Category: Post War/Modern Period (1946-1999)

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Frances McGovern, 1927 –

Frances McGovern, grass roots politician, served the citizens of her county and state with a sense of fairness and justice.

Born on April 18, 1927, McGovern has lived all her life in Akron, Ohio. She received her early education at St. Sebastian and Buchtel High School. Interested in economics and law, McGovern graduated from The University of Akron in 1948. She completed the requirements for a law degree the following year at Western Reserve University Law School (now Case-Western Reserve University Law School).

Elected to the Ohio General Assembly in 1954, McGovern was re-elected in 1956 and 1958. During her term as chair of the House Judiciary Committee in 1959, McGovern sponsored numerous bills such as equal pay for equal work and licensing for practical nurses. She helped create the State Building Code Authority and worked to establish a driving offense point system.

Never marrying, McGovern was the first woman appointed to the Ohio Public Utilities Commission in 1960. Outspoken in her beliefs and with a keen sense of fairness, she resigned her position with PUCO in 1963, when fellow workers were fired by the incoming administration.

During her political career, McGovern traveled with Sen. Hubert Humphrey in Barberton and President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, in Akron. McGovern represented Ohio on the National Platform Committee in 1960, and was elected to the Democratic National Convention in 1960 and 1964. Because of her political efforts, she was named the 1960 Ohio Democratic Woman of the Year.

After an unsuccessful bid for a U. S. Congressional seat, McGovern took a job as legal counsel for the Ohio Edison Company in 1965. In 1989, she retired.

McGovern served as president of the United Way from 1986-1988, and as trustee of The University of Akron, 1973-1982. With membership on the Akron Charter Revision Commission, she worked to put the Summit County Charter on the ballot in 1979.

Other nonpartisan causes attracted her involvement, including the “648” Board and the Sagamore Hills Children’s Mental Hospital Advisory Board. McGovern’s most recent involvement includes supporting renovations at The Civic Theater in downtown Akron.

McGovern has published two books. The first is Fun, Cheap, and Easy (2002), in which she chronicles what it was like to be involved in Ohio politics. Her other book is entitled Written on the Hills: the Making of the Akron Landscape (1996).

Called the “darling daughter of the Democrats,” McGovern has also been referred to by John C. Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at The University of Akron, as “part pioneer and part exemplar of her era.”

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Penny Fox

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Bertha V. Moore, 1896-1980

Bertha V. Moore started the Tea Time Study Club to increase the political leverage of African Americans in the city. She named the club after the Boston Tea Party because, she emphasized, “we were revolutionaries” – revolutionaries who knew how to work the system.

Tea Time members were busiest during the political campaigns. They tried to get local candidates to support the group’s aims – improved accommodations and job opportunities for African Americans. The club sponsored forums, inviting candidates to appear and learn about the community’s concerns. It also supervised the city’s Emancipation Day Program, which celebrated President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves.

Moore came up from the South in 1922. She went to school in segregated Alabama and received her teaching degree from the historically Black Selma University, Selma, Ala. Prior to moving to Akron, Moore taught in the segregated schools of the Alabama.

In 1922, the Akron Public Schools had no African-American teachers. Years would pass before any were hired. Moore began teaching adults how to read and write through the adult literacy program of the Works Projects Administration in the early 1930s.

Photo courtesy of the Women’s History Project of the Akron Area.

–Kathleen L. Endres

 

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Ruth McKenney, 1911-1972

Ruth McKenney, one-time Akron Beacon Journal reporter, is best known for her best-selling book, My Sister Eileen. Old-time Akronites, however, remember her for herIndustrial Valley, a book that described the struggle between industrialists and workers in Akron during the 1930s.

Born in Michawaka, Ind., McKenney grew up in East Cleveland, graduating from Shaw High School. At age 14, while working as a printer’s devil, she got her first union card as a member of the International Typographical Union. From there, she was off to Ohio State University. She majored in Journalism and worked part time for theColumbus Citizen and International News Service but she never graduated from college. Instead, she lined up a job with the Beacon Journal. Actually, it was OSU classmate Earl Wilson who suggested the plan.

McKenney was a popular writer at the Beacon Journal. She and Akron just meshed. There was something about the city and its residents she understood. A Beacon Journalreporter called it a “deep sympathy for those she considered downtrodden.”

