Category: World War II (1941-1945)

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Louise Voris, 1882-1946

Louise Voris converted her long career as a volunteer community activist into a job as the superintendent of the Summit County Children’s Home. When she was offered the position in 1936, she had never worked outside the home for pay. Nonetheless, she said, “I feel that I have spent my entire life preparing for the task I know have” (Beacon Journal, 1946).

She was correct. She was well equipped for the task. Born in Cleveland, Voris had graduated from the exclusive Vassar women’s college in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She moved to Akron shortly after graduating and married William S. Voris, a salesman during the 1930s.

She came to Akron at a time when the women’s community was brimming with energy and she quickly got involved. She was a charter member of both the College Club of Akron, an organization that her mother in law helped found, and the Woman’s City Club. Voris served as president of each organization. She was also the president of the Art and History Club. She also served on the board of the Florence Crittenton Rescue League, a home for unwed mothers. Her longest affiliation, however, was with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Akron. She served on its board for 22 years, as its president from 1927-1930 and as the chair of its camp committee that administered Camp YaWaCa on Lake Erie.

In 1936 when Mary E. Boteler suddenly resigned as superintendent of the Summit County Children’s Home, Voris applied. Given Voris’ connections within the women’s community and her family connections, she seemed the natural selection, even though she had no previous professional experience in administration.

Voris came to the job with no real plans. She admitted, “I don’t know in the least what I am going to do there except to follow in Miss Boteler’s capable footsteps” (Beacon Journal, 1936). Voris had no real crises to deal with. The home was well run, clean and well staffed.

The appointment, however, came to pose a problem for the children’s home. In order to keep the job, Voris needed to pass the state Civil Service exam. In 1937, she took that exam and passed.

Voris remained the superintendent until March 1946 when she died of a heart attack.

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

—Kathleen L. Endres

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Mary A. Holmes, d. 1986

Mary Holmes and Akron’s Civil Rights movement grew up together. In 1918, she was one of the founders of the NAACP in the city. In the 1920s, she was a staffer for the African-American newspaper. In 1940, she made her way to president of the Council of Negro Women. By the 1960s, she was with the Summit County Community Action Council as a “housing adviser.”

She never planned on that life. “I never planned to get knocks on my head, but somebody’s got to get the knocks to get things done,” she told the Beacon Journal in 1975. “My biggest pleasure is doing something for somebody.”

Born in Buchanan, Va., Holmes attended high school in Charleston, W.Va. She moved to Akron in 1918. Conditions for African Americans in the city were bad. Everything seemed to be segregated. It was little wonder that Holmes would help found the city’s NAACP chapter as soon as she moved to town.

For a time, Holmes worked as a stenographer/bookkeeper for a small manufacturing company. In 1921, she, along with William B. Johnson and William Byrd, started theBlack and White Chronicle, a weekly newspaper covering the city’s African-American community. Holmes was bookkeeper/proofreader/reporter for the newspaper. Opie Evans remembered that Mary Holmes was vital to the newspaper’s life. “You know, that Mary Holmes was everything in that office. She really kept that paper going” (Beacon Journal, Feb. 11, 1991).

After the newspaper folded in 1927, Holmes held a variety of jobs from catering to domestic work and continued to be a leader in the African-American community. She was the secretary of the Colored Women’s Republican Club and president of the Council of Negro Women. She also served as the secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the NAACP. In 1962 to 1964, when racial tensions were highest in Akron, Holmes was president of the city’s NAACP.

Holmes worked with the Summit County Community Action Council “for about as long as anyone can remember,” the Beacon Journal reported. In 1975, she was a “housing adviser,” helping set up the Emergency House for families displaced by eviction or forced out of their homes by disasters, and worked at the North Akron Neighborhood Center.

In 1975, she announced that she was retiring. When she looked back over her long career in Akron, she could see progress. As far as segregation was concerned, Akron was a better place to live. In 1978, the churches in the community acknowledged her role in the city by giving her the “Brotherhood Action Award.”

Holmes died in Akron on April 9, 1986.

 

Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.

. –Kathleen L. Endres

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Mary Peavy Eagle, 1909-2003

Mary Peavy Eagle, founder of the Akron Council of Negro Women in 1932, had a singular mission in her life, to improve the conditions African Americans faced in Akron, Ohio.

Eagle credited a walk on Glenwood Avenue with opening her eyes. A teacher had taken her children out to recess and it seemed to Eagle that the two or three little African-American children “looked a little less cared for than the others. So then I thought – I see this, so now I’ll have to do something about it.”

Eagle got together a group of women and started a club. “I wanted the mothers to take more pride in their children. We encouraged the parents to join the PTA; visit the schools; meet the teachers, and get to know each other. This would make it easier for the children to do well in school. We also worked with the schools in educational programs. We were successful at that. If there was any way that could help a mother by finding clothing for her children we did. We secured clothing, more food, and what not. We helped any child.” One of her biggest concerns was getting an African-American teacher at Bryan school. Eventually African-American teacher Herbert Bracken was appointed to that school over the protests of some white parents (Oral Black History Project, 1990, The University of Akron Archives).

