Charles W. Chesnutt to William Donahey, [11 May 1922]
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I rec'd yr letter with reference to Counts' offer1 to buy you out, & Helen2 has Mary's letter asking why I hadn't answered.3 I have been trying all winter4
Correspondent: William (Bill) Donahey (1883–1970) was a White writer and cartoonist from Westchester, Ohio. After graduating from the Cleveland School of Art in 1903, he briefly worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he met and married Mary Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) in 1905 and became friends with the Chesnutts. The couple joined the Chester Cliffs Club and built a cottage on the land. After 1905, the couple moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Chicago Tribune and produced a widely syndicated comic strip, the "Teenie Weenies," which ran intermittently from 1914 until his death and became the basis of an advertising campaign for a canned-goods company in the 1920s as well as for several books he co-wrote with his wife.
1. Albert Franklin (Frank) Counts (1881–1946), a White Cleveland lawyer with a 1906 law degree from Western Reserve University's law school, was a member and initially the secretary and treasurer of the Chester Cliffs Club when it was founded. In 1913, he married Eulalie (Eula) Gaskill Miller Counts (1869–1942), who was also a shareholder in the Club. In 1930 Counts was given an eighteen-month prison sentence for embezzlement in a fraudulent divorce case. Paroled in December of 1931, he joined his wife in rural Virginia, where they lived on a farm that was auctioned off after his death. [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. Mary Augusta Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) was a White journalist and author of children's books. She was originally from New Jersey, grew up in New York City and worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1898 to 1905. She married the cartoonist William Donahey (1883–1970) in 1905 and moved with him to Chicago, where she wrote children's and young adult books, cookbooks and newspaper columns. The couple befriended the Chesnutts in the early 1900s, when they were part of the Tresart Club and the Chester Cliffs Club. [back]
4. The rest of this draft letter continues in Pitman shorthand and has not been transcribed. Contact the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive if you are able to read Chesnutt's shorthand and would be willing to offer a longhand transcription. While a fair copy has not survived, a second letter to Donahey on May 12, 1922, clarifies the date and the context of the continuing correspondence about Chester Cliffs Club property that was jointly held by the Donaheys, the Chesnutts, and the Counts. [back]