The readers loved her and her stories – and honors followed. In both 1933 and 1934, the Ohio Newspaper Women’s Association (ONWA) called her the best in the state. As one colleague recalled, “Ruth, whose stories have brought wayward and wandering husbands back to their wives, saved poor children’s dogs from death in the dog pound, and caused food and dollars to find their way into charity baskets…” was a fine writer.

In 1934, however, she walked away from the Beacon to join the staff of the Newark Ledger in New Jersey. But that didn’t last long. McKenney was about to move to New York City and start a new phase of her career.

In New York City, McKenney worked on her book on the union strife in Akron and sold humorous sketches about the adventures of her sister Eileen to the New Yorkermagazine. In 1938, those stories were woven into the tremendously popular book, My Sister Eileen. Subsequently, the book was turned into a Broadway play.

In 1939 Industrial Valley came out to an outcry from Akron community leaders. Akron evangelist Bill Denton urged the Chamber of Commerce to file suit in the federal court, saying the book was full of “profanity, slander and communistic tendencies.” That same year, the book won an honorable mention in the non-fiction category at the American Writer’s Congress.

McKenney’s other books came in quick succession: The McKenney’s Carry On (1940); Jake Home (1943); The Loud Red Patrick (1947); Love Story (1950); Here’s England; a Highly Informal Guide (with husband Richard Branstein) (1951); All About Eileen (1952); Far, Far From Home (1954) and Mirage (1956).

While achieving tremendous professional success, McKenney experienced a personal life of tragedy. She married Richard Bransten, who wrote under the pen name Bruce Minton, in 1938. Both became Communists. They were ousted from the Communist Party in 1946. The Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, accused the couple of “conducting a factional struggle against the line of the party and its national leadership.” Just before “My Sister Eileen” opened on Broadway, Ruth’s sister was killed in an automobile accident. Bransten committed suicide in London in 1965.

McKenney moved back to New York City after that. She died there on July 27, 1972. She left a son and daughter and a body of literature and journalism behind.

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Kathleen L. Endres

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Anna Frederica Heise O’Neil, 1887 – 1970

Anna Frederica Heise O’Neil, champion of women’s issues in the workplace and for the poor, left a political legacy for Ohio women that few have matched.

Born in Cumberland, Md., O’Neil moved to Summit County, Ohio, in 1915. O’Neil received her public education at Coolville, Ohio. She attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music briefly.

O’Neil met and married her husband, Dennis (Mike), and pursued the work of a milliner in Akron for a number of years. Her husband worked for Ohio Edison for 43 years and Mrs. O’Neil become interested in politics when her husband served on the City Council for Kenmore and then ran for mayor of that community.

O’Neil began her career in politics in 1932, when she was selected to run for the Ohio House of Representatives by the Women’s Democratic Club of Summit County. Initially refusing to run, she reconsidered but did not tell her husband. When he read about it in the local newspaper the next morning, his only comment was that she would never be elected. Elected the following year, she was the only woman to serve 10 terms as a state legislator.

While in the state legislature, O’Neil was the first woman to serve as chairman of the House Finance Committee, a position she held for 12 years. She co-authored a bill to match state funds for the needy during the Depression. Under her direction, the first minimum wage bill was introduced for women in industry.

O’Neil was appointed by the governor to the Ohio Children and Youth Commission in 1949, and represented the state at a national youth conference in 1950. She was the chair of the Rehabilitation Committee of the Ohio Postwar Program Commission that same year. The RCOPPC was an organization that dealt with housing and urban development.

A natural leader, O’Neil was elected state president of the National Order of Women Legislators in 1953. The following year O’Neil retired from the General Assembly because of health problems resulting from a car accident.

Over the years, O’Neil served as president of many organizations. These include the Women’s Democratic Club of Akron, Kenmore Senior Citizens and the Krumroy Senior Citizens.

Using her knowledge of the political process, O’Neil also played an integral part in the Akron and Summit County Federation of Women’s Club, the Board of Legislators of Akron and Summit County, the Akron Area Citizen’s Committee on Aging, the G.A.R., and the Buckley Post of the Women’s Relief Corps.

An avid gardener, O’Neil enjoyed being an active member of the Town and Country Garden Club and the Garden Forum of Greater Akron. She also attended Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Akron and was a member of the Altar and Rosary Society.

