Small Town Girl: And Other Stories About Ordinary People Who Led Extraordinary Lives

By Jack K. Paquette

The stories of more than two dozen ordinary people who led extraordinary lives are told here with honesty and wit by a historian who has been writing about northwest Ohios history for more than 60 years.
Some of the people chronicled in the book were famous in their day, but are virtually forgotten today. Others gained a measure of renown for their unusual lifestyles only after their deaths. And still others are receiving well-deserved recognition for the first time in these pages.
Among those featured in the book are nationally known figures, like Teresa Brewer, Art Tatum, Joe E. Brown, Millie Benson, Brand Whitlock, Peter Navarre, Rose La Rose, Ed Libbey, Mike Owens and Edmund Osthaus, as well as highly-accomplished, but lesser known folks, such as Richard and Anna Mott, Grant Johnson, Doc and Ella Stewart, Ed Russell, Clyde and Carrie Tingley, Dr. Ernst and Therese Gottschalk, Mother Adelaide Sandusky, Jibby Jibilian, Jorgen Faldt Larsen, Colonel Christopher McLean, C. J. Hurrle and Marjorie Whiteman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483656465

Jack K. Paquette

Historian Jack Paquette retired as vice president and assistant to the chairman of Owens-Illlinois after 33 years of service to that company. Author of three other books on the history of the glass industry, he also has written a widely acclaimed memoir about growing up in the Great Depression.

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Copyright © 2013 by Jack K. Paquette.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013911138

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4836-5645-8

                Softcover       978-1-4836-5644-1

                Ebook           978-1-4836-5646-5

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CONTENTS

Preface

1.   Small Town Girl

2.   A.k.a., Harry Allen, the Union Spy

3.   They Loved to Share Their Wealth

4.   Renaissance Woman

5.   He Lost Two Ships

6.   They Revolutionized an Industry

7.   Nothing Could Stop Her!

8.   A Heart as Big as His Mouth

9.   A Rose by Any Other Name…

10.   Mr. Tingley Goes to Albuquerque

11.   The Home Run King

12.   Ed Libbey Wasn’t the First

13.   The Woman Who Lived to Write

14.   A True American Hero

15.   Music! Music! Music!

16.   Dogs Were His Passion

17.   Music Was in His Heart and Soul

18.   He Still Found a Way to Serve

19.   Betsy and Peter, the Survivors

20.   The Great Achiever

Endnotes

In Appreciation

Afterword

PREFACE

A ll of us have grown up around ordinary people—neighbors, teachers, playmates, clergy, favorite relatives—who, in some way, made a lasting impact on our lives. This book is a collection of stories about such individuals. However, the people portrayed on these pages differ from most other ordinary folks. Their stories are unique due to their unusual lifestyles, or to the fact that their accomplishments are so significant, they have become legends.

Each chapter of the book is devoted to one or two of these unusual men or women, all of whom lived in northern Ohio and are now deceased. With a few exceptions, the chapters have been kept short so they may be read in their entirety during one of those periods when you have a little downtime, or just before you turn out the light at bedtime.

Although endnotes are usually an unnecessary nuisance to most of us, they are employed in this volume not only to provide honest attribution, but also to offer source data for those readers who may wish to learn more about a particular individual.

I hope you enjoy reading about these special people as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing about them. And when you have a spare moment, take note of the folks around you… your neighbors, fellow workout addicts at the gym, folks in the choir in church, the talkative person sitting next to you at the bar or across from you at the card table. Study them and listen carefully to what they have to say: Future legends live among us—their stories waiting to be told.

Jack K. Paquette

Toledo, Ohio

1

The pride of Liberty Center…

SMALL TOWN GIRL

L iberty Center is a typical Ohio small town. It is located on State Route 109 in Henry County about 30 miles southwest of Toledo. Its website boasts that it has a doctor, a dentist, two banks, a florist, two grocery stores (one an IGA), a restaurant, a pizza parlor, a public library, a weekly newspaper and five churches—all of the Protestant faith.

Except for normal population growth and the addition of the pizza parlor and the IGA, Liberty Center has changed little in the last 100 years—especially in terms of Midwest small town values. And, even today, townspeople would find it unusual if the daughter of one of their own would not only become known, worldwide, as an expert on international law, but would end up in Washington, D. C. as a big wheel in the State Department and an advisor to the First Lady of the United States. So, it must have been a real shock to the local folks when Herbert and Estella Whiteman’s daughter, Marjorie, ended up doing all those things—and much more. ¹

Marjorie Millace Whiteman was born in Liberty Center on November 30, 1898, the second of the four daughters of Herbert and Estella (or Stella). Her father was a farmer who also owned and operated a brick and tile yard on the nearby farm of her grandfather, John Whiteman.

