Mary Jane Yohe remembered 75 years after beginning pioneering legal career
I was taking in a new exhibit at York College’s Archives about students and campus life and immediately recognized some prominent collegians and memorable events from the past.
There was Millard Gladfelter, who later became president of Temple University. And Cliff Heathcote, a Major League Baseball center fielder who is in the record books for being traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Chicago Cubs between games of a doubleheader in 1922. And part of this exhibit detailed a concert by a young Bruce Springsteen (and Crazy Horse without Neil Young) in 1972.
Such is a sampling of the many stories and artifacts in the exhibit curated by Schmidt Library’s Karen Rice-Young, timed with the April inauguration of York College’s new president, Thomas Burns.
Near the end of the tour, one picture, and specifically one name in its caption, stopped me and did what any exhibit is designed to do. It made me want to know more about one of the women pictured: Mary Jane Yohe.
I recognized that name from studies I’ve done about local attorneys and the York County Bar Association. Mary Jane Yohe is sometimes referenced as the first woman member of the county bar. That honor would go to Sara H. C. Wertheimer, with Lancaster roots, who joined the York County Bar in 1940. Her name was on the bar’s roster, but she was no longer active in the county legal community in the late 1940s.
Yohe, a York Catholic graduate, certainly was the first native York County woman bar member, as one newspaper called her, and the only practicing woman bar association member from her admittance in 1949 to her untimely death in 1954. She packed much into her short life and did so despite a disabling teenage disease. Or perhaps because of that disease.
Ideal student at right time
Mary Jane Yohe was a member of the first York Junior College freshman class in 1941. That year, two cooperating schools — York County Academy and York Collegiate Institute — gained junior college status and would remain so until 1968 when freshmen entered the newly minted York College of Pennsylvania.
Yohe was the very type of student a fledgling junior college needed. She energized student life and rose to become a campus leader.
She was co-editor of the yearbook, The Tower; associate editor of the student newspaper, The York Collegian; representative on Student Council; president of Der Goethe Verein (German Club); and member of Lambda Sigma Chi and Glee Club. Her sophomore yearbook entry lists her engagement in 12 organizations in the two-year school.
The yearbook entry suggested she would study law and named “Dickinson in the future.”
In fact, her academic prowess was such that she was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania Law School after completing her junior and senior undergraduate years at Penn.
Her law school class included future members of the bar in York County: E. Eugene Shelley, Frank Boyle, John Rauhauser, John Miller and James Buckingham, the latter three became county judges years later.
In all these accomplishments, she served as a model of what a student at the young York Junior College could become, an achiever who could be held up as an example of the quality students who matriculated from its then-South Duke Street and East College Avenue campus.
Known as a tenacious researcher
Yohe returned to York County in 1949 – 75 years ago – law degree and a cane in hand and with purpose in her step.
In the community, she was a member and officer of the county Women’s Democratic Club, the Knights of Columbus Ladies Auxiliary and served on the Veterans Bonus Bureau. And she did not forget York Junior College, serving as the first president of the newly formed York Junior College alumni organization and served on the school’s board of trustees.
As an attorney in York’s respected Markowitz, Liverant and Boyle law firm, she was appointed solicitor of the York County recorder of deeds.
She became known as a keen and tireless researcher for litigators in her firm. Frank Boyle, the Boyle in her firm’s name, said in a “memorial minute” delivered in York County Court about her tenacity as a researcher: “Here she had no peer.”
And perhaps most significantly, she served on the Bar Association’s Legal Aid Committee and was instrumental in setting in motion legal services for low-income residents. As Boyle said, this work grew out of her interest in those whose economic position was less fortunate than her own.
Personality right for the times
Memorial Minutes were — and are — delivered in York County Court upon the death of members of the bar. Many are captured in the bar association’s book “Reflections at Journey’s End, ” and it is here that we learn about the legal community’s high view of Mary Jane Yohe.
Upon her death, an unusually large number of attorneys commented: Fifteen fellow bar members, including three judges, delivered their memories. Three themes emerged in their comments: Yohe’s winsome personality, the bar’s welcome of a woman attorney and her courage living and working with a disabling disease. In fact, the personality piece was key to the other two themes.
She was described as having a happy and sunny disposition, and when that was added to her brilliant legal mind, she gained immediate respect in the legal community.
Indeed, Judge Harvey Gross indicated that the local bar could be a tough place for a woman to practice, but local attorneys embraced her.
“That is not only a tribute to the Bar Association but it is a very high and distinct tribute to Mary Jane herself,” he said, “for I am sure that that reception might not have been accorded to many other women.”
Dillsburg’s Jane Alexander was admitted the York County Bar a year after Yohe’s death and remained the sole woman until the 1970s. Sheryl Ann Dorney became the first woman judge in 1987. Women made up 17% of the bar association's roster in 1991. In the early 2020s, women represented 39% of the roster.
The Memorial Minutes indicated that she battled the unspecified disease at age 15, or perhaps later, in her senior year at York Catholic. She was completely paralyzed, and no one knew whether she would walk again. But there she was three years after graduation making her mark on the York Junior College campus. If she was made for York Junior College, the new two-year school was there for her, giving her the ability to live at home and commute to classes.
As attorney E. Eugene Shelley said, the use of a cane and the “difficulty under which she labored” were the only indicators of her disability because she never spoke about it.
Judge Gross commented about one moment in which she particularly struggled: “The last time she was in my office she had to stop in the middle of sentences to get her breath, and then I said to other members of my staff when she left, ‘I’m afraid Mary Jane won’t be coming up here very long.’ ”
After several weeks in her final battle, she died at age 33.
Judge Walter Anderson believed Yohe deserved a special place in the “Hall of Fame when the history of the York County Bar Association is written.”
A “Hall of Fame” designation — appropriate posthumous honors from both York College and the York County Bar Association to fete this pioneering honors student and attorney — still is possible, 70 years after Mary Jane Yohe’s death.
Sources: York College of Pennsylvania Archives; York Daily Record files; “Reflections at Journey’s End, Memorial Minutes,” York County Bar Association, J. Ross McGinnis, compiler.
Public presentations
Jim McClure will present about "10 questions — and answers — about Elks 213 in York, Pa." at 7 p.m. May 9 at the Elks Lodge, 223 N. George St.; "1960s in York County: How This Tumultuous Decade Shaped Our Communities Today" at 11 a.m. May 13 at OLLI at Penn State York and on “Fascinating Things about York Haven” at 11 a.m. May 18 at the NeyChip History Center, 5 N Front St., York Haven.
Jim McClure is a retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Mary Jane Yohe remembered 75 years after beginning legal career
