USA > Ohio > Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state, Volume III > Part 28
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Mrs. Foster has been a resident of Columbus since 1918 and has been a member of the editorial staff of The Dispatch since 1927. Although she is essentially a reporter on general assignment, she has, at various times, edited the woman's page, food page and book page.
When she first went to The Dispatch in 1927, it was to do clerical work in connection with various contests sponsored by that paper for its readers. She was asked to remain and has since handled many important assignments, includ- ing the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 1936.
Mrs. Foster's work is her chief hobby, with steamboating a close second. She is a veteran traveller on the Ohio River and numbers many river people among her friends. She is an ardent baseball fan.
Following her graduation from East High School, Columbus, in 1925, Mrs. Foster attended Ohio State University for a brief period. Journalism training was not included in her college work, which seems to strengthen the oft-expressed conviction that the best newspaper women are born, not made.
She is an associate member of the Columbus Alumnae Chapter of Theta Sigma Phi, national honorary sorority for women in Journalism, and a charter member of Delta Epsilon Chapter of Sigma Phi Gamma, business girls' sorority.
In 1932, Dorothy Todd was married to Harold J. Foster of Menominee, Mich., a graduate of the University of Michigan. At present Mr. Foster is a deputy clerk in the Columbus municipal court. They reside in Columbus, at 1369 Meadow Road.
"JERRY" ROCKEFELLER FOX
Thirteen years ago "JERRY" ROCKEFELLER FOX of the Dayton Journal Herald was singled out from Ohio's newspaper women and acclaimed Ohio's youngest newspaper editor. Today that glory is outlived but she continues to function with great ability.
When she began writing for The Dayton Herald in 1926, Miss Fox, signed the few articles she was privileged to byline "Geraldine Fox." She had, how- ever, long since developed a hatred of her given name, so as soon as it seemed discreet, she changed her signature to "Jerry" and after more than 13 years on the same paper, The Dayton Herald, she still so signs her articles including a daily column appearing under the heading, "Observatory."
"JERRY" ROCKEFELLER FOX
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Born in Dayton, Jerry Fox has spent her entire life in that city. She graduated from Steele High School in 1925 and immediately entered the business field. Her father, Harold L. Fox, died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, leaving her mother and three young children. Jerry was the oldest of these three. Armed with her high school diploma, she began at 17 to help support the little family.
She had her first taste of printer's ink when she was made a member of the staff of her high school paper, The Steele Lion. She studied journalism,.printing and advertising while in high school, and the day she received a 100 per cent rating on a proof-reading test, she determined to make newspaper writing her life work.
Editors she interviewed following her graduation, tried to laugh off her ambition. Backed with no practical experience, and hindered by her age, Jerry was "kidded" out of virtually every office she invaded. So in desperation, she put her newspaper aspirations behind her and took the only job she could get -at a drill press machine at the National Cash Register Company.
Company officials, it so happened, asked her to write an article on "Friend- ship" for a firm publication.
The article attracted the attention of a local editor, who asked for an inter- view. This was on a Friday. On Saturday she was tried out for a job in the society department. She was hired as assistant society editor on Sunday, quit her old job Monday and began her newspaper career on Tuesday.
In her 13 years on The Herald, Jerry has served in numerous capacities, including, in the order mentioned, assistant society editor, society editor, report- er, woman's department head, and columnist. She covers gory murders and Sunday school picnics with the same ease. Newspaper work is newspaper work- and the finest work in all the world-to Jerry.
Jerry Fox has been a member of the Ohio Newspaper Women's Association since 1927, and at the Cleveland convention of that group in October, 1938, was appointed co-chairman of contests, which automatically made her a member of the ONWA board.
NORINE FREEMAN
NORINE FREEMAN, reporter and feature writer of the Cincinnati Post, began her newspaper career in 1916, writing war poetry for the Lansing State Journal, Lansing, Michigan. It was the first time the paper ever had had a "staff poet," and they created the position for her.
Impatient because she was not allowed to become a reporter, she left the paper in 1918 and returned to stenography for a few months and then went to Chicago for three years, where she did secretarial work with a milk company.