Marjorie attended Bonnell District #2, a one-room elementary school at Bonnell’s Corner across from her home in Liberty Township. A group photograph of the school’s 18 students and their teacher, George Ernst, taken in the spring of 1910 when Marjorie was 11 years old, shows her as a beautiful, but sober young miss with pulled back hair and a frown on her face. Her oldest sister, Norma, looking much more mature than her 14 years, also is pictured unsmiling. However, in contrast, their younger sister, Helen, age 8, who sits directly below Marjorie in the photo, looks like she is enjoying the experience to the fullest as she grins impishly at the camera lens.

The depiction of Marjorie’s solemn visage would appear to be an example of when the camera lied: Despite the image of a sober child the photographer captured on film, it is known that Marjorie was an extremely happy child. Although she was a serious student with an encyclopedic memory, she had a pleasant personality and joyously participated in children’s play activities at the school, in the rural countryside near her home, and at the Liberty Chapel United Brethren Church, located a half-mile east of the Whiteman’s large French Empire style house. In the summer, she willingly did chores on the family’s 200-acre farm or that of her grandfather nearby. In the winter, her sisters and kids from school joined her in ice-skating on the pond that her grandfather fashioned in the brickyard for that purpose and also to provide ice for the iceboxes of his family and neighbors.

In late 1910, when Marjorie was 11, she easily passed the Patterson-Boxwell Test, required by the State of Ohio at that time for admission to a secondary school, and enrolled the following year in nearby Wauseon High School. In addition to doing well academically, she also was a member of the debating society at Wauseon High all four years; was active in the Girls’ Athletic Association, and played in the student orchestra.

After she graduated from Wauseon High in 1915, she entered Ohio Wesleyan College (later Ohio Wesleyan University) in Delaware, Ohio, where she majored in history and took courses in education. She graduated magna cum laude from the college in 1920 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

After several years of teaching history and public speaking in the Napoleon, Ohio school system, Marjorie decided to become a lawyer—a bold move for a young woman of that era when law firms usually hired females only as clerks or secretaries. Even more impressive was her acceptance into Yale University’s prestigious law school in 1924; she was only the second woman to enroll there. Equally significant was the fact that she became the first woman to serve on the board of directors of the prestigious Yale Law Journal.

While at Yale, Marjorie was fortunate to have an opportunity to study international law under Edwin M. Borchard, a renowned scholar in that field. This close academic relationship eventually would lead her to specialize in that phase of law. In fact, her first job after she received her law degree from Yale in 1928 was as a research associate with the Columbia University Research Commission on Latin America, working on legal projects involving inter-American relations. A year later, she joined the U. S. Department of State as an international law specialist and in 1931 became a special assistant to the department’s legal advisor, Green M. Hackworth.

Her exposure to the intricacies of international law intensified in 1937 when she was asked to become a major contributor to Hackworth’s scholarly eight volume Digest of International Law, a task she much later would undertake in earnest as the publication’s editor from 1963 to 1971. Her work on this bible for international law professionals led to its eventual informal designation as The Whiteman’s and garnered her further recognition as a world expert in this field of law. ²

Marjorie remained as a special assistant to Hackworth until 1946 when he left the State Department to become one of the 15 judges in the newly established International Court of Justice, or World Court, in The Hague. Following his departure, Marjorie’s major duties at State continued to involve international law, of course, but beginning late in World War II, she was asked to advise the U.S. delegation to the emerging United Nations organization on legal matters related to the drafting of the UN charter. In a promotion that must have made the folks back in Liberty Center sit up and take notice when they heard about it, Marjorie was assigned to work directly with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been one of the nation’s strongest advocates for the establishment of such an international body.

Marjorie attended United Nations organizational meetings in San Francisco with Mrs. Roosevelt in 1945 when the former first lady was chairman of the drafting committee and was an advisor to her during the periods, 1946-1952, while she served as the U. S. delegate to the UN General Assembly, and 1946-1951, when she was chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights. In fact, Marjorie spent so much time with Mrs. Roosevelt in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the former First Lady often mentioned the Ohioan in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, My Day.³

(A photograph taken of Mrs. Roosevelt in June, 1945, shows her conferring with Marjorie and Charles Malik, the Lebanese scholar and diplomat who subsequently would follow Mrs. Roosevelt as the head of the UN Human Rights Commission, and Rene Cassin, the French jurist who later would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in human rights, as they huddled prior to attending a larger session of the UN group working on the Draft Covenant on Human Rights.)

