Hazel Steiner Polsky, wife of the owner of one of the largest retail stores in Akron, Ohio, left her own mark on the city through her civic and benevolent activities.
Hazel Steiner was born in Sterling, Ohio, in 1882, the daughter of Elizabeth and Noah R. Steiner. She was educated in a convent school near Cincinnati. In 1899, she and her family moved to Akron. Her father, a real estate developer, was responsible for the development of much of the Kenmore (Ohio) area.
She met Bert A. Polsky, son of an Akron retailer, at a fraternity party and they soon married.
Hazel Polsky never worked outside the home. Both she and her husband, who ran the department store that carried his name, were active in civic organizations. She, especially, got involved with the hospitals in the city. Polsky served as president of the Women’s Auxiliary and a board member of Akron City Hospital (now Summa Health System). She also was active in the Mary Day Nursery and Children’s Hospital, serving as vice president. She was also associated with Women’s City Club, the Art and History Club as well as the Akron section of the National Council of Jewish Women. She attended Temple Israel.
At her death in October 1964, the Beacon Journalremembered her as a “woman whose grace of manner, whose devotion to husband and children and whose service to the community made her beloved by all who had the good fortune to know her.”
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.”
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.
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.
Mabel Cramer Kruse made history in Akron in 1939 when she became the city’s first policewoman under Civil Service. She remained on the force until 1952.
Mabel Cramer was born in New Lyme, Ohio. At first, she thought she wanted to be a nurse and worked at Cleveland’s Lakeside Hospital. In 1908, she married Arthur D. Kruse, a violin teacher, and she temporarily “retired” from working outside the home. However, her husband’s health failed and she needed to look for outside employment.
Her first job was as a relief matron at the city workhouse. Nonetheless, she continued her volunteer work. She served as president of the Henry School PTA; in 1935, she was elected president of Ohio Women’s Republican Club.
It was that later office that positioned her for a spot on the police department. In 1936 the Akron Republican Executive Committee asked her if she would like to be a policewoman. She said yes and served for two years as a police officer. Then the Civil Service system came in. In 1939, she was officially appointed a policewoman under Police Chief Frank Boss.
Over her 16 years on the force, Kruse was assigned to the vice unit and did general police work. At the time of her retirement, she was a detective. Under her vice assignment, she patrolled night spots in search of wayward youth. She attributed juvenile delinquency to “laxity” in the home. As she told the Beacon Journal, “Most of the children I find in these places are here for the same reason. They’re seeking diversion from constant unhappiness at home.”
By 1941, she was given the responsibility of investigations concerning women and girls. That was no easy task. More than once she had to dodge swings as she accompanied women prisoners to court. Nonetheless, Kruse seldom carried a gun.
Kruse was only 51 when she turned in her badge. She reported that 16 years on the force was enough.
Kruse died in 1973. Her obituary reported that she had been a member of the First Methodist Church, Fraternal Order of Police, the Republican Club and an honorary member of the Community Welfare Association. She had four sons.
Salaria Kea O’Reilly fought many battles in her life. Growing up in Akron in the 1920s, she faced racial discrimination. In the 1930s and 1940s, as a nurse, she fought the powers of Fascism.
Salaria Kea came to Akron with her mother and two brothers when she was just six months old. Her father was dead.
If the Keas thought that Akron would be an ideal living environment, they were soon proved wrong. Salaria Kea faced discrimination every day. When she wanted to learn to swim, she had to go to Lorain to learn; African Americans were not allowed to swim in Akron pools. Kea wasn’t allowed to play basketball at the high school she attended, Central, so she transferred to West where African Americans could participate in athletics.
While still at West, she worked in the office of Dr. Bedford Riddle, a successful African-American physician in the city. It was there she committed to a career in medicine.
Kea went to the Harlem Hospital Training School in New York City to become a nurse. While there, she came into contact with a politically active African-American community. In 1935 when Fascist Italy invaded Ethopia, these leaders organized a United Aid for Ethopia Committee to send much needed food and medical supplies to that country. Kea, a nurse at Harlem Hospital, initiated a fund-raising drive that sent a 75-bed hospital to Ethopia.
In 1936 when General Francisco Franco, supported by the Nazis in Germany, moved to overthrow the Spanish Republic, some Americans protested. A few politically concerned doctors in New York City organized the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy to raise funds to send medical supplies and personnel to Spain. The fundraising was easy. It was far more difficult to recruit the medical personnel to go to Spain.
At about this time, Kea offered her services to the Red Cross to help flood victims in Ohio, but the Red Cross declined the offer. Kea remembered, “the color of my skin could make more trouble than I’d be worth for them” (Peter Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, p. 69). When a friend heard that story, she suggested that Kea go to Spain instead; Kea followed that suggestion. She was the only African-American woman to join Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of young American volunteers who went to Spain to work for the Republic.