She returned to Lansing, Michigan, when the Capital News began publica- tion, as its theater editor, and eventually became general reporter and feature
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writer as well. Went from there to the Saginaw Evening Star, another new paper, and covered police and court house as well as general assignments and features. Norine became city editor and held the post until the paper was sold, when she returned to Lansing for a few weeks and then went to the Toledo Blade as feature writer and general reporter in 1923.
On February 14, 1924, she married Perry Sanford Freeman, then court- house reporter on the Toledo Blade. In 1926 Mrs. Freeman went to the Toledo News-Bee as feature writer and general reporter, also conducting the advice column under the pseudonym of "Cynthia Grey." She remained there until the fall of 1929 when Mr. Freeman was called to the Pittsburgh Press. He was made news editor of that paper, which position he held until his death in 1934.
Mrs. Freeman and their two sons, Richard and Perry, then went to Cin- cinnati, where Mrs. Freeman joined the staff of the Cincinnati Post as editor of the woman's page, later going to the city staff as general assignment reporter and feature writer, which position she still holds.
She was born Norine Jeannette Strough, daughter of Perrin A. and Clara F. Strough, in LaFargeville, Jefferson County, N. Y., May 21, 1899.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and is heard frequently on radio programs, including "Moon River," "Meditations," "Starlight Trail" and others. Two of her serials, "Love Takes a Holiday" and "Studio Girl," have been published in the Cincinnati Post.
ESTHER HAMILTON
ESTHER HAMILTON, a descendant in the sixth generation of her family in Mahoning County, Ohio, of which Youngstown is the county seat, was born at New Castle, Pa., the daughter of Scott B. Hamilton, famous political cartoon- ist in his day. She is a niece of Grant E. Hamilton, originator of the "Full Dinner Pail" cartoon that became the campaign slogan of 1897 and brought him nationwide fame. While she was in high school at New Castle, Pa., Esther wrote a daily column of chatter for The Herald, chiefly because the editor was a friend of her mother, the former Maude Whinnery, teacher for many years in private schools and colleges of Western Pennsylvania. In order to complete her educa- tion, Esther took extension and correspondence courses under the University of Chicago.
Her present column, started in the Youngstown Telegram in 1921, has eight times won the award of the Ohio Newspaperwomen's Association.
In "Ladies of the Press," Isabel Ross tells how Miss Hamilton nearly lost her life one February night while walking along the railroad tracks to a farm- house where an old woman had been murdered at an isolated crossroads in the last of a series of maniacal crimes that had terrorized the community. Esther hung onto the rain barrels while a train went by.
ESTHER HAMILTON
newspaperwoman, Youngstown Vindicator
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During the Lindbergh trial, Lowell L. Leake, editor of the Telegram, sent Miss Hamilton to Flemington, where she wrote daily byline stories.
In 1929 she took Youngstown's "best-girl" to the film capital of Hollywood as the guest of Mary Pickford and did a series of stories on the film capital that were syndicated by the Scrips newspapers. A year later she went to Arizona and travelled back with Irene Schroeder, known as "The Blonde Gungirl," and her companion, Glenn Dague, convicted at New Castle of the murder of Brady Paul, a Pennsylvania state policeman. On one occasion Miss Hamilton got into a powder factory where there had been an explosion. No one was being admitted but she rode in the hearse carrying the priest, who was an old friend of hers. She posed as a nurse, copied the list of dead and injured and did a thorough cleanup on the story.
In 1935 Esther caused a stir in the Mahoning Valley. She went to Washing- ton to see what was being done about the canal. The district had fought for 50 years to get cheap water transportation for the valley steel mills. Her story, "Washington Never Heard of Our Canal," re-opened the case.
When the Youngstown Telegram and Vindicator merged, Miss Hamilton was continued in the same capacity under the new setup.
Since her first days on a newspaper, Esther has used her influence to get things for needy people, stoves, washing machines, old clothing, books, anything and everything.
For a while she had an "Alias Santa Claus Club," of which she was the spearhead. She accepted contributions but was more interested in getting clubs and individuals to go into the homes and see the condition of people for themselves.
