawas viaduct; cleaning up commercial racketeering, and cleaning out the squatters’ shacks along the Ohio Canal.
Subsequently, Dobbs found little political success. Although she ran for Secretary of State, seats in the Ohio House of Representatives and the U.S. House of Representatives and Barberton mayor, she lost every race in the primary, sometimes by significant margins. Dobbs came back briefly in 1967 when she received a United Nations Fellowship Award and a grant to study the status of women in the UN.
Although the voters deserted her at the polls, Dobbs continued her civic/community involvement. Long a supporter of women in politics, she remained active in the Federated Democratic Women’s Club of Summit County (she served as president in 1937). She also was a long-time member of the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Barberton, the Ohio League of Senior Citizens, Akron Women’s City Club and the Akron Art Institute. She also waged an unsuccessful attempt for the preservation of the O.C. Barber mansion.
Dobbs wrote one book, Freedom’s Will: The Society of the Separatists of Zoar — An Historical Adventure of Religious Communism in Ohio (New York: Frederick Press, 1947).
Dobbs died in 1974. She and her husband had no children. Dobbs’ papers are located in The University of Akron Archives.
Photo courtesy of the Women’s History Project of the Akron Area.
Stella Long Denton has seen the legal system from many different perspectives. She has been a probation officer, helped develop and then run the county’s victim assistance program and now works with the youth before they get into trouble.
For 28 years Denton served in the Summit County’s Adult Probation Department, working with all kinds of one-time and career offenders. During the course of her long career, she volunteered at the Halfway House for Parolees in the state of Ohio.
Denton never lost sight of the victim. For the victim of domestic abuse, she helped develop the first of the state’s Battered Women’s Shelters. She also helped to create the county’s victim assistance program in 1972. That program was the first of its kind in the state and one of the first in the nation. That victim assistance program remained dear to her heart, even as she remained in the Adult Probation Department.
In the late 1980s, Denton, by then the supervisor of the adult probation department, retired. She then started a new career as an advocate for the Victim Assistance Program in the county. She was a hands-on person, providing the counseling where and when it was needed. She was with crime victims at the hospital; she accompanied them to the court hearings; she went to their homes to offer support. For 12 years she was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In 2001, Denton retired again and moved on to yet another career.
Now Denton is working with children, before they get into the criminal justice system. As a student services coordinator with Summit Academy in Akron, she works with special needs ADD/ADHD children and their parents. Research has indicated that 50 to 70 percent of ADD/ADHD children get into some difficulty with the law, Denton said. So she tries to redirect their energies into more positive paths and away from the criminal justice system.
Faye Dambrot made Akron her home in 1958, and it’s safe to say she began to working to make it a better place shortly thereafter. Through the years Dambrot logged thousands of volunteer hours in leadership roles as co-founder of Women’s History Project of the Akron Area, the Women’s Network, the Women’s History Project, and the Rape Crisis Center. The Women’s History Project attained national prominence through Dambrot’s work, much of which is archived in the National Women’s History Project.
Born Faye Hersh in Pittsburgh, she received her B.S. from Carnegie Tech and her Master’s Degree in Psychology from The University of Akron. She taught in the UA Psychology Department from 1966-89, during which time she originated the course of studies in Gender Identity and Roles. She was also on the interdisciplinary committee that formed the Women’s Studies Program at the university. From 1976-82 Dambrot served as an administrative assistant to the UA Department of Psychology, assisting more than 300 undergraduates each year.
From 1992-95 she served as project director for developing community plans to improve math, science and technology education for women and minorities for the Women’s Network, Ohio Department of Education and Summit County Education Partnership Foundation.
Dambrot received the prestigious distinction of Associate Professor Emeritus in 1989 and was posthumously inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000. But her achievements are best remembered in her legacy and in the people she inspired that are still working in the areas Dambrot embraced.
As the Akron Women’s History Project book Summit County Women As Winners said in 1986, “if it were not for Faye Dambrot, it is unlikely that Women’s History Week would be observed in the Akron area. She has been the catalyst bringing together diverse women’s organizations in the community, the energizer in their achievement and the promoter (and securer) of funding. Faye has demonstrated leadership, organizational skill, imagination, dedication, resourcefulness, strategy, tolerance, patience, imagination and tireless effort–all par excellence.”
Dambrot died March 17, 2000 from a recurrence of lung cancer at age 65 after spending the final weeks of her life working from her hospital bed. Her final project was to memorialize the former slave Sojourner Truth and her famous speech “And Ain’t I a Woman?” given at the Akron’s Woman’s Rights Convention in 1851.
Deborah Cook waited almost two years to learn the good news. In May 2003, the U.S. Senate voted 66 to 25 to confirm her nomination to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As the judge to that court, she rules on appeals from the federal district courts in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. In the federal court system, only the U.S. Supreme Court is higher that the 12 appellate circuits. Cook’s appointment is for life.