O’Neil was well respected by everyone who knew her. In an article dated March 1, 1954, the Beacon Journal says, “while [we] have not always agreed with Mrs. O’Neil on specific issues, we have respected her conscientious devotion to her duties. She has set a splendid example as a public servant which we hope will be followed by other citizens, both women and men.”

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Penny Fox

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Ruth Boleman Conner, 1897-1989

Ruth Boleman Conner is a familiar name in the Akron education. She taught school, served as an administrator and then served on the board of education. But there was more to Ruth Boleman Conner.

Born Ruth Boleman in 1897, Conner received her BA from Smith College in Boston. She began her teaching career at a high school in Nashua and earned a Master’s at Columbia University.

Conner moved to Akron in 1928, where she became a history teacher at Old Trail School, an exclusive private school in the Akron area. In 1931, Conner took over as acting principal.

Two years later, the same year she became principal of Old Trail, she married Chester F. Conner, a former Beacon Journal reporter who was the general manager of sales at BFG Industrial Products. Conner stayed on as principal long enough for Old Trail to find her replacement.

Once Conner married, she moved into a new stage of life. While living in Boston, Conner studied the violin and followed the Boston Symphony Orchestra closely. In Akron, she helped begin the Akron Symphony Orchestra by co-chairing the committee that got the orchestra started. In 1939, she was a member of the Akron Chapter of the National Committee for Music Appreciation.

Conner’s contributions were not just with the arts. She spent 11 years as a volunteer on the committee for the Family Services Board. Conner was a member of the League of Women Voters, the Akron branch of the United World Federalists (a group seeking global solutions to problems), and the Women’s Auxiliary of Summit County Children’s Home. She also served as president of the Smith College Club of Akron from 1934 – 1938.

After World War II, she re-entered education, teaching part-time as an English instructor at the Akron Art Institute. She was elected to the Akron Board of Education in 1947.

Conner had three children, Evelyn, Grace and George. She died in Lake Worth, Fla., in 1989 at the age of 92.

Photo courtesy of The University of Akron Archives.

–Jennifer Petric

 

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Ruth Alderfer Oenslager, 1892-1992

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

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Mary Elizabeth McGowan, 1896-1980

Mary Elizabeth McGowan was characterized as the “Susan B. Anthony of Summit County politics” by the local Akron newspaper. McGowan shouldn’t be compared with any figure from history. She was her own woman, who made her way in the rough-and-tumble politics of the local courthouse and in the statehouse.

Born in Ohio in 1896, she moved to Akron when she was 14. A Catholic, she was educated at St. Vincent’s schools and went on to the Actual Business College.

For 20 years, she served as a probate court reporter in Summit County. But her heart was in politics – Democratic Party politics.

McGowan won the right to vote along with all the other women in the U.S. in 1920. She was 35 at the time and already a committed Democrat. She soon became a force behind many local and state campaigns.

In 1960, at an age when most people are thinking of retiring, McGowan decided it was her turn to run and she won a seat in the Ohio House for the 42nd District. She was re-elected in 1962. When she was at the statehouse, she served on the welfare committee.

McGowan also drew power from her role as district Democratic committeewoman (from 1938 until her death in 1980). She also was elected Democratic National Committeewoman in 1952.

Although prominent Summit County Democratic politicians referred to her as the “first lady” of the party, her sometimes unpredictable behavior caused problems. In 1972 (at the age of 86), she made a run for a third term in the Ohio House. She won the primary but was handily defeated in the general election.

McGowan kept strong ties to the Irish Catholic community. She served as president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Ladies Auxiliary and remained active in St. Sebastian Catholic Church.

McGowan is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery. 

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Kathleen L. Endres

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Sophia Harter, 1887 – 1954

Sophia Harter, progressive thinker and liberal, worked diligently to serve the underprivileged and handicapped in Summit County and Ohio.

Harter, who was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, received her early schooling in Akron and later attended business college there. Her husband George Harter had been mayor of Akron from 1942-1943 and later served in the Ohio Legislature. Because of this, Harter developed an interest in politics and would accompany her blind husband, acting as his guide. As a result, she became as well known as he was and it was no surprise that she announced her intent to run for state legislature.

During her one term in office (1948-1949), Harter used her knowledge of Ohio tax structures to propose a revision in Ohio’s state laws. She also favored a uniform real estate tax and called for the redistricting of Ohio’s congressional districts. Her other interests included low-income public housing, city development and better unemployment compensation.