For the past eight years, Esther Hamilton has staged a Christmas fund show in a downtown theatre. She netted $4,000 last year. The money is spent in Christmas baskets for the needy. No wonder that no matter what back door she knocks on at any hour of the night, they come to the door and call her "Esther. "
LOLA J. HILL
LOLA HILL of the Piqua Daily Call and of the Advisory Board, Ohio Newspaper Women's Association, was born in Piqua, Miami County, Ohio, only child of Walter Duval and Laura Harlow Jones. They christened her Laura Catherine but-according to Lola-"it didn't take."
Lola attended and was graduated from the Piqua public schools. Her father, now retired, was judge of the Miami County Common Pleas Court for 38 con- secutive years ; a record said to be unequalled. Her mother, the daughter of an Episcopal rector, was a Southerner by whom even the most ladylike of young
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ladies seminaries were closely scrutinized and college-for a daughter-was quite taboo. Most daughters married when they put their hair up, anyhow. So did Lola. She married Shirley Randolph Turner, member of an old Virginia family and a cousin-a generation removed-of General Robert E. Lee.
Shirley Turner, no older than his bride, took her to a ranch on the Rio Grande River in Texas, where they lived in the manner of the old movie Westerns. When the romance of ranch life wore thin, they established their home in Piqua and there two children were born, Shirley Randolph Turner, Jr., and Charlotte Tuttle Turner. The son is now a practicing attorney in Piqua and the daughter-after graduating from college-is completing a course in nurses' training in Chicago.
After the World War Lola became bookkeeper in a business house in which work she remained for six years, when she resigned to accept a position offered her by the Piqua Daily Call.
She had always written, had often done reviews and covered musical events. When the Call's society editor resigned she took the place.
After entering newspaper work, she married Dr. John F. Hill, physician in general practice. She resigned her position but returned to it and has been connected with the editorial department of the paper ever since.
Mrs. Hill is a member of the Dayton Woman's Press Club. From 1935 to 1937 she was a contest co-chairman on the Ohio Newspaper Woman's Executive Board. For eleven years she has written a daily column, Piqua-isms, for the "Call." Mrs. Hill's home is shared by her distinguished father, association with whom, she says, is an education in itself.
FLORA WARD HINELINE
FLORA WARD HINELINE may be rightfully called a "Four Career" woman, her life work falling into four distinct lines or professions while she also successfully filled the roles of wife and mother. Pioneer in careers for women, Mrs. Hineline had the courage to break away twice in her lifetime from an established success in one line of endeavor and plunge into a new and untried field. This is her life story.
Born on a farm in Lorain County, Ohio, two miles south of Oberlin, the seat of Oberlin College, pioneer in admitting woman on an equal footing with men as candidates for graduation, Flora Ward Hineline was the youngest of a family of five. At the time of her birth her father, William Franklin Ward, was a man past fifty and her mother, Susan Groves, was forty-two, her broth- ers and sisters already of teen age. On her paternal grandmother's side the family was related to "old" King George of England, as the colonists called him, and in the Revolution naturally stood by the King from whom they had grants of land, and remained staunch Tories. Of this, Mrs. Hineline says, her
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family was ashamed as was she herself until at the age of thirty she heard a lecturer declare that the foremost families of the colonies were all King sympathizers while the rank and file were for the Revolution. Most Tories up to the number of many thousands migrated to Canada during and after the Revolution, but her ancestors chose to remain, impoverished though they were, in the new land to which they had come with such high hopes. Her father was born in Vermont and her ancestry is as purely "Yankee" as any in America.
As is so often the case with children of older parents, Flora Ward early showed signs of precocity. When six years old she was enrolled in the country school but could not be induced to attend with any regularity as she declared her little playmates were always the same place in the primer as when she last was in school. After two years of this desultory schooling it was dis- covered by a male teacher who came to the little district school that Flora could not read a word but knew all the primers by heart, knew nothing of figures although prodigious in securing the right answer in her tiny head.
