The Grandes Dames by Stephen Birmingham

Author:Stephen Birmingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504041041
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

16

A LITANY OF GOOD WORKS

Mary Emery’s first important philanthropy came not long after her husband’s death, when she donated $250,000 to build a YMCA in Newport, specifically for the Army and Navy enlisted personnel who were stationed there. She had noted, she wrote in a letter outlining her plan, that Newport offered the military men little in the way of entertainment or recreation except “bar rooms and picture shows.” Her YMCA, she hoped, would provide “a better rallying place than you now have for your leisure hours … preferring it as a resort.” As would become typical of her giving, however, she was secretive about it. She was not present at the cornerstone laying, and the identity of the donor was not made public until half an hour before the event. The plaque placed on the building did not even include her name, but merely read:

A MOTHER’S MEMORIAL TO HER SONS

SHELDON AND ALBERT EMERY

To her alma mater, Packer Institute, Mary shipped off $50,000 Brooklyn Union Gas Company bonds to establish a teachers’ pension fund, directing that the fund be named in memory of a favorite mathematics teacher, Miss Adeline L. Jones. In her home town, another $250,000 was presented to the University of Cincinnati Medical School to endow a professorial chair named in honor of her pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin K. Rachford. Another large gift went to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and a grand total of $20,000,000 was set aside to establish the Thomas J. Emery Memorial Fund in memory of her husband. Because her husband “had a kindly and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the Negro race,” she built a 250-bed “Negro orphan asylum” in Cincinnati, as well as a black YMCA. Clearly, as the widow of a builder, she had acquired a taste for building things.

In Cincinnati, meanwhile, the gossips said that Mary Emery and Mrs. Charles P. Taft were not, as they appeared to be, best friends at all, but were actually bitter philanthropic rivals. It was noted that whenever Mrs. Emery stepped forward to support a project, Mrs. Taft withdrew her support from that particular endeavor. Annie Sinton Taft was also very rich. Her father, David Sinton—though the fact was politely overlooked by the time of the second generation—had been a Civil War profiteer. Sensing, with the South talking of Secession, that a war was in the offing, and having a good hunch that war would mean a demand for pig iron, Sinton had cornered the prewar iron market. From the fortune he made selling iron for cannon balls to both the Union and the Confederacy, Sinton had built, among other things, Cincinnati’s Sinton Hotel, which rivaled the Emerys’ Netherland Plaza in both size and luxury. Annie was David Sinton’s only child.

Actually, what Mary Emery and Annie Taft did in Cincinnati—it was often the subject of their daily “breakfast letters”—was to divide things up. When Annie Taft’s interest in the Cincinnati Symphony began to wane, and she became more interested in the Cincinnati Opera, Mary Emery

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