Events circa 1890-1940.
Written January 1993.
In the early 1890’s Clara Partridge, age 18, left her comfortable home and family
in South Bend, Indiana, to travel to far away Ohio to teach school. Her three sisters,
Eloise, Charlotte, Frances, and brother Will hated to have her leave home.
Clara’s father, whose medical training is somewhat of a mystery, was a horse and buggy doctor who made house calls — even in the country. He was applauding Clara’s adventure, but her gentle mother was frightened and reluctant to see Clara stray so far from the family’s protection.
New Lyme Academy, in Ashtabula County, Ohio, was her destination. It was an institution whose main curriculum prepared one with a teacher’s certificate, but also offered prep courses for medicine and law.
There were many institutions like New Lyme Academy dotted about Ohio that are extinct today. The common attitude of the time was that most people didn’t need more education than these institutions offered.
Emory Dial [ELD] had always needed to work to help keep food on the table for his mother and two younger sisters, Nellie and Mamie. Emory’s father died when Emory was just a young boy, so his need to work delayed his schooling.
This delay made him one of the big, older boys in Clara’s class, where he was determined to learn fast and well. This obviously brought him to teacher’s attention, and the outcome was that, in a short time, they fell in love.
Clara and Emory married as soon as he graduated and then moved to Cleveland. Emory entered Western Reserve Medical School, graduating in the class of 1898. They moved to a building at West 89th and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, where he began his practice and where his family of five children was born.
At this time, the mundane tasks of feeding five small children three times a day, keeping them clean, and keeping the house in order were overwhelming to Clara Partridge Dial. She was a petite woman who was so thin that she gave the misleading appearance of being frail. However, she had deep convictions and strong opinions, expressed only when pressed to do so. She was an intellectual, brilliant in mind, and a voracious reader.
Emory realized that Clara’s domestic workload was too hard for her, so he thought the happy solution was to import his mother into the home to take over. She had operated a boarding house back in New Lyme. Grandma Dial, as she was known, was gifted with pots, pans, skillets, and rolling pins. Emory was hungry for her cuisine, but he never realized how incompatible living in the same household would be for these two very different women.
Grandma Dial, vigorous and active, was constantly busy with the physical work needed to keep the family going. She took over. She would call mother Dial lazy if she sat down for a moment to read or instruct the children. Her gentle nature and upbringing recoiled at these unfair reprimands.
Another happening contributed to disturbing Clara’s tranquility then. She had graduated from a two-year course at Oberlin with highest honors. This fact prompted Emory to acquire a Phi Beta Kappa key for her because he thought she deserved it.
The governing powers in the Phi Beta Kappa society then wrote to Father Dial saying his wife was not entitled to be a member of that august group. She had to either return her key or finish a four-year college course.
This infuriated Father Dial, so he declared that Clara should finish two more years of college work at Oberlin. The outcome was that her commuting to classes at Oberlin College somewhat eased the severe domestic tension.
Commuting was physically possible because a streetcar line to Oberlin, the Interurban, ran right by their home regularly. She commuted three days a week for two years and earned the necessary degree with honors. Father Dial was delighted and proud.
Father Dial planned a big family celebration to present Clara with the Phi Beta Kappa Key that became hers to keep and cherish all her life. Toddler David was provided with a satin pillow, upon which the golden key was placed. Behind him in line, according to age, were Donald, Ralph, and then Robert. Elizabeth, the oldest, brought up the rear.
They marched in line into the living room, surprising their mother with the gift and their congratulations. She told me years later that this little ceremony made the key more precious to her than all her effort to win it.
Clara and Emory had five children to educate. Father Dial dreamed that they, like himself, would all become doctors of medicine one day, and he had the forcefulness and strength of character to make his dream come true.
The best medical literature then was written in German, so he sent all his children to a German parochial school in the neighborhood to become proficient in that language. All the lessons were taught in German.
They then went through West High School on Franklin Avenue, which was the best college preparatory school on Cleveland’s West Side. After that, Elizabeth and Robert finished Oberlin, Ralph, and Donald went to Yale, and David went to Hiram. David and Elizabeth then went to the Western Reserve School of Medicine. The three boys, Ralph, Donald, and Robert, acquired their M.D.s from Yale Medical School.
The dream took many years to materialize to this point, but it was not complete. Father Dial dreamed of a place where they could all practice medicine together with him.
By the time Elizabeth had earned her MD and was ready to practice medicine, he had built a big, multi-purpose brick building at West 115th Street and (11420) Lorain Avenue in Cleveland. [This building, located opposite the Cleveland Christian Orphanage grounds, is still standing and in use today (2023) — but not in the way originally planned. Elizabeth’s husband, Dwight Spreng, contributed heavily to the design and implementation of this project. Family lore does not record how much of the design of this project is attributable to ELD and how much to Dwight Spreng, but Dwight’s contributions were probably primary. ed. CED.]
The first floor of this building was commercial, containing an optometrist and other shops. Father and Mother Dial lived on the second floor in a two-bedroom apartment next to professional office suites for seven doctors and two dentists, an X-ray suite, an emergency surgery, and a recovery room surrounding a huge Tudor lounge. This lounge was the waiting room and held the receptionist’s desk and telephone switchboard for The Lorain Avenue Clinic.
The third floor had eight efficiency suites and one two-bedroom apartment identical to Father Dial’s apartment and directly above it. This was to be Elizabeth’s apartment. It seemed to be a cozy arrangement, but then Ralph and Margaret moved to Lakewood, and Elizabeth and Dwight took a bigger place down on Lorain Avenue [across the street from St. Ignatius Church.] Robert and I moved into the two-bedroom apartment vacated by Elizabeth. [Dwight allegedly had had an acrimonious falling out with ELD, partly over Dwight’s decision to go to law school after finishing medical school. ELD was known to have had an anathema for lawyers, which did nothing to endear Dwight to ELD. Whatever happened, it was serious enough that ELD was willing to compromise his dream of having the family all live and work together.]
Later, an exodus to family homes began as Emory’s grandchildren arrived. Donald was studying abroad, and David was in medical school, so they were not present during this period.
Robert was the one Dial to keep his office in the Lorain Avenue Clinic Building throughout his life. We did not move our home from that building until after Father Dial died because Robert was very sympathetic to the pain his father suffered from seeing his togetherness dream shattered.
Our two oldest children were in the second and fourth grades when we moved to 4243 West 196th Street, Fairview Park, (then Fairview Village) in 1937. I lived there for 47 years.
Mary W. Dial
[In Dec. 2022 Andrew Dial, ELD’s great-great grandson, provided the following status update on the Lorain Medical Building, which housed the Lorain Ave. Clinic:
I looked up the Lorain Ave. clinic building in the Ohio State Historic Preservation Office’s GIS database and found that the City of Cleveland has already listed it as a local landmark and part of one of its historic districts (see attached Property Detail: Lorain Medical Building).
This does not mean that the building is on the National Register of Historic Places, only that it is on the City of Cleveland’s list of historic landmarks. My next step is to ask Cleveland and the Ohio SHPO for their files on the building. It may say something about its significance and ownership.
Andrew]
Transcribed March 1993 by CED
Posted Jan 14, 1993 at 02:59.
Revised Jan 23, 2023 at 19:49. EDT.
Retrieved Jun 1, 2026 at 22:24.
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