Helen C. Moore to Charles W. Chesnutt, 22 August 1932
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CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
HELEN MOORE
EMILIE SKARABOTTA
CHESNUTT & MOORE
SHORTHAND REPORTERS
1646 UNION TRUST BUILDING
CLEVELAND
August 22, 1932
Dear Mr. Chesnutt,
Your tax receipt was received in the morning mail, so evidently the amount has been credited on the treasurer's books, and you won't need to worry for a few months until you get another bill. Too bad about the City Ice and Patterson-Sargent reductions. I had n't seen it in the financial column. Have 35 shares of P.-S. myself, and will feel the loss.1
Helen is keeping track of your balance.2 Told her it would take every penny you could scrape together between now and October 1st to pay your interest, and that was counting the full amount of your two dividends.
Miss Skarabotta3 will be back at the office tomorrow, and I am letting Miss Schultz go today.4 Could n't get along with only two of us in the office. One day we have no jobs, and the next day we have two little ones at the same time. Last week I went up to take a deposition for Mr. Cull,5 and sent Miss Kormos6 to take a little one for Mr. John Duncan of SS&D, who finally came to life again.7 Thought I'd better take Mr. Cull's, he being a bit fussy about new people working for him. I got 20 pages, and Miss Kormos got 65 on her job.
We did get some wonderful bargains on the office furniture, but I doubt if the building would have sold it to any outsider—not for the prices they gave us, at any rate. So Dorothy does n't need to worry about what she missed.8 She might have shopped around, however, and bought some good second-hand stuff at reasonble prices. We could n't afford to buy what we did, but I feel sure we will never be able to buy at such prices again—not in the near future, at any rate—and you must admit your things were just about worn out. They came this morning to move themit out of the office for Miss Kormos, and the old desk sure did creak and groan. We were sure it would fall to pieces before they got it out, but it did n't. Like its owner, it has lots of "staying" qualities.
Too bad the fishing is n't better. Hope you make one or two more good catches before you return home. The weather has been delightful the past two weeks, and if it continues you won't mind the change from Michigan to Ohio.
You said to give your regards to any inquiring friends. Well, your old chum Mr. David Gibson stopped in the other day to see you.9 Said he was n't busy and came in to have a little visit. Stayed about a half hour, and wanted one of your photographs. Thought they were splendid. We did n't give him one. Thought you could do it if you want to some time. Said he's badly bent himself, but not broke. Did n't know you were in Michigan.10 Sent his regards to you and the family, and he hopes you find the fishing good.
[2]
CWC-2
Up at BHIS's office the other day,11 Mr. Kellogg12 stopped to say he was reading the life of Wm Dean Howells, and saw a complimentary reference to you in it.13 Told him you knew about it, and also told himabout the article Mr. Howells wrote about you in the Atlantic.14 Mr. K also sent you his regards, and he says when he gets older he's going to do just what you are doing—fish and read, and try to take life easy.
We will just about make the office expenses this month, if the next ten days are as good as the last twenty. Things are certainly dull.
We'll be glad to see you again. Meantime, continue to enjoy yourself as much as you can. Regards to Johnnie15 and all the folks, from all of us.
Sincerely, H. M.The girls just rec'd your cards. They think you must be doing a lot of traveling around. Want me to thank you for them.
Correspondent: Helen C. Moore (1881–1963) was a White shorthand reporter who began working with Chesnutt in 1918. Moore graduated from Cleveland Law College in 1925, earned her Bachelor of Laws from Baldwin-Wallace, and later, at the age of 58, obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio State University. During the last years of Chesnutt's life, she managed their firm, Chesnutt & Moore, and upon his death in 1932, she founded her own firm, Helen Moore & Associates ("Memorial Resolutions," Journal of the Cleveland Bar Association 35 [1964]: 81–100). Most of their surviving correspondence consists of summer updates during periods when either she or Chesnutt were away from the office on their summer vacations.
