Leila Holterhoff

Leila S. Holterhoff was born in Dayton, Ohio and raised in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles,[1] the daughter of Godfrey Holterhoff Jr. and Louise Schaeffer Lewis Holterhoff. Her father was a railroad, oil, and banking executive.[2] Her aunt, Ida Holterhoff Holloway, was a notable painter based in Ohio.

Leila Holterhoff was blind from infancy. She attended the Marlborough School in Los Angeles. She studied piano as a girl, but concentrated on voice and languages when she traveled to Paris, Florence, and Berlin for further studies, especially with Edgar Stillman Kelley.[3] She also earned a California teaching certificate in Latin.[4]

Holterhoff performed to acclaim in Berlin in 1910.[5] In 1911 she gave a series of concerts to benefit the Grand Ducal Institute for the Blind.[6] On her return to North America, Holterhoff performed across the United States in 1910s, sometimes billed as "the Helen Keller of music.[7] After her Chicago debut at the Ziegfeld Theatre in 1917, where a reporter found "the quality of the voice is exceedingly sweet and this – coupled with an engaging gentleness of manner in the singer combines to make her thoroughly charming."[8]

Later in 1917, she gave a concert at Aeolian Hall in New York to benefit "blind soldiers in France".[9] She became interested in helping disabled veterans more directly.[10][11] After studying medicine and psychology at Columbia University and earning a medical degree in the 1920s, Leila Mosher earned another professional degree from the University of Vienna.[12][13] She co-authored a book in French with René Maublanc, on blindness. Using her fluency in European languages, she worked as a translator at the First International Conference for the Blind in New York in 1931, sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind.[14] Also in 1931, she also worked with the League of Nations in Geneva, for the International Bureau of Labor, on immigration issues.[12]

She was married twice, first to Bernard George Heyn in 1923;[15] they divorced in 1925.[16] Her second marriage was to Evan Royal Mosher by 1927.[10] She and Mosher adopted two children, Ann and Allen. Leila Holterhoff Mosher died in 1968, aged 82 years, in Coronado, California.

• Leila H. Mosher's gravesite, on Find a Grave.