—J. B. Lippincott corporate history,privately published (1967) The Lippincott editors who assembled to meet Nelle were all men except one: the vice president, a woman in her early sixties dressed in a business suit, with her steel-gray hair pulled tightly back. Her name was Theresa von Hohoff—but she preferred the less Teutonic-sounding “Tay Hohoff.”1 Her voice was raspy from too many cigarettes and her eyesight was failing, but her associates knew her as “a powerful gray-haired lady who knew her own mind” and spoke frankly.2 Hohoff had been raised a Quaker in a multigenerational home in Brooklyn where “thee” and “thou” were used.3 She attended the Brooklyn Friends School, and the Quakers’ social consciousness had never left her. Outside the office she was completing a book of her own, A Ministry to Man (1959), a brief biography praising John Elliot Lovejoy—her ideal of a social reformer. Elliot was a descendent of Elijah Lovejoy, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, because of his editorials condemning slavery.