1. The City Ice and Fuel Company was a supplier of ice and coal, and The Patterson-Sargent Company was a paint company. Both were based in Cleveland. [back]
2. Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880–1969) was Chesnutt's second child. She earned degrees from Smith College and Columbia University, taught Latin (including to Langston Hughes) at Cleveland's Central High School for more than four decades starting in 1904, co-authored a Latin textbook, The Road to Latin, in 1932, and served on the executive committee of the American Philological Association in 1920. She became her father's literary executor and first biographer. [back]
3. Emilie Skarabotta (1908–1990), the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, was a stenographer and notary public who worked for Chesnutt's and Helen Moore's stenography business in the early 1930s. She was eventually listed on the firm's letterhead. [back]
4. An Olga Scholtz worked as a stenographer for Chesnutt & Moore. Most likely, this is the same person as Olga Scholtz Blabolil (1914–2009), the daughter of Czech immigrants, who got married in 1935 and lived in Cleveland's Brooklyn Heights neighborhood for the remainder of her life, where for many years she worked as an executive secretary for Cleveland Public Schools. [back]
5. Francis "Frank" Xavier Cull (1887–1965) was a White lawyer from Ohio with a Ph.D. from Notre Dame University and a law degree from Georgetown University. Beginning in 1913, he was associated with the law firm of Robert Bulkley (1823–1911), Bulkley, Hauxhurst, Inglis & Sharp, which often employed Chesnutt's stenography services. Work for Cull by Chesnutt & Moore's firm is mentioned in letters from 1930–1932. He was a member of the Cleveland and the state Bar Associations and a registered Democrat. [back]
6. Margaret Kormos Shuri (1910–1979), the daughter of Czech immigrants, was a bookkeeper who worked for Chesnutt & Moore from 1930 to 1932; she married in 1937. [back]
7. John A. Duncan (1903–1977) was a lawyer with the prestigous Cleveland law firm of Squire, Sanders, and Dempsey. [back]
8. Dorothy Katherine Chesnutt Slade (1890–1954) was the youngest child of Charles and Susan Chesnutt. After attending the women's college at Western Reserve University from 1909 to 1913 and working as a probation officer for two years, she began teaching junior high school French and English at Willson Junior High School in Cleveland. She married John G. Slade (1890–1976) on March 29, 1924; they had one child, John C. Slade (1925–2011), known as Johnnie. [back]
9. David Gibson (1871–1945) was a White journalist, columnist, and publisher who, along with his wife Mary Rich Gibson (1870–1952), was a longtime friend of the Chesnutts. Originally from Indiana, he came to Cleveland in 1903, where he founded a publishing and printing business and started several journals; by the 1920s, he was also involved in local public affairs. The Gibsons stayed with Chesnutt when his wife and daughters Dorothy and Susan spent the summer of 1906 in Europe. See Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 220–221. [back]
10. Starting in 1922, the Chesnutts spent every summer until Chesnutt's death in Idlewild, in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles northwest of Cleveland. Idlewild was a popular lakeside resort for hundreds of Black families from the urban Midwest from the 1910s to the 1960s, when racism excluded them from many resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, where he had a summer home built in 1925. [back]
11. Bulkley, Hauxhurst, Inglis & Sharp (BHIS) was a prominent Cleveland law firm co-founded by Robert J. Bulkley (1880–1965) in 1909, initially as Bulkley & Inglis. By 1924, it was located in the newly built Bulkley Building, initially as Bulkley, Hauxhurst, Jamison & Sharp (BHJS). It was renamed from BHJS to BHIS in the summer of 1931 when Robert H. Jamison (1884–1965) left and Richard Inglis (1880–1956), one of the original founders of the firm, rejoined. [back]
12. John Hall Kellogg (1891–1985), a White lawyer originally from Kansas with degrees from Oberlin Collee and Western Reserve University Law School, joined the Cleveland law firm of Bulkley, Hauxhurst, Jamison & Sharp (here referred to by Moore as BHIS for its later name) in 1926. [back]
13. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, Vol.2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928) by Mildred Howells (1872–1966) reprints a letter by Howells (1837–1920) to Henry B. Fuller (1857–1929) from November 10, 1901, where he writes "I have been reading Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition. You know he is a Negro, though you wouldn't know it from seeing him, and he writes of the black and white situation with an awful bitterness. But he is an artist almost of the first quality; as yet too literary, but promising things hereafter that will scarcely be equalled in our fiction. Good Lord! How such a Negro must hate us" (p.149). [back]
14. William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a White novelist and critic, seen as the dean of late 19th-century American letters and a champion of literary realism. He served as editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1871–1881) and later, as a continuing contributor, praised Chesnutt's short stories ("Mr. Charles Chesnutt's Short Stories," Atlantic Monthly 85, no. 511 [May 1900]: 699–701). He also reviewed Chesnutt's Frederick Douglass biography ("An Exemplary Citizen," The North American Review 173, no. 537 [August 1901]: 280–288) and The Marrow of Tradition ("A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction," The North American Review 173, no. 541 [December 1901]: 881–883). Chesnutt and Howells briefly corresponded in 1900. [back]
15. Chesnutt's grandson "Johnnie," John Chesnutt Slade (1925–2011), spent much time with his grandparents as a small child, since he and his mother, Dorothy (1890–1954), lived with them until the fall of 1931, when her husband John G. Slade (1890–1976) completed his medical degree at Howard University. He and his mother also spent the summers with his grandparents in Idlewild, Michigan. [back]
