Great-great Grandma Ida Chetister

"Now that I think about it," Grandma Eckman told me as she recounted her history, “I’m pretty sure Ralph wanted me to be more like his mother.”

“What was she like?” I asked, for I had no memory and little knowledge of my great-great-grandmother Ida Chetister.

(Born Ida Geringer to Lewis B. Geringer and Mary Ann Woodring in Wauseon, Ohio, in 1870, she married Louis A. Chetister on May 2, 1891 in Fulton, Ohio. They had two surviving sons: Ralph (born 1892) and Walter (born 1896). In 1918, Ida moved to Toledo with her husband. He died  in 1949, and she died in December of 1963, three weeks before I was born. She was 93 years old.)

“Well, darling,” Grandma Eckman answered carefully, “I believe we should never speak ill of the dead, but I’m an old lady and I don’t have anything to lose either. So let me be clear and impartial. As much as I can. She kept a spotless house. She did laundry every Monday and the ironing on every Tuesday. She didn’t approve of sweets of any kind, so when they were younger, your Grandpa Chetister and Uncle Walter had to sneak them. She would make a pie here and there, but her crusts were always dry. That’s why your Grandpa Ed and even your father, I think, always eat pie in a bowl drowning in milk. Her hair was always tidy and pulled tightly into a bun. And she always had a cup of coffee at the ready but rarely finished more than two a day. And that’s pretty much all she drank. Also, she didn’t like to brush her teeth, a habit your Grandpa Chetister also adopted.”

She paused for a few moments, and I had difficulty ascertaining if she had run out of memories or was simply tired. Perhaps, I thought, she had run out of good things to say. After all, Grandma Chetister could not have been happy to have her son divorced by a woman who would go on to live the kind of life Grandma Eckman had.

Then her eyes opened wide.

“You know,” Grandma Eckman added, “Ida was a member of the Royal Neighbors of America.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“As I recall, and honestly, darling, I don’t remember a lot about this organization, it was a fraternal organization for women and connected somehow to life insurance.” Grandma Eckman worked hard to remember this. “You see, back in those days, there really wasn’t much in the way of life insurance or benefits for women. Not many had jobs, they couldn’t take out loans to buy a house or car or anything. And too many lost everything when their husbands died. Women needed to create their own ways of taking care of themselves. But also, as a fraternal organization, the Royal Neighbors did these activities to help women – poor women, women hurt by men, sick women – that sort of thing. Ida told me when I was still married to Ralph that I should join—and my mother, too, but we didn’t. ‘A woman needs to take care of herself,’ she told us, and she believed it. But at the time, I was a new wife and mother. I thought I had the world by a string. And Ralph, like his own father, thought it was a bunch of foolishness.”

Then Grandma Eckman became very quiet.

“He thought a lot of things were foolish.”

Crying babies get held

Leta and Ralph's little boy Dale was a fussy baby. Like most men of that era, Ralph left nearly all of the child rearing to Leta, but he did on occasion want to hold the little guy and whisper to him about baseball games and fishing. However, Dale seemed to reject his father’s attention. He could be calm and serene at the start, but once he realized that he had been pulled from his mother’s arms and left to his father’s, even with Ralph’s soft voice, he would immediately begin to cry. If he was unsatisfied, the cry would escalate to a scream until the only thing Ralph could do was hand him back and gruffly leave the room.

For her part, Leta devoted herself to Dale, tending to his every whim and whimper. While her physical connection to her husband waned, she lavished all of her attention and affection on the little boy.

“You need to let that baby cry it out,” her mother-in-law Ida told her one Sunday afternoon when Dale was only a few months old. Leta, Ralph and their children Vivian (aged three) and Dale joined Leta’s in-laws and Ralph’s perpetually single brother Walter for dinner. They had concluded the meal and the dishes. The men were in the living room planning their baseball game attendance for the season, and the women were sitting at the dining room table. Vivian was taking her nap.