While in Spain, she met American poet Langston Hughes who described her as a “slender chocolate-colored girl,” who worked as a nurse in the American Hospital under very primitive conditions. The plumbing often did not work in the hospital and she and the other nurses had to use non-conventional methods to provide the medical care the patients needed. Hughes reported that a physican ordered that a wounded soldier be warmed by using hot-water bags. But there was no hot water to be had and the diluted kerosene would not light. Kea went to the kitchen and filled the water bags with hot soup and kept the wounded soldier alive (Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, pp. 380-382).
While in Spain, Kea was captured by Franco’s forces. In a 1979 interview with the Beacon Journal, Kea remembered, “Every morning at 4 a.m., the Germans with swastikas would come down and get me” and bring her above ground so she could witness the massacre of civilians. Seven weeks later, Kea escaped, returning to the American Medical Unit. She had to return to the United States, however, when she was wounded while working in a field hospital.
During World War II, Kea volunteered to work as a nurse with the U.S. Army in Europe. After the war, she and her Irish husband John P. O’Reilly lived in New York before returning to Akron in the mid-1970s. Salaria Kea O’Reilly died in May 1990.
Photo courtesy of Women’s History Project of the Akron Area.
During the Depression, Marion Huber led the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). She was a good example for the members to follow. Never married, Huber had a career and, at the same time, she carried on her civic obligations.
Born in Akron in 1893, Huber worked as a stenographer.
She spent her free time with the women’s clubs and organizations of Akron. In this, she was following the lead of her mother Rachel. Both were members of the Women’s Council of Summit County.
Huber dedicated most of her civic activities to children and young women. She served as superintendent of Trinity Lutheran Church’s elementary department and served as president of the Young Women’s Missionary Society. But Huber was best known because of her involvement with the Young Women’s Christian Association. She served as president of the group for two terms.
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.”
Virginia Frances Beck Etheredge, outspoken advocate of the union, was a positive force in helping to establish better relations between industry and labor.
Born in Lasca, Ala., and being one of nine children, Etheredge understood the importance of working together for the good of the whole. It was this thinking that enabled her to stand up for the rights of coworkers at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company during the labor strikes of the 1930s.
Having moved to Akron with her husband, Wiley J. when they were first married, Etheredge received the endorsement of Labor’s Non-Partisan League to serve as a council representative for factory workers. She won the election and became the first woman in that office.
Etheredge was known in her neighborhood as a champion for causes involving the underdog. Her membership in Goodyear’s Local No. 2 of the United Rubber Workers (U.R.W.) was no different. She also served as the first recording secretary for the union. A skilled spokesperson, she used this ability to insist that Akron City Council find a way to work out problems between labor and industry.
When she was not involved in disputes between labor and industry, Etheredge worked on the Akron Recreation Commission. She and her husband were parents of one son, William J., and she was keenly interested in the parks and playgrounds of Summit County.
Etheredge was killed in a car accident in 1964, even as her name was on the ballot for a third term re-election. Always true to her long-held beliefs, in the November 3, 1937 issue of the Akron Beacon Journal, Etheredge is quoted as saying, “I want to have a part in bringing about the rehabilitation of Akron-the city without labor strife, instead of one of the leading cities with it.”
Photo courtesy Woman’s History Project of the Akron Area
Cheryl Crawford, probably one of the most influential female producers on Broadway ever, got her start directing plays in her family’s Merriman Road home in Akron.
Crawford, who successfully brought “Brigadoon,” “Porgy and Bess,” “One Touch of Venus,” “Paint Your Wagon” and others to Broadway, was the daughter of Robert Kingsley and Luella Elizabeth Crawford. Her father was the owner of a successful real estate firm (Crawford Real Estate); her mother cared for the four Crawford children.
The eldest of the children and the only girl, Crawford went to grade school and high school in Akron. She then went on to the exclusive Smith College, where she majored in drama. Because she was so tall, she played many of the male roles in the Smith-College productions. But Crawford never wanted to be an actor. She always wanted to be a producer.
After her graduation from Smith College (she was briefly expelled for smoking off campus during her senior year but her grades were so good that the administration relented and let her graduate), Crawford headed for New York City. Using her inheritance, Crawford enrolled in the acting school of the Theatre Guild, even though she had no acting aspirations and admitted as much to the school director and company producer Theresa Helburn. Crawford was allowed to stay because she had the money for the tuition.