Although it might seem unusual, Marjorie’s work with Mrs. Roosevelt actually was a side job: The Ohioan continued to be employed full time by the State Department as its expert in international law and one of its key specialists on Latin American diplomacy. Over the years, she played significant roles in a large number of major conferences in Central and South America, including the one in Bogota, Colombia in 1948 which drafted the charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), the body that was created to supersede the old Pan-American Union, and another in 1953 which led to a temporary settlement of the longstanding border dispute between Ecuador and Peru.

When tempers ran high or revolutions were fomenting in a host country, Marjorie faced personal danger during some of these activities in the Southern Hemisphere. For example, when she was attending the ninth Inter-American Conference in Bogota in April 1948, a revolution got underway in Colombia. Here is how the press reported Marjorie’s involvement with it:

"The day of the outbreak, Miss Whiteman went with a State Department group to lunch. They had just given their order (to a waiter) when they heard a commotion in the street. As they watched, one man was killed. He was, it developed, the leader of the revolt.

"They rushed back to their office and remained there overnight with no food, other than a candy bar and some fruit. Outside, they could hear yells and firing; flames from burning buildings came closer and closer.

"The next day orders arrived from Washington to come home. Escorted by army tanks, the group went to a hotel, packed belongings and rushed to a waiting U. S. plane.

But as soon as Miss Whiteman reached Washington, she got orders to hurry back to Colombia whose officials wanted ‘everything to go on as usual.’ Although she did return and the conference continued for a few days, the conferees found themselves distracted and unable to accomplish results. ⁴

Marjorie was too modest to tell the newspaper reporter who wrote the story that her orders to return to Bogota came directly from her top boss, Secretary of State George C. Marshall: It seems that in the chaos created by the revolution, the U. S. delegation lost its country’s position papers for the conference; Marjorie, who had prepared the original documents, was able to recreate them for the delegates from memory.

(Marjorie’s prodigious memory was famous among her colleagues at State: One of her co-workers reported that, in 1958, after Marjorie had participated in the first UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in Geneva, she told a friend she had simply picked up where she left off at the Hague Conference on the Certification of International Law she had attended with her boss, Green Hackworth, in 1930.) ⁵

With her extensive overseas travel and long hours at the office when she was in Washington, Marjorie’s schedule always was so hectic she could find little time to relax. However, when she did have brief periods of free time, she spent them visiting relatives back in Liberty Center or working in the elaborate garden at the large residence in the nation’s capital she shared with her sister, Helen, who worked at the U. S. Department of Labor. Friends who visited the sisters at their home in northwest Washington were awed by the beauty of its garden—not surprising when one considers that two former Ohio farm girls planted and cared for it.

Marjorie’s last position in the State Department was that of first counselor in the Office of the Legal Advisor, the office that advises the Secretary of State on all matters pertaining to international law in regard to U. S. foreign relations. One of her assistants during this period was J. Richard Knop, a student at the Georgetown University Law School. Reminiscing about Marjorie recently, Mr. Knop, now an internationally known financier, wrote:

She was one of the most amazing, wonderful persons I have ever met. She was a wonderful mentor… brilliant and charming. She never forgot her roots growing up on a farm in northwest Ohio. ⁶

Marjorie remained as a first counselor at State until her retirement in 1970 after 41 years of public service. At that time, Marjorie and Helen, who had retired in 1963, packed up their belongings, closed up their Washington house and moved back into the family residence in Liberty Center—a home now vacant following their parents’ passing in 1962.

Until her death on July 6, 1986, at age 87, Marjorie continued to correspond with other experts around the world on matters involving her three-volume work on Damages in International Law and the Digest of International Law, or The Whiteman’s, which, by that time, had grown to 15 volumes.

The extensive list of honors that had started to come to her in her college years continued throughout her life and posthumously:

As an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan, she won the Charles Elihu Slocum Prize for scholarship, in addition to her election to Phi Beta Kappa.

At Yale Law School, she was selected for a Carnegie fellowship in international law and, of course, served on the board of the Yale Law Journal.

In 1953, she once again was honored by Ohio Wesleyan—this time receiving an honorary doctorate as a distinguished alumna.

In 1958, she was chosen by the National Civil Service League as one of its ten outstanding federal career people for her work as legal advisor to the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.

In 1979, her home state of Ohio inducted her into its Women’s Hall of Fame for her contributions to society in state, national and international affairs.

In 1981, Ohio Wesleyan honored her once more by presenting her with a Distinguished Achievement Citation for her many years of public service.

In 2012, when Wauseon High School named Marjorie to its Academic Hall of Fame, the folks in Liberty Center couldn’t have been more proud of her. It was an appropriate honor for their own small town girl who had played such a dominant role in America’s international affairs for more than four decades.