Initially, Leta put Dale down on Ida’s bed with his sister, but he immediately began to fuss. Leta sat with him for a few minutes, stroking his cheek and cooing motherly love. This put Vivian instantly to sleep, but Dale refused to be coddled in this way and expressed his displeasure with loud wailing. Anxious about her mother-in-law’s convictions about stern child-rearing, Leta tried to mollify her infant’s displeasure by rocking him gently on the bed. But he struggled and screamed even louder. With a quick look at Vivian who seemed to be getting restless, too, Leta picked up the squalling infant and rockingly walked through the house and into the kitchen. He almost immediately quieted.

Ida shook her head.

“Vivian was sleeping,” Leta protested.

“We could have moved him to Walter’s bed,” Ida answered, “and closed the door. He would have fallen asleep eventually. They always do.”

Leta continued to gently rock her son.

“A baby that’s constantly held will turn out bad,” Ida continued. “Spoiled, not able to take care of himself.  You don’t let him sleep in the bed with you and Ralph, do you?”

Even Leta was shocked by that. “No, of course not.”

“So what do you do when he cries at night. I’m sure he cries at night.”

“I get up and walk and rock him until he falls back asleep.”

“He’s got you trained,” Ida said finally, turning her attention back to her needlepoint.

Leta’s mother was not much better.

“You baby him too much, Leta,” she would repeat. “He needs to learn to fall asleep on his own. You can’t hold and rock him forever.”

“Of course not, Mother,” Leta snapped.

“How on earth do you accomplish anything if you’re holding him all the time?” her mother persisted.

“We manage.”

“I just don’t see how,” Julia concluded but then turned back. “What does Ralph think of all of this?”

“He understands,” Leta replied. “At least he doesn’t have a screaming baby keeping him up or distracting him.”

“And Vivian?”

“What about her?”

“Doesn’t she get jealous? Act out?” Julia suggested.

Leta thought for a moment. She had heard that sometimes older siblings became disrespectful and jealous of a new baby, but at least in her own house, this was far from the case. Vivian adored her brother and was very helpful in taking care of him.

“No, she likes him,” Leta answered.

“Well,” Julia said finally, “I still think you’re hurting him. Mark my words: All this babying is bound to result in some damage.”

Dale’s crying tapered off over the next several months, but still Leta continued to devote herself to him.

New gloves, part two

Leta wanted a pair of ladies' dress gloves for her fourteenth birthday. When she told her mother, the older woman looked her in the eye and said, “You’re not old enough.”

For Julia, that was the end of the conversation, but Leta felt the sting of her mother’s comment deeply. She decided then and there that someone was going to give her dress gloves for her birthday, even if that someone was herself. When she went to work at the hat shop, the next afternoon, she priced the item. They were more expensive than she thought, but she was undeterred.

Later that evening while her family was  in the living room, Leta stole into her bedroom and retrieved her small tin box from where it was hidden in her larger box of dolls. Even though she had outgrown playing with them a few years ago, she convinced her mother that the toys had sentimental value, and she wanted to share them with her own daughter some day. However, her primary reason was to designate a safe place for her secret money.

As she was still young, had not been working very long and liked the chocolate-peppermints that the grocer recently began to sell, her financial reserve was quite small, not enough to purchase the gloves she wanted. Still, she was close. She went from the bedroom to the living room with her slate to review her financial capability to  purchase the gloves for herself.

“What are you doing, Leta?” her sister Louise asked after a time.

“Math,” Leta answered without looking up.

“Math?” her mother inquired. “I thought you finished your homework already?”

“Yes, I did, mostly,” Leta answered vaguely, for she did not want to lie to her mother, nor did she want her mother to become too suspicious. “I just wanted to figure out one more problem.”

“There’s not a lot of light, so don’t strain your eyes,” Julia warned.

“I won’t. I’m writing big.”

“Plus, I need you to stitch the sleeves on that blouse for Mrs. Wilbur.”

“Yes, Mother.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Leta completed her mathematical task and created her plan. If she focused and took on a couple of side income-earning projects, she could purchase the gloves within a month.

While her birthday had come and gone, the desire for a fine pair of ladies’ gloves had not, and on a bright spring morning, Leta put on her gloves for school.

