“How did you develop an interest in a woman from the Pennsylvania hinterlands?” That question came from Barb Emmer, who lives in those “hinterlands” herself. Like me, Barb is a Dr. Betty fan who’s done a huge amount of her own research into Hayes’s role in leading 350 coal miners on a 1945 strike for decent living conditions and clean drinking water in their company-owned town. She’s also done me the great honor of inviting me to talk about A MIGHTY FORCE to the DuBois (PA) Area Historical Society during Women’s History Month 2022.
I’m tremendously excited about speaking on Dr. Betty’s home turf, and I expect that others will ask me that same question there: How did a Brooklyn-based writer learn about this once-famous woman — still a legend in her native north-central Pennsylvania hills but mostly forgotten elsewhere?
Ironically, I have Wall Street to thank for my introduction to Dr. Elizabeth Hayes of Force, PA. Not the street itself, where she may have never set foot, but rather the striking impression she left on the financial community. The five-month strike, sparked by her disgusted resignation from the Shawmut Mining Co., shed light on the shifty financial practices of the railroad that owned the mining concern.
In the end, Hayes’s actions forced the Pittsburg, Shawmut & Northern Railroad onto the junk heap. It was worth more as scrap than when it was operating. She was the woman who ended the nation’s longest receivership — PS&N heads had drawn handsome salaries for decades while driving the rail line ever deeper into debt — and the business press saluted her for it.
With a federal judge’s approval, the railroad’s mining subsidiary was reborn as New Shawmut Mining, which produced profits for decades. The striking miners took over ownership of their houses, cleaned up their communities, and found new sources of pure drinking water.
I discovered all this by searching for women’s names in the year-end indexes of a pocket-sized magazine called the Investor’s Reader. From 1943 to 1973, this biweekly publication ran breezy stories about business and finance. Merrill Lynch produced it as a lure to pull average people into the stock market. Most articles, predictably, revolved around males. But, as I noticed while writing my previous books, it wasn’t unusual for Investor’s Reader to write features about women. A fair number of women wrote for the magazine over its lifetime, perhaps because it launched in the war years.
So, having drawn on Investor’s Reader for my two previous books about women in business — POPOVERS AND CANDLELIGHT, about restaurateur Patricia Murphy, and SCAN ARTIST — about speed-reading marketer Evelyn Wood — I went to the New York Public Library to consult the year-end lists of Investor’s Reader articles. I began with the 1940s because I’m interested in that decade, and I skimmed each December list of the decade for women’s first names.
This took me to articles about one woman with a successful textile mill and another who ran a profitable brewery with her husband. Neither seemed to be likely subjects for a book. As in fairy tales, the third try was the charm. My authorial antennas quivered madly as I read a short summary about Dr. Betty Hayes and her battle with the coal company, which, the article told me, “made front-rank news in almost every daily paper in the East as well as in periodicals like Business Week.”
From there, I found the articles, as well as the photos at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the letters and papers in the collections of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Penn State, and the memories of Hayes’s niece and stepson. To all who have helped me, I’m profoundly grateful. And to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, as it was then named, a special tip of the hat (with veil and matching muff: remember, this is the Forties!)
