Dave Wood

With my wife and me bereft of both mothers and offspring, Mother’s Day somehow gets swept under the rug in our household. But as the nostalgia of old age creeps over us, I think more and more about the aunties who blessed my life with such great and glorious profusion. My late mother left me her four sisters who never forgot I was their nephew. And to them I dedicate this Mother’s Day column.

It began with the youngest, Wyliss, who drove out to the farm in her sleek black Buick to tell me my mother had passed on and my father would be bringing her back from the sanitarium in Oconomowoc where she died.

I sobbed on the brown mohair sofa as she held my hand and hugged me. “What am I gonna do now?” I choked.

“You are coming to Whitehall with me and you’ll be staying with me and my in-laws until we can work things out.”

Wyliss — everyone called her Illie because no one could figure out how to pronounce that name—was a classy dame. Cute as a bug, a classy dresser, who wore tailored slacks to work at the egg processing station. We lived in an elegant old home full of antiques taken care of by my new GREAT aunt Floy, who descended from the Breed family, whose hill in Boston was known as Bunker. A kind lady, she toddled off to the bakery to buy me sweet rolls, a treat I had never tasted. On my birthday, I came down with the mumps and Floy presented me with a gift I never could have hoped for, a Classic Comic that cost ONE dollar. It was the famous publisher’s version of the Holy Bible in glorious color. So I learned about all the colors of Joseph’s coat.

And Aunt Illie, what a firecracker. Despite her 10 hours every day at the business, she took me to the Pix Movie theatre, a block away every time the program changed. And that was three times a week.

Suppers were a puzzle because there was always meat on the table and everyone washed it down with black tea. One afternoon she returned with two 2-quart Mason jars of home canned meatballs, explaining that she had visited her older sister Hazel and found them in the garbage can. “We’re out of meat ration coupons, and Hazel is so fussy, I thought I’d try one. Then, if I don’t get sick, these will tide us over until we get more coupons.” She didn’t get sick, so we dined on Hazel’s wonderful meatballs for weeks.

We didn’t have to wait long for meat coupons, because soon the war was over, a wonderful gift to be sure, but it meant that the family lost its government contract with the army for processed eggs. It didn’t take long for the egg market to crash and the egg processing station to go belly up. Illie didn’t flinch and took a salaried job candling eggs for a competitor across town. The job didn’t stop her from picking me up at school every afternoon and treating me to a lemon phosphate at Fortun’s soda fountain. Illie’s husband Gene came back from the Navy, and I moved in with my grandparents, as Uncle Gene tried his hand at selling insurance, then revived his skills as a shoemaker, which had been his father’ occupation. Unfortunately, post-war Americans bought new shoes when the old ones wore out.

So in their 40s they bit the bullet and applied for jobs at Southern Colony Training School in Union Grove, which served kids and adults with serious physical and mental deformities, and where they distinguished themselves as kind caretakers, who loved their charges, according to a witness, (“not all aides did” he whispered). I can’t help thinking they saw the kids as replacement for their sickly daughter Patty Jean, who died of convulsions at age three, grieving the entire household in 1942.

And so it was a sad day when I came home from college to attend the auction, where all those beautiful examples of 19th century furniture (I loved great Aunt Floy’s platform rocker!) were sold for a song to help pay off the debt they acquired after the egg crash. Floy was lodged in a rental room, the house sold to the bank, unceremoniously torn down to make a bigger bank parking lot, and the lovely old house and its backroom that housed Whitehall’s first wheelwright in 1860 was brushed into a forgotten chapter of my hometown.

Folks in town opined that the couple, after living the high life for most of their marriage, would not last in the fretful world of Southern Colony. Folks in town were wrong. When I graduated from college, Illie sent me an airline ticket from Eau Claire to Milwaukee. After they picked me up they spent a week enthusiastically showing me around Southern Colony, where they were excited about their work and new life. They stayed on for years and returned home to bury Illie’s husband and pay off the remaining debts. Illie didn’t come back in that old black Buick, but in a brand new Cadillac. You can’t keep a good woman down.

I’ll stop here, but I can’t let this go until I give fair shrift to Illie’s unique sisters, who contributed wonderful things to the life of this semi-orphan. Till next week.

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715 426 9554.