Money dissolved through the ages

Lavish lifestyles consumed the Campbell steel fortune.
By MARALINE KUBIK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Steel transformed Youngstown into an industrial center at the turn of the last century, and the pioneers who spearheaded the development of the industry became some of the wealthiest families in the country.
James A. Campbell, co-founder of Youngstown Sheet & amp; Tube Co., was one the richest men in Ohio, collecting annual salaries of up to $250,000, even during the Great Depression when most Americans were unemployed and scrambling for the most menial jobs.
What became of his fortune is something most, if not all of Campbell's descendants have pondered, said Susan Lopez, 53, one of the industrialist's great-granddaughters.
"They say it takes three generations to burn through a family fortune: One generation to make it, one to enjoy it and one to spend the last of it. (I think that is the saying.) That is certainly the case in our family," Lopez said.
Lopez, who was put up for adoption at birth, has been tracing her birth family's history and recently discovered that her birth mother, Louise Campbell, James A. Campbell's granddaughter, was an heiress.
Emphasizing that she is not an expert and certainly cannot speak for any of the other Campbell descendants, Lopez shared her ideas with The Vindicator about what became of the family fortune.
First, Lopez stressed, no one event or single family member is responsible for the evaporation of the Campbell steel fortune; many factors were responsible.
Untimely deaths
The greatest impact to the family fortune, Lopez speculated, were the deaths of the family's primary breadwinners, James A. Campbell and his only son, Louis, died in 1933 and 1935, respectively.
Uretta, James' wife, died two weeks after her husband, one of their two daughters, Rebecca, died one year earlier, and Cordelia, Louis' wife, died in 1937. Their deaths and the fact that so many family members died within a few years of one another "impacted the lives of the survivors irreparably," Lopez continued.
But even before James died, the family fortune may have started to shrink.
Bad business
In the 1920s, James agreed to finance construction of the Youngstown City Club, Lopez said. After the stock market crash of 1929 and the onslaught of the Great Depression, he was forced to sell stock in the club at "rock-bottom prices to complete the project," she said, and the family fortune suffered.
The Depression also slowed production -- and profits -- at Youngstown Sheet & amp; Tube, and the value of the Campbell family holdings, primarily steel-related equities, plummeted. The value of the family's limited real estate holdings also dropped, Lopez noted.
Some assets were sold, she continued, but Depression-era prices brought a fraction of their former value.
Legal fees for a long legal battle related to the proposed merger of Bethlehem Steel and Youngstown Sheet & amp; Tube in the years immediately preceding James' death also reduced the family fortune, she said.
Spending habits
The eighth child of a butcher, James built his own wealth, Lopez reflected, but had no experience in how to maintain it. Referring to her great-grandfather as "nouveau riche," she said, "There was no family tradition passed down through generations of never touching the principal or of building assets and avoiding ostentation." He also failed to diversify, she said, and spent and allowed his family to spend as if the inflow of money would never end.
While Campbell's passion was his business, he doesn't seem to have been as astute at building personal wealth, and his heirs "probably cared more about what the money could buy," she continued, and maintained very lavish lifestyles. James' daughter Helen Marie and granddaughters, Uretta and Louise, "spent their way through Europe, traveling for months," she said. "They would buy sports cars, stay at the Ritz ..."
Lopez knows this from reading her aunt Uretta's diary.
"They were not brought up with 'old money' prudence, and some had to learn the hard way in later years as the money began to dwindle away."
Although Campbell earned $250,000 a year, his estate was worth only $407,272 at his death, $148,906 in real estate and $220,062 in stocks, Lopez pointed out.
After his death, his family continued to live much as they had. For years his daughter Helen Marie lived at the family home, Elmcourt, a custom-built mansion designed by one of the nation's most respected architects. Maintaining the house and acres of landscaped gardens undoubtedly consumed some of the family's other assets, Lopez said.
Divorces aplenty
Also detracting from the family fortune was the fact that few men were born into the family who could further the family business or an enterprise of their own, and the Campbell women failed to marry and stay married to men with money, Lopez explained.
James' daughter Rebecca married into other affluent families, including the Stambaugh family of Youngstown, but divorced twice before marrying her third husband.
"Helen Marie married an Italian count, which boosted the prestige of the family but not its fortune," Lopez continued.
The next generation of Campbell women, including Lopez's birth mother, also failed to marry and stay married to men whose own fortunes would contribute to their wealth.
Uretta and Louise, the daughters of James' only son, were married two and three times, respectively. Although they inherited enough of the family fortune to live comfortably without ever having to work outside the home, they had to live modestly in their later years, Lopez said.
At one point, Louise, Lopez's birth mother, lived in a trailer with her four older children.
"I know of no marriages in my mother's generation which did not end in divorce. To my knowledge, James' grandchildren's marriages pretty much all ended that way," Lopez said.
As for their children, Lopez said, "All of us great-grandchildren are professionals or entrepreneurs or both. We are making a modest success of ourselves. We have all done fairly well for ourselves," she continued, "but are, at most, upper middle class professionals, not heirs and heiresses."
Lopez has master's degrees in multicultural education and public administration, speaks fluent Spanish and teaches English as a second language at a community college in California.