2

Fremont’s bon vivant…

A.K.A., "HARRY ALLEN,

THE UNION SPY"

H e was a little guy, barely five foot seven and slender as a reed, but he was a big man in his home town of Fremont, Ohio and the folks who knew him well thought he was a ton of fun… a colorful bon vivant whose comments and activities titillated the town during the last two decades of the strait-laced Victorian era.

His name was Edward Hawkins Russell, but he preferred to be called Ed, or later, Dad. And he came from a family of equally unique personalities. His father, Shubel Russell, was a hard driving northwest Ohio real estate tycoon who served two terms as sheriff of Sandusky County in the late 1860s. His father-in-law, Major Samuel A. J. (for Andrew Jackson) Snyder, a successful businessman and a highly decorated veteran of Shiloh and a half dozen other battles of the Civil War, was appointed Fremont’s postmaster after the war by President Ulysses S. Grant, his former commanding general.

However, over the years, Ed Russell’s activities and demeanor most closely emulated those of his maternal grandfather, Thomas (Tom) Hawkins, a descendant of the illustrious Sir John Hawkins, a British admiral who served under Sir Francis Drake in 1588 when the Royal Navy defeated the Spanish Armada.

Tom Hawkins, an officer in the War of 1812 and one of the founders of the village of Lower Sandusky, as Fremont was called prior to 1849, was a successful businessman, inventor, boat builder, artist, preacher and poet. But, most significant from his grandson’s point-of-view, was the fact that Tom was also a playwright and an actor, who staged the community’s first play and established its first opera house.

That first play, the Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith’s farce, She Stooped to Conquer, was produced in Lower Sandusky in 1819, and Tom arranged to stage it in a back room in the Ohio Mansion House, a local tavern. He also painted the scenery; sold tickets; wrote and delivered a special prologue, and performed the important parts. Three years later, he decided the village needed a bona fide theater, rather than the make shift one in the room behind the bar, so he converted the upper floor of the tavern into a full-fledged performing arts center and continued to produce and perform in the popular plays of the day. ⁷

Then, in 1830, when he felt that his village was ready for another dose of culture, Tom established the area’s first opera house, providing local citizens with escape from the corn meal and side pork of reality, as one historian put it. ⁸

Tom’s grandson, Ed Russell, was born in Fremont in 1855. As a boy, he was told about his grandfather’s love of the performing arts and, early on, the youngster was keenly aware that his own greatest attributes were his wit, his melodious speaking voice and his ability to charm an audience. While still in high school, he became enamored with the lifestyle of the traveling actors who performed in the plays staged frequently throughout northwest Ohio and vowed that, one day, he would become a thespian, like his grandfather. And, although he went into the family real estate and insurance business after he finished school in 1873, he often performed in local theatrical productions when a suitable role was offered him.

However, because he was not content to play minor roles in amateur productions, he soon began looking for an epic drama he could stage, produce, direct and star in. In late 1879, at age 24, he found such a work when it was presented in a theater in nearby Toledo. It was a Civil War melodrama written and produced by a retired Union Army major from Englewood, Illinois named Joseph Barton. Titled Harry Allen, the Union Spy, the play was described by its author as: A grand allegorical military drama, in five acts, with new and original tableaux, music, sound, choruses, scenic effects, and situations never before presented on any stage.

Plays about the Civil War were extremely popular in the northern states at this time, just 14 years after the long and bloody conflict had ended. But this show had special appeal because it was all that Major Barton purported it to be. Employing a cast of as many as 100 men, women and children dressed in a head-turning collection of military uniforms and fancy costumes, Harry Allen, the Union Spy featured a marching band, a concert orchestra, banjo players and guitar strummers, dancers, divas, a chorale group, a chorus, poetic recitals, a foreign-accented comedian to provide comic relief, platoons of soldiers marching or in combat, and a barnyard full of domestic animals that brayed, baaed, barked, clucked and crowed, off stage and on, during most of the acts.

The melodrama became an immediate success after Major Barton introduced it in the Chicago area in the early 1870s and it continued to play to sell-out audiences wherever it was performed over the next 25 years.

Despite the show’s pretentious staging, its story line was rather straight-forward. The play opens in the dining room of a farmhouse located in an unidentified northern state. Seated around a breakfast table are the farmer, John Allen; his wife, Mary; their daughter, Nattie; two of their three sons, Frank and little Jimmie, and their daughter-in-law, Emma, the wife of their eldest son, Harry, who is said to be elsewhere on the family farm, repairing a plow.

The family is chatting about its current houseguests, longtime friends from Virginia, Peyton Randolph and his son, Edmund, who are to