Chinese Laundryman in Westerville

[The Chinese laundry was part of the urban scene in the early twentieth century.]

Browsing through an old issue of the Otterbein College Tan and Cardinal, I saw an advertisement for a Chinese laundry in Westerville. From approximately 1917 to 1925, a certain “Hop Lee” ran a laundry at 12 North State Street. That conjures up all kinds of images, from the “No tickee, no shirtee” stereotype to laundries as fronts for opium dens. But I’ve married into a Chinese family, so I decided to look deeper.

Unfortunately, Chinese laundries do not lend themselves to research. Chinese immigrant men who ran laundries often were the victims of American mainstream prejudice. They kept very much to themselves, and thus appeared secretive and mysterious to outsiders.

Not surprisingly, Hop Lee mostly defies historical recovery. He was probably from southern China probably from near Guangzhou (Canton) or Hong Kong. His real name was probably Li. Many a Chinese man adopted the spelling Lee, closer to the pronunciation of Li to American eyes. Or, Hop Lee may not have been his real name. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was still in force, and men coming to this country sometimes used the names of dead relatives or friends who had been granted permission to enter.

The census of 1920 showed a 55 year-old Hop Lee living on Third Street in Columbus, with his younger cousin, Wing Haey (The spelling is probably phonetic). But this was not the same Hop Lee, a common name in the Chinese immigrant community.  Most Chinese laundrymen lived in or above their laundries.  Westerville’s Hop Lee appears to have done so.

Unfortunately, the most informative document on Lee is his 1919 death certificate.  “Our” Hop Lee was born in 1861.  His father was named Ching Lee.  We do not know the date of his emigration.  He was married, but his wife stayed in China.  Hop Lee was 58 when he died in Grant Hospital in Columbus, “following an operation for appendicitis.”  He was buried in Green Lawn Cemetery.

As I was just about to give up hope of finding anything more about Hop Lee, I spotted a quotation from him in a 1917 copy of the Public Opinion. Lee was quoted as saying he liked hot weather because it meant more laundry business. Unfortunately, he was quoted in stereotypical Chinese pidgin English, and we can only guess what wording he really used.

Whoever he was, Mr. Lee probably worked long hours for little pay. We can guess that he was lonely – the male female ratio among Chinese immigrants was 90% male to 10% female.  There is no evidence that his wife ever came to the States, even for a visit.  It was only postmortem that Hop Lee found companionship, of a sort.

In 1936, 17 years after his burial, Hop Lee and eleven other Chinese men were disinterred from Green Lawn.  According to the Columbus Dispatch, permission was granted to William Woo, a Columbus consular agent connected the Chinese consul in Cleveland.  Green Lawn Cemetery also approved the request.  The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Society in Columbus helped pay for the trip, and a similar charity in China would also help pay once the dead men arrived in China.  The twelve dead men from Columbus would eventually join 200 other dead men of Chinese birth who had died in Ohio.

Traditional Chinese burial customs have radically changed since the 1949 revolution.  China’s population is such that most residents are cremated.  But in Hop Lee’s time, 3000 years of tradition was firm and prescribed burial near to one’s respected ancestors.  Hop Lee’s wish was granted too late for him to see, but his family, I hope, derived comfort from his bones resting in China, and that his time in Westerville was relatively short.

[Revised 2022]

Christmas Cats in Perrysburg – and Iceland!

 

             Many languages assign genders to nouns.  German, French, Italian, and others all give their nouns a gender.  For example, the German word for dog, der Hund, is masculine, or male.  Die Katze, a cat, is feminine, or female.  The gender of any specific word varies; the German word for moon, der Mund, is masculine but feminine, la luna, in Spanish.  Some folks believe that there is mystical affinity between the word and the gender.  In art, women and cats are often portrayed together.  As far back as ancient Egypt the cat-goddess Bastet was understood to be female.  In our time, “catty,” an adjective meaning “nasty”, is usually understood to be a female trait (my apologies to the female half of humanity).

            This picture of milk-drinking, squirming cats, (check the buggy) was used as a Christmas card in 1916.  Katheryn (possibly Katheryn Kah) in Perrysburg used a “real picture” postcard of herself and her cats to send Christmas greetings to her grandfather:

            Dear Gran Paw,

            I would like to visit you but am busy with My family.

            Merry Christmas

            Katheryn

            Kittens and little girls rival each other in cuteness.  Katheryn looks like she is roughly a second grader.  Writing Christmas cards to grandparents is one of the cute tasks girls perform.  We can assume the “Family” mentioned in her message was the family of kittens pictured.  And the picture “fits” because of the cultural association of the female and the female.      

            The card was sent to a little town in Shelby County called Anna, and was addressed to “L. Kah.”  Anna, Ohio, is a town of about 1500 people.  Today it has a branch of the giant Honda of America complex.  In the early days, it was a small farming community.  Originally named Carey’s Station, for town founder J. W. Carey, the town was renamed Anna, for Anna Carey Thirkield, his daughter, about 1867.

            The address on the card show it sent to “L. Kah.”  Louis Kah was a big name in Anna.  Owner and proprietor of the Kah House hotel, Kah’s establishment had great reputation as one of the finest hotels in western Ohio.  He once hosted then-governor William McKinley, who was in the village waiting for a change of trains. Anna was also the hometown of Lois Lenski, award winning children’s author.

