Dave Wood

When I was growing up before and during World War II budgets were tight in our family and gift giving was catch as catch can, as World War II store shelves were bare. Nevertheless, I received gifts I well remember.

One great gift came my way when Santa came to our apartment on Graham Avenue in Eau Claire. It was Christmas Eve and I was quarantined with measles. “Ho ho ho,” Santa chuckled as he presented me with a shiny new tricycle and a big hug. Santa’s aroma was incredibly pungent, and my youthful nose picked up scents of eggnog, bourbon whiskey and Harvester cigars as well as the acrid odor of the inside of a car tire. Then he drove out of sight, leaving me with a question that still lingers. Why did Santa smell just like my Uncle Floyd, who was a foreman at the Gillette Rubber Company?

But these days what I continually go back to is a small glass-doored bookcase which contains old and dusty books given and received by members of my family. Not great books of the western world, but books I cherish with titles you’ve probably never heard of.

One book was re-given to me by my great grandpa’s granddaughter Elsie Wood. At first it seemed a strange choice for the 85-year-old pioneer who probably wasn’t much of a reader. So I read it, only to find that Elsie was spot-on for handing it on. “Vandermark’s Folly” by Herbert Quick, Bobb-Merrill 1922, tells of a pioneer hero who duplicated almost perfectly the life of my great grandpa.

Next came a book belonging to my maiden lady cousin Elsie Wood, a bestseller by Wisconsin feminist author Zona Gale and Progressive party supporter given to her at Christmas by James Blaine, former Wisconsin governor, senator, Elsie’s law partner, and rumored by Elsie’s brother to have a closer relationship than that with sister Elsie. Hmm.

My grandpa had received popular teenage books, like my treasured “Battleship Boys in Foreign Service,” a 19th century thriller about two teenagers who enlist in the navy to fight American enemies in France. An exciting read for a kid who never got further than St. Paul.

My mother Florence Back cut her reading teeth on a book her mother gave her when she was a teen. “Jed the Poorhouse Boy” by the very popular adventure romance writer Horatio Alger. It seems the wrong book for a wide-eyed farm lass, but her mother Allie Beswick Back was widowed, had five kids to support and a big farm to run, which probably occasioned her gloomy perspective. 

But her cheerier daughter-in-law Myra sent me Allie’s homemade cookbook, a ragged handwritten tablet which contained advice I’ve actually used: “To thicken tomato ketchup, lest you use up all of your tomatoes to make a single condiment relish, toss in a few cored and peeled apples and they won’t be apparent in the red sauce. IT WORKED!

Despite the grim introduction to books, my mother continued to read for the rest of her life, books like “Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm” by Kate Douglas Wiggin. Mom loved the novel “Gone with the Wind” and was such a fan of the Civil War novel that she took me as a toddler to see the movie when it finally came to town but had to leave at intermission when I screamed at the moment Scarlett O’Hara Butler swore “I’ll never be hungry again!!” Mom was reading Gene Fowler’s “Good Night Sweet Prince,” a biography of John Barrymore, the week before she died in 1945.

When that happened, her sisters took over my literary world. Aunt Wyliss giving me Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty,” a deluxe edition of the Holy Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red. I confess I liked better the version from my aunt’s mother, a most kindly and loving woman: a very thick Classic Comic of the Holy Bible which cost ONE DOLLAR.

 Wyliss’s wonderful sister Doree flooded me from faraway Black River Falls with hardbound editions of Kipling and Twain classics, which were much appreciated. But on the Christmases when Doree was having “one of her spells,” I received books meant for older readers, which I secretly admired even more. One was “Glencannon,” a raucous adventure of a drunken tugboat captain. Another, “The G-String Murders” by stripper and sometime novelist Gypsy Rose Lee. 

Merry Christmas and Happy Reading!