This man, A. Z. Tillotson, subsequently a well-known attorney of Ober- lin, interested the child in her lessons and took great pride in her progress. Upon her graduation from the Oberlin High School, youngest in her class, he gave her a silver watch, declaring her the brightest pupil ever to have been taught by him. Her father had moved his family to Oberlin when Flora was ten. Previous to her high school graduation, she had been awarded a cer- tificate to teach school in Lorain County at the tender age of thirteen, her marks in all subjects of a stiff examination entitling her to the certificate, although doubtless no school board would have employed one so young. Dur- ing her high school course when the professor of Latin was ill or absent for any reason, Flora taught the class as a matter of course. She made ab- solutely perfect grades in all studies carried term after term and was never absent or tardy for ten years of schooling.
Graduated at the head of her class her commencement address, which she insisted on delivering like the boys instead of reading an essay as did the other girls, attracted the attention of the wealthiest citizen of the town who offered to undertake the expense of her college education. But Flora, wanting to become of help to her aging parents and eager to have a try at the world, took a position as cashier in an Oberlin drygoods store at three dollars a week. Still too young to secure a better position upon which the age limit was eighteen, she finally took a country school when she was seven- teen and taught it with distinction. Soon her work became known in Ober- lin and although she was not a college graduate and the town teemed with such, she was given a grade in the Oberlin public schools. So unusual was her work that the normal class in the college used her room for practice study. All this time by night and day Flora Ward was educating herself.
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Her classmates in the high school went on to college degrees and have been forgotten, but she went on to more and more knowledge acquired by her own study lamp and in evening sessions. During this period she corrected college theme and examination college papers for certain professors who dreaded this drudgery and herself coached many backward high school pu- pils in Caesar and Cicero. She was wont to say that living in a college town she had seen so many fools graduated from college that she was not greatly desirous of securing a degree, an omission which in later years has rankled not a little in her heart.
At the time of her marriage in 1902 to Herbert Bey Hineline, who had spent one year in Oberlin as a student, she had a pre-marriage agreement with him that she was not to keep house as every wife must in those days, but was to continue her teaching. A son, Bey Ward Hineline, was born the first year of her marriage and so great was her devotion to him that she remained in her home until he was two years of age. A friend of hers teaching in Ober- lin falling ill, she returned to school to teach out the season and the next fall transferred to Elyria public schools since her husband was then em- ployed in this small city.
Mrs. Hineline says of this period of her life in Elyria that she was the only respectable married woman working outside her home in the town with the exception of the washerwomen who went out by the day. She found herself a target for the reformers who believed her to be neglecting her child. Her pastor remonstrated with her, as did many others. The fact of the matter was her small son was in charge of an English woman of middle age, his beloved "Ging" but whom the family called "Kingsley," a woman much more experienced in child care than any young wife could be. It was now that the young Hinelines had framed and hung in their living room Elbert Hubbard's slogan-"They say-what say they? Let them say." When Mrs. Hineline took this motto to the town bookstore to be framed, the young woman clerk after puzzling over it for some time, timidly asked what it meant. Quick as a wink Mrs. Hineline blurted out, "My husband says it means we don't care a damn what they do say."
Removing with her husband to Toledo when her son was six years old, she found that Toledo schools would have nothing of her services since she was married and would be taking some girl's place who needed the money worse. She vowed never again to enter a schoolroom and for five years be- came excessively active in clubs and church circles, teaching a Sunday School class of boys now grown into prominent Toledo citizens. Then came the opportunity to write for the Toledo Blade. Always possessed of an unusually trenchant pen and the proverbial nose for news, fate decreed that she should be getting out the social column of the Blade the day the World War broke out in Europe. She bethought herself of the socially prominent Toledoans
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who were abroad that summer, got in touch with their families and sent out a "lead" to her social column which was promptly taken by the editor and made into a front-page, streamer-head story-the best war story of the day by all odds.
The Blade offered her a permanent job and during the war years when most of the men had been called to serve in the war, she did three men's work, often staying at the office sixteen and eighteen hours a day covering al- most every beat on the paper. At one time but four of the staff remained- the others had all left for training camps or overseas-three men and "Hine- line" as they called her. "She's the best man of the four," one of them was wont to say.
