Who Owned This Book? Helen Welshimer

After tracing the inscription in my copy of Gertrude Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia through the remarkable life of its owner, Elizabeth Seeber, years ago, I often look into the person behind the name written in a used book I’ve bought. Usually, the trail leads to little more than an address and news item or two, and I expected much the same when I typed “Helen Welshimer,” which I found in a copy of Ethel Mannin’s 1935 book Forever Wandering, into my usual first source, newspapers.com.

Instead, the first article listed, from June 1936, linked to the start of her newspaper serial, Runaway Bride, described her as “a favorite writer of thousands.” “Few can rival Miss Welshimer in regard to the volume of copy from her typewriter which appears in newspaper columns in the United States,” it declared. Even allowing for the hype one expects from a piece probably written by the public relations flack for the NEA Service, the syndication service distributing the serial, I soon found there was little exaggeration in this claim. Between the early 1930s and 1950 or so, Helen Welshimer was responsible for over a dozen serial novels and novellas, hundreds of poems, and thousands of advice columns, personal essays, and celebrity profiles that appeared in newspapers throughout the U.S., along with more occasional pieces of genuine reportage.

This was a woman who could compete with Ethel Mannin when it came to producing words. Her chosen forms and medium, however, guarantees that today her one-time national notoriety has utterly evaporated, leaving her even less known than Mannin. Helen Louise Welshimer was born on February 17, 1901, to P. H. Welshimer and his wife Clara, the first of three children. Her father was just starting his fifty-year tenure as the head of the First Christian Church in Canton, Ohio, and none of his children ever ventured too far from their faith, despite Helen’s years as a reporter in New York.

In her yearbook in her graduating year of high school, Helen Welshimer wrote, “Worthy books are not companions, they are solitudes. We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.” That observation would later prove more meaningful than she suspected. After attending Hiram College, she studied journalism at Columbia but returned to Ohio, where she began as a reporter and society editor for the Canton Daily News.

In 1928, she and her sister Mildred traveled to Europe, and when they returned, Helen joined the staff of the Akron Beacon Journal. While there, she became the head of the Ohio Newspaper Women’s League and began syndicating her work — at first sentimental poems and color stories — through the News Enterprise Association syndicate.

Though the Akron Beacon Journal may not seem much of a powerhouse, it may help to know that its owner at the time was Charles Knight, whose son John began to build one of the largest newspaper and magazine corporations in the U.S., now known as Knight Ridder, after inheriting the Journal in 1933. Helen Welshimer was just the sort of talent that helped John Knight expand his empire. By the time Helen Welshimer had inscribed her copy of Ethel Mannin’s book, her advice/human interest column, “Helen Welshimer Says,” was appearing in over 900 papers nationwide.

The 1930s witnessed the rise of a number of high-profile women reporters such as Dorothy Thompson who were prepared to take on risky assignments and challenge the status quo even in places like Hitler’s Germany. Helen Welshimer was not one of them. Indeed, her success was more dependent on her reinforcing rather than questioning the status quo. Even before she moved from Ohio to New York City in 1933, she was a popular speaker on women’s issues at high schools and colleges, and three collections of her talks were published: Talks to Girls (1934); Girlhood Today (1938); and Questions Girls Ask (1939).

“Her editorials express the modern feminine viewpoint on happenings of the day, has wider circulation that any other woman editorial writer in the United States” declared the announcement of the start of Runaway Bride in 1936. But though Welshimer never married, she described her dreams in quite conventional domestic terms: “White cottages with gabled rooms, window boxes, and ruffled curtains.” Dispatched to England in early 1936 to cover the coronation of King Edward VIII, she ended up staying for the better part of the year to see through the abdication crisis and report on the happy ending of King George VI’s coronation in December.

Thanks to wire services, she was able to keep up her regular output of columns and poems for the NEA syndicate, but when she returned to New York, Helen Welshimer quit, dropping her column and taking up as a freelancer. In addition to her poems, she threw herself more and more into fiction, writing stories and serials for Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and, increasingly, Christian magazines such as The Lookout and The Christian Herald.

This shift back towards her faith accelerated in 1939. A taxi she was riding in was struck from the side, slamming her into the opposite door. Though Welshimer wasn’t severely injured, the accident seems to have triggered a problem with osteoporosis, and within a short time afterward, she decided to move in with her sister, who was dean of women at Milligan College in Tennessee. Later, they returned to Canton, Ohio, where their mother began caring for Helen after their father died.

Though effectively confined to her bed after 1939, Helen Welshimer continued to write. Her poetry continued to be in demand. E. P. Dutton published two collections of her poems: Singing Drums (1939) and Shining Rain (1945). She was, in effect, the female Edgar Guest (though hardly anyone today gets that reference). Suffice it to say that hers was not the sort of poetry ever to be found in a Norton anthology — though it occasionally sneaks into the sort of sentimental collections given by great aunts or themed anthologies like Famous authors tell you about their beautiful, loving, and nutty dogs:

Won’t somebody please take care of Spot?
I can’t keep him any more.
My mother got cross at him because
He tracked mud across the floor.
He’s the nicest dog in the world, I guess;
I love him an awful lot,
But I won’t be seeing him any more.
Please, someone, take care of Spot!

There are four more stanzas that I’ll save you from.

She also wrote numerous newspaper serial novels, the last appearing as late as 1945. These were the heydays of newspaper serials, which were staples of outlets large and small across the U.S. — and often Canada and Australia as well. While some of these were serialized versions of novels published in book form, many — like most of Welshimer’s — were written exclusively for serialization.

The only one of Welshimer’s novels to see print, as far as I can tell, was Wings of Youth, which was published by Arcadia in 1941. As was typical of these direct-to-newsprint novels, it was never reviewed.

Helen Welshimer died in her sleep on December 22, 1954. The following day, the Akron Beacon Journal reprinted the following poem along with the notice of her death:

Dear God, may I be strong and brave
When dreams I dreamed prove vain.
And may I make a symphony
Of song from every pain….
Oh, may I keep my little griefs
Securely in my heart,
But help the world to mend its dream—

Her inscription led me to discover Helen Welshimer’s remarkable if sad life, but knowing more now, I have to wonder about her motive for buying Ethel Mannin’s book. Forever Wandering is a collection of pieces about Mannin’s travels and life in Europe, Russia, England, and Ireland in the early 1930s. It’s filled with Mannin’s trademarks: championing the pre-eminence of the individual; measured support for socialist movements (as long as they didn’t take themselves too seriously); distaste for petty authoritarianism, filth, and incompetence; and belief that a good day ends with a glass of wine or beer. It’s hard to imagine Welshimer taking Mannin’s side on much of anything.

Instead, one can imagine Mannin taking violent exception to an opinion piece that Welshimer published in 1934. It attacked the tendency of judges and juries to be lenient toward women convicted of murder. “It isn’t chivalrous to kill women, the cry goes up. Oh no! It isn’t a Sunday school picnic to take a man’s life, either!” Mannin was a lifelong opponent of capital punishment and sometimes described herself as “following the authentic socialism of the Early Christians.” It would have be fascinating to witness a debate between the daughters of a William Morris-influenced socialist and the minister of the First Christian Church of Canton, Ohio. Instead, we can only speculate how Mannin’s book wound up on the shelves of one of the most popular — if now forgotten — Christian women writers of her time.