Cook is a strict constructionist of the law and is considered a conservative. Thus, her nomination caused much controversy in liberal Democratic circles. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass, was particularly critical of Cook’s record on worker’s rights. “She seems to think ‘the law’ should almost always protect corporations and not injured workers.” Cook objected to that characterization, “It was just an incredible distortion.”
When President George W. Bush nominated Cook for the federal court in May 2001, she was serving on the Ohio Supreme Court. She was first elected to that seat in 1994 and re-elected in November 2000.
Prior to her election to the Ohio Supreme Court, Cook served as a judge of the Ninth District Court of Appeals covering Summit, Wayne, Medina and Lorain counties for the four years prior to taking the Ohio Supreme Court bench
A native of Pittsburgh, Cook received her Bachelor of Arts (1974) and her Juris Doctor (1978) degrees from The University of Akron. Following graduation from law school until her election to the Court of Appeals, Cook was with Akron’s oldest law firm, Roderick, Myers & Linton and became the firm’s first female partner. She later married partner Robert Linton.
Cook was president of Delta Gamma and president of her senior class at The University of Akron and is a member of the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership and academic honorary. Cook received the Delta Gamma National Shield Award for Leadership and Volunteerism and the Akron Women’s Network 1991 Woman of the Year Award. The university presented her with an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1996 and in 1997 she received The University of Akron’s Alumni Award.
Cook chaired the Commission on Public Legal Education and was a member of the Ohio Courts Futures Commission and the Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management. She is a past president of the Akron Bar Association Foundation, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the Akron Bar Association disciplinary committee.
On the community side, Cook has served on the Akron Art Museum Board of Trustees, Summit County United Way Board of Trustees, Volunteer Center Board of Trustees, and Women’s Network Board of Directors. She was also a past chair of the Junior Leadership Akron Project, Safe Landing Shelter volunteer, Mobile Meals volunteer; Akron School of Law Board of Trustees, and The University of Akron Alumni Board.
Those who know Mary Cacioppo describe her as a fearless leader and a pioneer.
Born in Akron in 1923, Cacioppo graduated form Garfield High School and received a BA from Kent State University. She was the only woman in the Akron Law School (now The University of Akron School of Law) graduating class of 1945 and entered a field dominated by men.
Cacioppo’s history is one of firsts. She served as the first woman assistant law director in the city of Akron, first female chief prosecutor, first woman to serve on Akron Board of Zoning Appeals, and first appointed female referee to the Domestic Relations Court. Upon surrendering her seat in 1992 due to age requirements, Cacioppo traveled all over the state trying cases as a visiting judge and hearing appellate cases, including several sessions on the Ohio Supreme Court.
Cacioppo entered politics at age 16 as a junior campaign manager for the late Mary McGowan and later worked for Democratic candidates at the local, state and national levels. She also made a name for herself by being involved with elections in a different way when she was denied the right to vote because she had kept her name after marriage and was unable to prove marital status. By noon that day the quick-thinking and fast-acting Cacioppo had a ruling that admonished the Board of Elections for not knowing that Ohio law does not require a woman to take her husband’s surname.
“Mary Cacioppo is a Grand Lady in every sense-intelligent and compassionate but firm and always prepared,” said noted Akron attorney Paul F. Adamson. “She loves the law and respects those attorneys who come before her to argue zealously for their causes. She was a trailblazer for all the many women who have followed her into the legal profession, and she is a role model for all attorneys, men and women, in integrity and the ethical practice of law.”
Since 1997, Fannie L. Brown has served as executive director of “The Coming Together Project,” an organization that promotes racial harmony and understanding. The Coming Together Project was formed in 1993 to improve race relations in the community. When the nonprofit organization began, it had $40,000 and 16 partner organizations with which to work. It has since grown to include 235 community organizations and a budget of nearly $400,000 — and it’s still growing. On its 10th anniversary, the CTP announced that it has created a national umbrella organization that will oversee local chapters throughout the United States. The national organization — spearheaded and led by Brown — would be called Coming Together USA.
A native of Macon County, Ga., Brown, 47, received a Bachelor’s degree in business management from Malone College in 1990 and later a Master’s in technical education and a Doctorate degree in secondary education from The University of Akron. Brown has been involved in education throughout her career. Prior to her current position, she served as program manager with Project R.I.S.E., worked as a job specialist with Tri-County Jobs for Ohio Graduates and as an academic tutor for Akron Public Schools. She also has served as an instructor at the University of Akron.
Brown is involved in a wide range of activities, including the Akron Area Association of Churches Board to the Summit Education Initiative Advisory Board the University of Akron College of Business Administration Diversity Board, Clinic for Child Study and Family Therapy Advisory Board and the K-16 Steering Committee. Her recent honors include an Akron Aeros 2001 Spirit of Akron Award and Community Service Awards from The Ohio Partner Group and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.
