fuel Powell’s longing for the “real” one—which was located directly opposite a busy railroad station: Shelby was a transfer point for the New York Central, Baltimore & Ohio, and Pennsylvania railroads. Seeing the travelers come and go, hearing the whistles blow as the trains pulled into the station and then departed, piqued Powell’s imagination and stirred her longing to escape small-town Ohio for more glamorous regions, just as characters do in her 1930 Ohio novel Dance Night. Young Dawn realized that she was much more like her restless father than, for example, her maternal grandmother, Julia Sherman, who “got her excitements on remote farms from traveling hucksters, cousins or distant relatives who wandered up the cow lane” (Diaries, 470). Such “excitement” would never do for Dawn; she was always anxious to experience the real excitement of the big cities, and what bigger and more glamorous city was there than New York?
Some time later, remembering her days living near the train station, Powell would quip that she had been brought up in Shelby, “not on the wrong side of the railroad tracks as is generally supposed, but right on the railroad tracks” (Farnham, 3; my emphasis). The travelers who would come and go from the train station, buying meals from accomplished cook Auntie May, or staying nearby at Dawn’s grandmother’s boardinghouse,13 offered Powell abundant material for observation. Again the girl kept notebooks, but although this second collection of writings and drawings,14 begun while Dawn was living with Auntie May, “survived into the late 1960s,” according to Page, it now seems to have vanished (Diaries, 1).
The burned writings were not the only reason that Powell left home: she had learned that her stepmother was going to keep her from attending high school. Being forbidden to read the books in Sabra’s house was bad enough for the bookish girl, but being kept out of school would have proved intolerable. Living now with Auntie May, in 1910 Dawn enrolled in Shelby High School, where she earned high marks and worked on the school paper, and, in her senior year, acted as editor of the yearbook. From the age of sixteen she worked as a reporter on the Shelby Globe (Gross, 112). Fellow reporter Eleanor Farnham remembers that an enthusiastic Powell “always got to the fires first” (Farnham, 3), determined to do her job well and eager, as always, for any fresh excitement the town might offer.
Powell was happy to be allowed to attend high school and grateful to be living with Auntie May. The two would “talk about all things all day, never bored with each other” (Diaries, 72). The eccentric older woman, Dawn recalled, “gave me music lessons and thought I had genius, and when I wrote crude little poems and stories, she cherished them” (Page, “Chronology,” 1045). Her aunt, who not only loved her, cared for her, and supported her, proved a fine example for the girl. According to Page, “the emancipated, self-reliant Orpha May, who did as she pleased, followed her own moral code, and insisted on being treated as an equal among men, provided Dawn with her greatest role model” (Bio, 14). Auntie May’s influence on Dawn was far reaching: without her, Powell may never have been able to attend even high school, let alone college; it is likely that she also would never have had the opportunity to flee small-town Ohio for New York City.
Some years later, after Powell had settled in New York, she would invite her aunt for a visit in a letter that reveals the free-spirited sense of humor of both women: “Unless we take another girl you can sleep in our living room,” Dawn wrote, “or if Helen’s father comes to see us you can sleep with him. He is a widower—a doctor—and has oil wells in Texas so you could do worse” (Letters, 43). Not only was her aunt unconventional and open minded, but she so believed in Dawn that she encouraged her to pursue her ambitions as no one else had done before. When Dawn was about to graduate from high school, Auntie May encouraged the girl to follow her dreams and go on to college, a luxury they could ill afford.15 She suggested that her young charge write a letter seeking admittance to Lake Erie College for Women, founded in 1856, in Painesville, Ohio. And so Dawn wrote to Vivian Small, president of the college, promising to work hard in exchange for any tuition remission she might receive.16 Though the letter no longer survives, early friend and college roommate Eleanor Farnham recalls that Powell had written something along the lines of “I’ll do anything to work my way through, from scrubbing back stairs to understudying your job” (Gross, 111).17 President Small, who believed that rich and poor alike were entitled to an education, saw to it that Dawn was admitted to Lake Erie College. The college, just five years before Powell’s death, would award her an honorary Doctor of Literature degree.
Auntie May paid for some of Dawn’s college expenses,18 a lawyer friend of Dawn’s aunt also contributed, and, according to Powell, “everybody in town helped me gather proper equipment for this mighty project, so that my borrowed trunk would scarcely close over the made-over dresses, sheets and towels blotted with my signature, tennis racket with limp strings, and a blue serge bathing suit in four sections, 1900 model, contributed by a fat neighbor on the assumption that going to ‘Lake Erie’ meant I would be spending most of my time in the water” (Letters, 249). The college assisted its new student financially: President Vivian Small herself made a personal loan to Powell; in a 1919 note to her friend and former Lake Erie College classmate Charlotte Johnson, Powell mentioned still owing President Smith $55.00 (38). Despite the financial assistance she received, still Dawn had to help pay her way, always putting in “five hours a day to earn her expenses,” as she wrote in her entry for Twentieth-Century Authors (1123). She worked in the school’s general office, where her duties included “answering doorbell [and] telephone, putting out mail, ringing bells for class and running a rotten, rheumatic old hydraulic elevator,” which requires “some muscle” to operate and which “nearly kills my back” (Letters, 15).19 She also found employment in the college library, and in the summer of 1915, between her freshman and sophomore years, she served as maid and waitress at the Shore Club in Painesville,20 where she began keeping a diary addressed to Mr. Woggs, an imaginary confidant; those early journals are a precursor to the diaries Powell would keep until her death.
Resolved as she was to succeed academically, Dawn earned unremarkable marks at Lake Erie, partly because she kept herself involved in nearly everything the campus had to offer. She not only worked part time, but she also wrote for both the college yearbook and the school literary magazine, the Lake Erie Record, serving as literary editor from her sophomore year and as editor in chief in her final year.21 She also put out an “anonymous, dissenting newspaper called The Sheet that competed with the [school] magazine” (Gross, 111); the paper offers glimpses of the wittily irreverent writer Dawn Powell would later become. Active with the school’s theatrical group, she portrayed Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Letters, 21); an unnamed role in Mice and Men22 (9–10); and Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest (15). She even wrote of masquerading as a performing dog with “a whisk-broom tail” one Halloween (15). As busy as she was, she still found time to write and perform skits for her classmates (17), donating the extra money she earned from them to the war effort or funding excursions into Cleveland to see such plays as The Little Minister with Maude Adams (15). Classmate Eleanor Farnham later said she felt sorry for anyone who had not attended Lake Erie while Dawn was enrolled there, for the lively Powell “turned everything upside down” (Gross, 111). Familiar with stories passed down about the famous alumna, today’s Lake Erie College Lincoln Library director, Christopher Bennett, wrote to me in a personal letter (August 31, 2006) that “Dawn really did shake up things on this campus for those four years.” Dawn herself, in a diary entry from the time of her sophomore year, insisted that a humdrum existence was not for her. “I must have days of rushing excitement,” she wrote (2).
One yearns to go someplace where the band plays all the time and life is not so simple.
—Letters, 26
In September 1918, following her graduation from college, Dawn Powell did precisely what she had always firmly believed “the gods” had “written” for her (Letters, 26): she moved to New York, and the city did not disappoint. Powell contemporary E. B. White would write decades later of three New Yorks: the
