Helen Rennard wanted to be left alone. For most of her life, she succeeded.
Then everything spiraled out of control.
As she looked around her dilapidated home, did she comprehend the irony? She had worked as a house cleaner for some of the wealthiest families in Akron. Now her house was filled with trash.
At 80 years old, Rennard was ordered to vacate the crumbling building at 1641 E. Market St., which housing code authorities had condemned in 1980 as a public nuisance.
Some rooms were filled to the ceiling with decaying litter, broken furniture, empty bottles and old clothes. Other rooms contained dozens of plastic buckets collecting putrid water from the seeping roof. Rats gnawed at moldy piles of debris in the dank basement.
Rennard had boarded up the doors, so she entered the two-story frame house by climbing through a broken window. A postal carrier stopped delivering mail because the porch was collapsing; a wooden pole propped up the roof.
Still, Rennard wanted to live in the house. She battled the city for six years before receiving an eviction notice.
“They want to put me somewhere and lock the door and throw away the key,” she told the Beacon Journal in August 1980. “I’m not a kid. I can take care of myself.”
East Akron neighbors knew her as eccentric and reclusive. Rennard was known to rummage through trash bins and salvage food from garbage cans behind restaurants.
Living on monthly checks from Social Security, she padded her fixed income by holding yard sales. Some neighbors felt sorry for her and donated items for her to sell.
Since 1974, housing inspectors had asked the woman to repair the home, which stood alongside the railroad tracks west of Brittain Road. When the Akron Health Department condemned the building in March 1980, Rennard was ordered to vacate the premises, but she refused to leave. Electricity and plumbing services were turned off.
“We’d like to tear the house down,” John Armocida, director of the city housing division, told the Beacon Journal. “We’re concerned about the house falling down on her.”
Rennard paid no attention when a bench warrant was issued for her arrest in April. Officers arrived at her home in July, and told her she had the option of going to a local hospital for treatment of a skin condition or spending the night in the Summit County Jail. To the surprise of everyone, Rennard chose the barred cell.
“We shouldn’t have her here,” Summit County Sheriff’s Maj. Howard Taylor lamented at the jail.
The following day, deputies persuaded Rennard to transfer to the hospital, where she remained for three weeks. It was her first trip to a hospital in nearly 50 years. Heck, she hadn’t even taken any medicine since 1940.
Court-appointed guardian Scott Gordon and a few colleagues helped Rennard rummage through her house for belongings when she got out of the hospital in August.
Scattered among the debris were mementos from her sad, solitary life.
Rennard was the mother of three children: June, Robert and Dorothy. Her husband, Robert, a salesman, abandoned them in 1931 when they lived on Pocantico Avenue in Ellet.
“He liked to chase women and spend money,” Rennard explained. “He left four months before my last child was born. He joined the Navy and told them he wasn’t married.”
Rennard worked as a house cleaner for prominent families, but couldn’t afford to raise three children during the Great Depression. Her husband, who died in 1956, never paid any child support.
After careful deliberation, she placed her two daughters and son in the St. Vincent Orphanage in Columbus, where they remained for eight or nine years. She worked hard and sent modest payments to the orphanage, writing occasional letters to her children, but they never returned home to their mother. Upon adulthood, they moved out of state and had little contact with her.
In 1951, Rennard bought the home on East Market Street, paid it off by 1956 and lived there alone for nearly 30 years.
As she sifted through the cluttered house in 1980, she discovered a 1928 photograph of a smiling woman holding a baby girl in a bonnet. It was a picture of herself with her daughter June. What had happened to the past 50 years?
As workers helped Rennard sift through belongings, they were stunned to find secret caches of money. Piles of out-of-circulation currency and collectible silver coins were hidden in the debris. Rodents had nibbled some of the bills.
“I think she knew the money was there, but I don’t think she knew how much money,” said Gordon, the court-appointed guardian. “It was like Christmas. We found money everywhere.”
More than $85,000 — the equivalent of $240,400 today — was unearthed in the decaying house. In addition, Gordon found five bank books with deposits of more than $24,000 at local branches. Police kept a 24-hour guard as curious onlookers gathered outside the home of the supposedly destitute woman.
“I started hiding my money,” Rennard said. “I guess I forgot where it was.”
Declared incompetent to live on her own, the 80-year-old woman was placed at Country Place nursing home in Cuyahoga Falls. She had to admit that she liked the facilities of her new home, but she still wished she had her own place.
“I kind of like to move around,” she said. “I feel strong again.”
Rennard kept one final secret. She had terminal cancer.
In October 1980, two months after bidding farewell to her derelict house, Helen Rennard passed away at Country Place. The funeral was at Annunciation Catholic Church. She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery.
Her substantial estate was divided among her three adult children. They had kept in close contact with each other over the years and were shocked to learn of the inheritance from the mother they barely knew.
“She never showed any feelings as far as I was able to see,” said daughter June England, a resident of Sonoma, Calif., in 1980. “Perhaps she kept them hidden. She had a very hard life.”
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.