After graduation, she went on to be an assistant to a director for the Theatre Guild’s stock company in upper New York and worked part-time, played poker and bottled bathtub gin to pay the bills. In the process, she was getting the experience and contacts she needed to produce. As assistant stage manager on “Pygmalion,” she worked with actor Lynn Fontanne. She worked with famed French director Jacques Copeau on a production of “The Brothers Karamazov” that featured Alfred Lund, Edward G. Robinson, Fontanne and Clare Eames. By 1929, she was experienced enough to take charge of a company heading off for London.
By 1931, Crawford — tired of the Theatre Guild’s lack of focus — made plans to move on, by creating her own company (with Lee Strasberg), The Group Theatre. Building on a group of 28 actors, among them Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis and Franchot Tone, the group wanted to become a true company so the actors, directors, producers, writers and crew went off to Connecticut to bond and rehearse. Crawford’s primary responsibility in all this was arranging the needed finances, no mean task during these Depression years.
The early Group always seemed to be short of money. Most of the early productions – many of them critical successes – failed to have a long run in New York. Finally in 1933, the Group had its first commercial success, a production that Crawford had pushed for, “Men in White,” a medical drama that won the Pulitzer Price and played in New York for 311 performances.
That didn’t set the pattern, however. Subsequent productions were often critical successes but commercial failures. In 1936 Crawford resigned from the company. As she recalled in her autobiography One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1977), “I felt exhilarated, even cocky, to be on my own. I was going to do great things, bring to audiences distinguished plays, quality entertainment” (p. 103).
Crawford became enormously successful as an independent producer. She started the Maplewood Theatre and brought such actors as Helen Hayes, Bojangles Robinson, Ethel Barrymore, Ingrid Bergman, Tallulah Bankhead, Paul Robeson and others to the stage. Broadway theatre owner Lee Shubert was so impressed with the Maplewood’s production of a revival of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” that he arranged to bring it to Broadway. It became a critical as well as commercial success.
After “Porgy and Bess,” Crawford decided to concentrate on musicals. She then brought “One Touch of Venus” to the stage, signing Marlene Dietrich to the production. Dietrich withdrew, however, when she saw the final script that she said was “too sexy and profane.” So Crawford turned to Mary Martin. Directed by Elia Kazan and choreographed by the legendary Agnes deMille, “One Touch of Venus” was a critical and commercial success, with the production taking most of the top prizes at the first Donaldson Awards. Soon she had other musical successes on Broadway, “Brigadoon” (1947) and “Paint Your Wagon” (1951).
In 1946, she set up yet another company, the American Repertory, with friends Eva LeGallience and Margaret Webster. That company included an impressive array of actors, including Eli Wallach, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., William Windom and Julie Harris, and investors, including William Paley of CBS, Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn and others.
In 1947, she resigned because she was going to start one of the most important acting schools (with an associated theatre) in the nation. She, Elia Kazan and Bobby Lewis created the Actors Studio (Lee Strasberg, the individual most closely identified with the Studio, did not come aboard until 1951). The Actors Studio is credited with training some of the most important actors of the 20th century: Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, James Dean, Sidney Poitier, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Steve McQueen, Joanne Woodward, Jane Fonda, Geraldine Paige, Shelley Winters, Ann Bancroft and many more. In 1976, Crawford reported that Actors Studio graduates had received 98 Academy Award nominations and 21 Oscars. Since then, the number has probably doubled.
Crawford was given the hardest job at the school. “My major task was to keep us solvent,” Crawford recalled in her autobiography. The theatre failed but the school (now under actor Al Pacino’s guidance) continues today. As Crawford explained, “Lee (Strasberg)’s great gifts are teaching and inspirational guidance, not administration and management” (One Naked Individual, p. 227).
Crawford experienced her greatest Broadway successes before 1954. The years 1954 to 1974, she wrote, were lean ones financially and emotionally. Although she had successes with “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “Brecht on Brecht” and “Period of Adjustment,” she also had 15 productions that failed during those two decades.
Her emotional trials were worsened by her wrangling with Sen. Joe McCarthy and his committee on Un-American Activities and the destruction of her home in Connecticut by fire. Her financial situation was worsened when a trusted assistant embezzled a good deal of money from her. Through it all, however, she continued to produce plays.
Crawford died in New York City on October 7, 1986. During her life, Crawford produced more than 100 plays and helped create one of the most successful acting schools in the nation. She was well regarded by other producers, directors and actors.
In September 2002, the New York Public Library celebrated her contributions to the theatre with the Crawford Centennial. Her papers are located in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the University of Houston Library.
All photos are reprinted from Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre (Indianapolis & New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1977). Middle photo shows the Group Theatre directors, from left, Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford in 1931 (photo from the Blackman Photo Service). Bottom photo shows rehearsals for “Strange Interlude.” From left, Cheryl Crawford, Pat Hingle, Ben Gazzara, Jane Fonda, Franchot Tone and Geraldine Page (photo by Joseph Abeles).
