Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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The Ohio Women’s Reformatory has been a part of Marysville for a long time. When I was a kid growing up during the thirties and forties, it looked more like a small college campus, than a penal institution. There were no bars on the windows, and there was no barbed wire or razor wire surrounding the place. In fact, there was not even a chain-link fence.
The inmates grew much of their food in the surrounding fields. When you drove on Collins Road past the institution you could see the women planting, tilling and harvesting their sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and the like. They even raised and milked cows, which were housed in a barn at the northwest corner of the property.
Then there were the variety shows. There was a lot of talent among the inmates, and every year they produced a stage performance that drew audiences from all over the state and beyond. The inmates sang, played musical instruments, danced, and performed a variety of specialty acts. They even made their own costumes. It played to rave reviews from newspapers throughout the state.
But perhaps the thing that brought the reformatory closest to the community was a program to prepare inmates for their eventual release. As part of that program, a limited number of them who had excellent records within the institution were allowed to work in homes in Marysville. Our next-door neighbors, Clarence and Ella Hoopes, hired one of these women as a housekeeper. Her name was Alice.
Alice worked for the Hoopes family for quite some time. She and Ella became close friends. I would often see them talking and laughing together. My first contact with Alice was when I saw her hanging laundry on the clothesline in their backyard. I think I was about five or six years old, and I sat in the grass and talked with her while she worked.
A few days later, I knocked at their back door and Alice let me come into the kitchen while she was preparing dinner. She helped me climb up on a high kitchen stool to watch her work. She was preparing turnips, and I told her that one of my favorite things to eat were raw turnips. She immediately cut a slice, salted it, and handed it to me. I knew right then that I had a friend in Alice.
I began making occasional trips to visit with her. I would knock on the back door and then she would let me come into the kitchen while she was working. Each time she would help me get up on that same kitchen stool, and I would watch her work. Unlike a lot of adults, she was really easy to talk with, and our friendship grew.
Eventually Alice’s time for release was approaching. I overheard her talking about it with Ella. I think Ella had mixed feelings, as she was happy for Alice’s return to her family, but sorry their own relationship was coming to an end. I wasn’t there when her husband drove to Marysville to pick her up, but when she was gone I know we all missed her.
I don’t want to create the impression that all the inmates during the ‘30s were good souls like Alice. At the other and of the spectrum was a woman named Velma West. She was a Cleveland woman who had bludgeoned her husband to death with a claw hammer and then went Christmas shopping with her mother. Velma was the institution’s most notorious inmate.
Alice and Velma were polar opposites. Today, if I Google Velma on my computer, I can get more information about her than I really want to know. But there is no way on earth I can find out anything about what happened to Alice. That’s a shame, because Alice was my friend.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com