Dave Wood

WhenI began reading my great-grandpa’s 8,905-word 27-volume daily diary, I had to conclude that his neighborhood was totally populated by a pack of “holier than thou’s” who prayed and went to church three days a week. And that the diarist himself was an avowed Baptist, a builder and pillar of his faith. But as I pondered his daily entries, I learned the whole truth. At the end of my mission I discovered what Dave’s wife had written to correct the local paper when it claimed Dave was a “lifelong Christian.” “Not so,” she wrote. “In his earlier days on Sundays he sent me and the boys to church with the hired man while he sat home and read novels and political magazines.” 

So Dave wasn’t as pure as the driven snow until late in life when an evangelist from Ellsworth converted him to the Way, The Truth and The Life. Yes, from Ellsworth! As I dug further in the diary and asked old-timers who were acquainted with Dave, I learned that there were plenty of rapscallions in Whitehall who did far more unchristian things than stay home from church on Sunday.

There was a business competitor named Ed Southworth, the local Cargill dealer that folks around town claimed, “Ed was so crooked, he’d steal a hot stove without gloves.” After hearing that Ed was caught stealing firewood from his next-door neighbor I was convinced. I also heard from a relative that my Great Grandpa Chester Beswick sold his fall oats crop to Ed, then couldn’t find his pocket watch. But after he purchased from Ed fancy seed oats, he found his watch when he poured a gunny sack of “fancy” seed oats into his seeder and out popped the watch.

And there was also the town constable, Joe Ellison, who was married to my grandpa’s crippled and feeble cousin whom my nurse mother cared for. When she opened the windows for the ailing old lady (standard operating procedure in caring for pneumonia patients), Joe hollered to my mom. “Goddamn me, Poodie,” (Joe could never figure out how to pronounce Mom’s name:  Pody with a long O) “I don’t mind you freezing the old darling to death, but now we’ll have to crack her into pieces to get her out the door to get her to the funeral parlor.”

One day he ran into my Grandpa Ralph Wood. In his youth Joe had been a sheepherder in Montana. He had left the sheep behind but brought home his colorful language when it came to expressing sympathy for the recent loss of Grandpa Ralph’s mother. “Goddamn me, Ralph. Sorry I missed the funeral, but when I heard of Grandma’s passing, I cried tears as big as golden horse turds!” 

Because of his colorful language he was often called before the female-dominated city council where Mrs. Melby, the banker’s elegant wife, implored him to clean up his language, especially around her children. Hat in hand, a tear (probably large as a golden turd) in his watery old eye, he pledged that henceforth his tongue would be pure as the driven snow. Council women Melby and Southworth thanked him for his cooperation and dismissed him. He meekly backed out the council door, but quickly returned for a second farewell: “But damn me, ladies and gents, you don’t realize how mean those little sonsabitches can be when they bear down on you!!!”

That outburst was an obvious reference to a long-standing tradition each Halloween when the youth of our fair city waited for Joe to partake of using facilities at the old outhouse behind Erickson’s store and then tip it over on its only door.

I guess that’s enough rapscalliana for one column. Happy Halloween!