Last month, the Riesenfeld Center received an exciting donation to its Clarence Darrow Collection. The items were generously donated by Elva Paulson, an artist and great-niece of Ruby Darrow. The donation includes many items related to Clarence and Ruby’s travels together, as well as a new group of letters to and from Ruby. The Riesenfeld Center is grateful to Elva for this new donation, which adds to the Center’s preeminent collection of Darrow's letters, writings, books, and other material from his life and career.
We recently also received additional items from Elva, including Darrow’s traveling trunk, which nicely complements the travel memorabilia now in the collection. The traveling trunk, made by J.H. McNamara Trunk Works Co. in Chicago, is a unique tie to the famous attorney. Rivets in the side form Clarence's initials, "CSD," and there is also a travel sticker listing several hotels in the White Mountains in New Hampshire that were owned by Barron, Merrill, & Barron. The donation also includes a couple of handkerchiefs embroidered with Darrow's name and several new letters.
We’ve now been able to sift through all of the letters in the two donations, which range in content but largely consist of family correspondence. Two letters from Ruby (circa 1928) are addressed to her nephew, Fred Hamerstrom, Jr. (Elva Paulson’s father), to whom she writes with ideas about a fiction story he was working on. Ruby’s writing is always very expressive--she underlines often, uses dashes and exclamation points, and frequently connects a long list of short phrases. In one letter to Fred, Jr., she includes about ten pages of her narrative suggestions, including dialogue and critiques of the opening and closing parts of his story. She also provides ideas of who might be able to provide good feedback. She notes that she already sent the story along to George Eaton, “one of the cleverest writers of today in [the] magazine field” for advice ahead of presenting it to George T. Bye, who was a prominent literary agent at the time.
Ruby was interested in literature, which makes sense given that she was a journalist in Chicago at the time she met Clarence. We don’t know what happened to this story of Fred, Jr.’s, but it seems that his career aspirations changed soon after. In 1931, Fred married Frances Flint, and the two became notable naturalists and ornithologists. Both studied under Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and they are best known for their work with prairie chickens and raptors in central Wisconsin.
Other letters from the donation show the relationship between Ruby and her brother, Fred Sr., after Clarence’s death. Two letters from the early 1940s, from Fred to Ruby, detail family updates. The other letter, written a year later, gives information about his daily life on the east coast. He writes about a Paul Revere festival in his town, his daily walks, finances, and his reminiscences as he gets older. Fred tells Ruby, “I’ll understand perfectly that you can’t be writing so often,” though they remained in contact.
All of the letters have given us more insight into Ruby’s family and her relationships, and we have learned more about her life after Darrow’s passing. The generous donation from Elva Paulson enhances our Clarence Darrow collection and will allow for further examination of Clarence and Ruby’s relationship and travel, in addition to insights about Ruby’s later life.
- Sophia Daley, Archives and Digital Collections Associate
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