            Doubtless there were many cats in Anna in 1916.  Whether any of them had their picture taken is unknown.  Also unknown is whether anyone in Anna, or Perrysburg, sent Christmas cards which featured cats.  Although cats sometimes do adorn Christmas cards, the association is not immediate.

            Cats are frequently seen in folktales.  Puss-in-Boots we all know, the Cheshrie cat is famous.  “The Cat Came Back” is a well known children’s song.  In Japan, the “maneki-neko” holds a paw high to attract money.  Another Japanese cat character is Hello Kitty, who has brought in at least $84 billion for her creators. 

There is only one “Christmas cat” in folklore and that is Jólakötturinn (Yule Cat) in Iceland.  Unfortunately, the Yule Cat was a bad kitty.  Gigantic in size, it prowled the island looking for children who had not received any clothes for Christmas, and then ate them.  In a cold country like Iceland, this may have been a warning to share clothes with the needy.   Or:

According to Icelandic tradition, anyone who finished their chores before Christmas would get new clothes as a reward. Meanwhile, lazy children who didn’t get their work done would have to face the Jólakötturinn.

Bitter days and dark nights inspire dark holiday traditions.

            Katheryn and her milky pussycats represent the opposite tradition.  Her cats were bundles of fluff, warm and purring.  Together they stand for the life-giving, nourishing half of humanity.  Always be nice to cats.  Or the Yule Cat will start licking its chops!

Dr. Hollister of Wauseon, Fulton County, Ohio

 

     

          It seems like we all have disease and medicine on our minds these days.  It has been awhile since we faced a disease that we could not treat and, at the beginning, could not even understand.  It will be many years until we can write a history of Covid 19, and while it seems to be under control (for now), we must file it under the handful of diseases for which is not 100% curable.          

            There were and are many reasons a disease cannot be cured.  The state of technology, the availability and usability of medicines, and, sadly, the cost of treatments, all play a part.  Less troublesome now but a great hindrance once was the availability of transportation.  If you lived in the city, you were more likely to have access to trained doctors, hospitals, and drugs.  If you resided in the country, you were more apt to rely on quack medicines and poorly trained practitioners.  Even trained physicians had no access to modern transportation.  The (justly) praised frontier doctor who travelled five miles in a blizzard to treat a frontiersman is part of the folklore of our settlement.

One example of the stress and strain of early doctoring can be found in a letter from Joseph Waldron of Wauseon in Fulton County dated February 11, 1881.  Writing to his brother, Martin in New York State, Mr. Waldron faced a medical crisis, and a financial one.  He wrote:

Jessie was taken down with the fever.  She had the doctor for six weeks and then Charley had the fever and when it turned [,] the lung fever set in and Juley came down with the same fever.  But Dr. Hollister broked it up on her, and now little Philley is down and we are agoing to have the doctor for him to night. . . .

Joseph Waldron was a day laborer.  He had a much younger wife, Jessie, whom he had married when she was 17 and he was 36.  They had four children by 1880, and the sick ones, Charles, Phillip, and Julia were the youngest at 4, 6, and 9 years old.  They all, apparently, suffered from “lung fever,” an outdated term which could refer to anything from bronchitis to pneumonia to lung cancer.  None of the siblings succumbed to the ‘fever.”  This is not to say that they were not very sick, but they survived to move to Toledo.  Joseph Waldron died in 1912, having relocated to Camden, Oneida County, New York, whence two of his children followed him.

Whether the medical care was heroic or routine, the Waldron children were treated by a local doctor, Dr. De Witt Hollister (1825-1902).  Like his patients’ family, Hollister was born and educated in upstate New York.  His medical education was half-apprenticeship, half-college, the latter at Geneva Medical College, which he attended for “two terms.”  His first professional position was eighteen months in Jefferson County, New York,

 “after which he joined the tide of emigration to this then western country, and took up his abode at Wauseon, in the newly created county of Fulton.  At that time Dr. Hollister was the only resident physician in the place, and soon acquired a large practice; and, being a young man of good education and address, and possessing a thorough understanding of his profession,”

attracted customers from all over Fulton County.  Dr. Hollister married a local girl, Permelia Lamb.  After ten years, he joined another doctor, William Hyde, creating the practice of Hollister & Hyde.[i]

A taste of the heroic light in which Dr. Hollister was viewed may be seen in this recollection:

Doctor Hollister was a most welcomed settler, for up to that time we had to diagnose our own disease, and prescribe our own medicine, or be to the great expense of getting a physician who lived miles away.  None can appreciate the hardships that Doctor Hollister endured, as he  rode, night after night, on horseback, over the cow- paths through the dense forest, to render  relief to a settler who was suffering  from disease contracted from exposure, or the  unhealthiness of  the climate.  I say none but the early pioneer can appreciate the hardships that  Doctor Hollister endured to relieve the sufferings of his fellow men.[ii]

            Thanks to this scrap of a letter, we can appreciate the efforts of Dr D. W. Hollister in doing what needed doing to relieve the suffering of pioneer children.

 

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[i]  History of Henry & Fulton Counties edited by Lewis Cass Aldrich - Syracuse NY - Publ. D. Mason & Co. 1888.

[ii] A standard history of Fulton County, Ohio, an authentic narrative of the past, with an extended survey of modern developments in the progress of town and county.  By Reighard, Frank H., (Chicago, New York, The Lewis Publishing Company, 1920), p. 206.