It was that activism that led Mary Eagle to be the first African-American woman president of a PTA in Summit County.

Eagle, then Mary Peavy, came to Akron in 1924 from Checotah, Okla. Her father came to work in the rubber factories and found a job with Miller Rubber. The Peavys were a big family. Mary was the eldest of seven. Several of her sisters, particularly Anne and Sarah, were also leaders in the African-American women’s community in Akron. Mary Peavy attended old North High School.

By 1927, barely out of her teens, Mary Peavy was superviser of the Young Ladies Progressive Club. Sisters Sarah and Anne were also officers. The club provided services to the poor. They distributed groceries and money to needy families. Other officers included Cora Armstrong, Addie Mae Williams, Ruth Coffee, Ada Driskill and Velma Varner.

In 1929 Mary Peavy married Isaac Thomas Eagle, a Goodyear rubber worker who was also from Checotah, Okla.

In 1932, when most African Americans were struggling during the Depression, Eagle started the Council of Negro Women to coordinate efforts among the neighborhood clubs. In 1936, African-American leader Mary McLeod Bethune copied Eagle’s model and created the National Council of Negro Women.

Eagle did not stop with the Council of Negro Women. She continued her activism throughout her life. In the late 1930s, Eagle heard about a slum clearance program, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA projects. Eagle contacted her councilman, Ray Thomas, and asked for help. He agreed and the slums on North Street were replaced by the brick homes of Elizabeth Park Homes.

Eagle was always a Democrat. She remained active in Democratic politics throughout her life. She sipped tea with first lady Bess Truman and was invited to President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. She was also a delegate to the 1954 UNESCO conference in Washington, D.C.

Eagle, a lifetime member of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, had two daughters, one a teacher in the Akron Public Schools and the other a public relations executive in Houston.

Eagle is buried at Glendale Cemetery.

 

Photo courtesy of The University of Akron Archives.

–Kathleen L. Endres

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Ruth Ebright Finley, 1884-1955

Ruth Ebright Finley, “girl reporter, sob sister, feature writer” for the Akron Beacon Journal in the early 20th century, went on to a career as an editor, a biographer, an expert on American quilts – and one of the greatest clairvoyants of the 20th century.

It’s a long trip from Akron to the afterlife but was an easy one for Finley because she lived two quite separate lives.

Ruth Ebright was born in Akron, the daughter Dr. L.S. Ebright and his wife, the former Julia Ann Bissell. Her father himself lived a kind of dual existence, one as a physician and one, for a time, as the postmaster of Akron.

Ebright was well educated for her day. She enrolled in Oberlin in 1902 but returned to Akron the next year to go to old Buchtel College (now The University of Akron). She never completed her degree.

Instead she started her reporting career with the Beacon Journal. This was a time of sob sisters and sensational journalism. Ebright won a name for herself when managed to get an interview with the former Akronite wife of inventor Thomas Alva Edison. She then went on to the oldCleveland Press. She was best known for her stories on the working conditions of labor women and she is credited with helping get a bill passed that was designed to benefit working women. It was while at the Cleveland Press that she met and married Emmet Finley, an editor there.

Finley had a varied journalistic career after that. She was woman’s page editor of the Cleveland Press, fiction editor of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, managing editor for the old Washington Herald, woman’s editor of the Enterprise Newspaper Association, assistant editor ofMcClure’s magazine and editor of Guide Magazine and theWoman’s National Political Review.

There were many dimensions to Finley’s life. Building on her interest in quilts and quilting, she wrote the book, Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them. Part of the movement to reawaken American interest in quilts and quilting, Finley designed the quilt given first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. There was a certain irony in this because Finley was a critic of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first lady on the pages of the Woman’s National Political Review, the periodical she edited.

Finley was also an historian of sorts. In 1931, she published a biography of antebellum magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale. The Lady of Godey’s: Sarah Josepha Haleis still considered an important resource on Hale and her popular woman’s periodical.

Even as Finley continued her career as an editor, quilt expert and historian, she and her husband were exploring different aspects of reality.

As Joan and Darby, the Finleys became chronicling their exploits in the afterlife in their 1920 book Our Unseen Guest. That book chronicled how they first got involved in the paranormal. In Cleveland in 1916, they played with a Ouija board and met their guide to the afterlife, a volunteer ambulance driver who had died in France the year before. Although Our Unseen Guest quickly became a classic in psychic literature, the Finleys were able to keep their involvement in the paranormal secret.

Ruth Ebright Finley died in 1955. Her husband had died five years earlier. The couple did not have any children. Ruth Ebright Finley’s papers are located in The University of Akron Archives.

Photo courtesy of The University of Akron Archives.

–Kathleen L. Endres