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.”