The war over, her work at the Blade palled upon her interest. This was in a day when few women worked on newspapers and when their salary was far below that of the men, no matter how outstanding their work. She determined to secure equal pay or leave. That meant her salary must be doubled. It was, but not without a battle of wits and a one-woman strike. Winning this battle, she finally decided she would like to work on a Sunday paper where her work could become more highly specialized. She left the Blade with no malice and without warning, got a job on the Toledo Sunday Times and in due season became its Sunday editor. Those were the halcyon days of the newspaper business and she made everything grist for her mill. Every man on the paper turned in to her a feature story each week, she setting the example herself although quite the busiest person on the staff.
After eleven years of this, during which time she was Sunday editor, woman's editor, radio editor, automobile editor, music editor, all simultan- eously and, in addition, covered an average of three concerts by major artists a week, she one day while out at lunch, right out of the blue as it were, without previous consideration, quit this job which she devotedly loved. She failed to return from lunch and never afterward set foot in a newspaper office as an employee. Nobody could believe in her strange vagary. For weeks she was importuned almost daily to return. Thirty thousand Toledo women petitioned the paper, her friends argued and cajoled. She remained firm-her newspaper career was over, she declared, and she knew it. This was less than a year after her husband's death, at a time when for the first in her life she was dependent upon her own resources. Her son was in delicate health. She needed her very fine salary, but she needed more to free her soul. She had no idea how or when she could secure work to earn her living, and yet she remained cheerful-she knew it would all come right.
And right it did. Just two months after her abrupt leave of the news- paper world, from a casual clipping in a Detroit paper she got the idea of establishing a Town Hall in Toledo modeled after the famous Town Hall speakers' forum in New York. In six weeks she had it going with a theatre
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full of members and with such celebrities on the list of talent as G. K. Chester- ton, J. B. Priestley, Sinclair Lewis, just then awarded the Nobel Prize, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and others. From the start Town Hall caught on in To- ledo largely through the town's belief in Mrs. Hineline's judgment and abil- ity . In 1939 it is celebrating its tenth anniversary and in this decade it has brought to Toledo most of the great names of the world. Later on Mrs. Hineline succeeded in bringing back to Toledo, which for twelve years had been without a legitimate show, the great New York plays with stars like Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, etc., putting Toledo on the map as one of the best show towns in the country instead of its worst. Her theatre seats 3,500 and she fills it.
Mrs. Hineline numbers in her acquaintance many of the great person- alities of our day, who meet her as an equal and leave Toledo aware of her rare ability. Her work was cited by Walter B. Pitkin in his book on careers as one of the outstanding examples of a career after forty. She is as at home with a King as with a maid in her hotel and as much in awe of one as the other. Mrs. Hineline likes folks of every degree and it is this quality more perhaps than any other, which has spelled her success in three different forms of endeavor-first as teacher, next as newspaper woman and last, as she declares her present work will be, as entrepreneur. Her friends however, expect any day that she will break out into another and equally startling career but it is doubtful if she could ever give up her beloved Town Hall for anything else, no matter how glamorous. Town Hall has made a different city of Toledo. It has brought books and reading to a point never before attained, say the libraries and bookstores, and one im- possible without the stimulus of the great minds which yearly visit the city of the Town Hall series.
Mrs. Hineline has sustained the greatest losses that can come to anyone- first her husband, then the savings of a lifetime of both herself and her husband all swept away in the depression, and last the tragic death of her only son. His widow, a bride of but seven months, a former St. Paul school teacher, resides with her and the two are known to their intimates as "Ruth and Naomi," a thrilling example of a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law situation which might well refute the whole world of mother-in-law jokes.
GEORGIA HOPLEY
GEORGIA HOPLEY was a descendant of a long line of newspapermen and public spirited women. Her father was John Hopley, editor of the Bucyrus Evening Journal and her mother was a "Crusader" in 1873-74.
She worked as a reporter and writer in the offices of her father and brothers where she learned about temperance and intemperance.
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