Harter was a member of the Democratic Women’s Federation, the Women of the Moose and the Eagles Auxiliary. She participated in Catholic Daughters and was a member of the Altar Society of St. Vincent Church in Akron. Because she lost a son in World War II, she was also a WWII Gold Star Mother.

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Penny Fox

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Elizabeth Robinson Saalfield, 1888-1971

Elizabeth (Bess) Robinson Saalfield focused her benevolent activities primarily around the Mary Day Nursery and Children’s Hospital in Akron, Ohio.

Elizabeth Robinson was born into one of the most prosperous, important families of Akron. She was the daughter of the founder of Robinson Clay Products. She lived a pampered life. She went to the best schools, graduating from Wellesley College in 1909; and she married well, to A.G. (Albert) Saalfield, who would soon take over the management of Saalfield Publishing, a national publishing company located in Akron.

The Saalfield mansion, Robinwood, became the center for visiting dignitaries, including movie star Shirley Temple, who had business dealings with Saalfield Publishing. (Saalfield published the “authorized” Shirley Temple books.)

Robinwood was also a meeting place for benevolent women in the city, especially those associated with the Mary Day Nursery and Children’s Hospital. Saalfield got involved with the Mary Day Nursery shortly after graduating from college. She served on many committees but her “special project” was the Children’s Charity, a kind of self-help program where Akron children donated money each year toward the purchase of needed hospital equipment at Children’s Hospital. Saalfield helped establish the charity in 1913 and supervised its growth until 1949.

Besides the Children’s Charity, she also served on the board of the Mary Day Nursery and for a time was president of the Women’s Board of Children’s Hospital, which with the trustees ran the hospital corporation. In 1960, she was given one of the few 50-year awards for volunteer work at Children’s Hospital.

Besides her involvement with Children’s, she also served on the Women’s Board of the Sumner Home for the Aged and worked in a variety of associations affiliated with her church, First Presbyterian.

Saalfield died in 1971 in Norfolk, two years after her husband.

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Kathleen L. Endres

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Edith Nash

Under Edith Nash’s supervision, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Akron grew from a small but thriving organization into a force within the city. It was under Nash’s leadership that Akron’s YWCA swelled in membership, built a new headquarters and introduced new services to the city. At the brink of her success, Edith Nash resigned and left the city.

Little is known of Edith Nash’s career before Akron. According to sketchy YWCA personnel records, Nash had been with the Oberlin YWCA before coming to Akron. At the time she was appointed general secretary of the Akron chapter (1917), she was in her early 30s.

Nash had great skill in administrative matters and soon took Akron’s YWCA into new directions. In 1918, Nash argued that Akron home owners were reluctant to rent to women workers coming into the city during the war. Soon after, underwritten by money from Henry Firestone, owner of Firestone Tire and Rubber and an important employer of women workers, the first dormitory for women workers was opened. By 1920, the YWCA patched together three homes on South Union Street, called the “Blue Triangle,” as a dormitory for women workers. That dorm would have to suffice until 1931 when the grand, new YWCA headquarters opened on South High Street.

Nash also supervised the expansion of the old Grace House headquarters to include a dining room and club house. In 1918, she oversaw the opening of the YWCA’s first summer camps for Akron girls and working women. In 1925, she negotiated the YWCA’s purchase of land on Lake Erie. That land was transformed into Camp YaWaCa, the YWCA facility used by Akron working women and girls for decades.

But perhaps the greatest testament to Nash’s capability was the grand, state-of-the-art YWCA headquarters, opened in 1931. With a supportive group of board members, including Mary (Mrs. O.C.) Barber, Grace (Mrs. W.S) Chase, Elizabeth (Mrs. George W.) Crouse, Louise (Mrs. W.S.) Voris and Mary (Mrs. J.B.) Wright, Nash supervised the fund-raising campaign and the construction of an enormous building on South Water Street. The Beacon Journal praised the building and C.W. Seiberling, one of the owners of Seiberling Rubber, had only praise for the general secretary who seemed to make everything possible.

And then, Edith Nash resigned. After 14 years of enormous successes, Nash left Akron. She said she planned to travel and study the labor movement.

 

Photo of Edith Nash courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

–Kathleen L. Endres