“It was a mistake,” she told me over seventy years later. “I went to school with country girls and boys who had no interest in sophisticated ladies’ gloves. They laughed and teased me for trying to be better than they were.”

“That must have been rough,” I said sympathetically.

“It was, my darling, but I wouldn’t let those mean, rough children break my character. I wore those gloves the entire day. And at the end of it, I think a lot of them sort of admired me for not cracking under the pressure.”

“Grandma, that’s terrific!” I exclaimed.

“It also gave me an advantage with some of the older boys,” she added. “They started to look at me differently. Of course, this made my mother and your Uncle Aaron very anxious. And truthfully some of the boys that were attracted to me were rough and vulgar—farmers, workmen and such. But I learned that I deserved to be treated like a lady.”

New gloves, part one

After David and Julia divorced, and David left to seek his fortune in the West, Julia and their three daughters were forced to fend for themselves financially. This meant that each of the women would have to contribute any earnings to pay for their household expenses. When they were young, they mostly helped their mother with the various jobs she took—laundry, sewing, helping the other farm women with their canning and gardening—but as they grew older, they were able to secure their own employment and income. Even Leta who was only five when her father left was trained to sew and developed a delicate stitch perfect for certain needs.

While Julia utilized most of her daughters’ income to support the household, she did permit each of them to keep a portion for her own personal needs and interests. They had designed a family budget and each person’s responsibility for meeting it. Leta’s was a fixed amount. After she contributed to the household fund, the remaining income was hers. Like her mother, she was cautious and somewhat frugal with her finances. She dedicated a portion to her savings, which she kept in a little box under her bed.

“A woman should always have her own money,” Julia told all three of her daughters shortly after their father abandoned them. As he was the principal income-earner, his abrupt departure left the mother and three young girls with no specific income and several bills, including two accounts he had opened without his wife’s knowledge. The mother and her girls were sitting at the breakfast table with the stack of papers in front of them. Julia had just totaled the debt and monthly payment requirement. With a grim face, she went into a cupboard and removed a small tin. She put the tin on the table and took off the lid to reveal a stash of bills and coins.

“Always,” Julia repeated for emphasis and set about fulfilling her immediate financial obligations.

Although very young at the time, Leta took her mother’s words to heart, as did her sisters, and all three immediately selected small tins or boxes as containers for their own savings.

Sometimes maintaining this reserve was challenging for Leta. She liked pretty things—hats, dresses, jewelry, scarves, shoes, underclothes—and had a rather impulsive nature. So she developed an alternative savings, a pool of money for more immediate purchases. Having this in addition to her tin of emergency money was quite challenging, but she was determined to make it work. When the desire to purchase a particular item came upon her, she would learn the cost and go to this fund. As she regularly contributed to it, sometimes she could purchase the item right away; other times, she would have to wait until she had amassed the needed amount.

Just before her fourteenth birthday, Julia asked Leta what gift would she like to celebrate the day. Initially, the question surprised the girl. Birthday celebrations were rare in the Scott household. Julia had always called them an extravagance that they could not afford. However, she would prepare the celebrant’s favorite meal and leave a few pieces of candy at the birthday child’s place setting, enough candy for the child to have two for herself and one for everyone else in the household. The siblings never considered giving each other gifts. That luxury was reserved for Christmas when they would exchange home-made presents—stockings, handkerchiefs, scarves. Before he left them, their brother Fred would carve wooden animals that they would add to their Noah’s Ark collection. Only Aaron would purchase items, but still these were always practical or needed.

Julia’s seeming to break the family birthday tradition by asking Leta if she wanted something special was startling, and at first Leta did not know how to respond.

“Are you thinking?” Julia asked after a few moments of silence. The mother always asked this question to apply pressure for an answer, and Leta knew she had to respond immediately.

“Gloves,” Leta blurted.

“Gloves?” her mother repeated in surprise. “But it’s going on spring, and you got new gloves at Christmas. What on earth will you do with a new pair of gloves?”

“No, Mother,” Leta clarified, “I mean, a pair of white dress gloves, like the ladies wear, like you wear for church, only white.”

Julia stopped everything and devoted her entire attention to her daughter.

“You’re not old enough.”

To be continued.