Emilie Skarabotta to Charles W. Chesnutt, 11 August 1931
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August 11, 1931
Dear Mr. Chesnutt:
Received your interesting letter that other day, and am finally answering it.1 It's cool enough to work now -- too cold to be comfortable outside -- but for the first time in a long while I don't happen to have an order. However, Miss Moore2 got one this morning, and we're still putting in attendances, and I might have one before the day is over.
I suppose Miss Chesnutt3 wrote you that she collected the rent from Mr. Dill.4
Glad to hear you are enjoying your vacation,5 and hope fishing has improved now that we have rainy weather -- is n't that supposed to improve it? I suppose you catch enough fish for breakfast every so often, even though you have n't caught the biggest fish of the season, or anything like that.
Johnny6 probably keeps you busy while you are n't fishing. He's so lively, he probably makes you all step around to keep up with him and keep him out of mischief. Be sure to give him my regards, will you?
I don't know how many newspapers and magazines I have for you, but I'll send you some soon. It's the 11th of August already, so will you please let me know when you want me to stop sending them to you?
Regards from us all, and keep on having a good time and spending your money "slowly and judiciously".
Sincerely yours,Correspondent: Emilie Skarabotta (1908–1990), the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, was a White stenographer and notary public who worked for Chesnutt and Helen Moore's stenography business in the early 1930s. Later, she was listed on the firm's letterhead.
1. The letter in question has not been located. It would have been sent from Chesnutt's vacation home in Idlewild, Michigan, where he spent July and August, requesting and receiving regular updates from his business partner, Helen Moore, and his office staff. [back]
2. 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. [back]
3. 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]
4. Robert A. Dill rented rooms from Chesnutt's apartment at 1267 Lakeview Road in the early 1930s; he and his family have not been further identified. Contact the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive if you have further information. [back]
5. After discovering Idlewild in 1921, the Chesnutts spent every summer at this location in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles west 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 White resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, and had a lakeside cabin built (14240 Lake Drive), which was completed in 1926. [back]
6. 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. Johnnie and his mother also spent the summers with his grandparents in Idlewild, Michigan. [back]
