Dave Wood

The Beautiful Wife and I recently sloughed off months of depression worrying about the upcoming presidential election. We’re sad, but glad that Joe Biden bowed out, and also joyous that Harris’s running mate is Tim Walz, a plain-speaking pol with a sharp wit to boot, and like both of us, a teacher. When a reporter asked him why he looked older than his 60 chronological years he quickly replied, “Because as a teacher I served as a high school home room monitor for 20 years!” As a one-time hall monitor and with next year’s schooldays on our doorstep, I’m gonna tell you about B.W.’s Aunt Elsie Pirsig, who taught for years in rural schools near Gov. Tim Walz’s own school. Her building had no homeroom because it was a one roomer!

Elsie was a Pirsig, a family of various talents which sprung up from Blue Earth. When author Louise Erdrich’s father Ralph discovered Ruth’s maiden name, he exclaimed that “When I taught in Blue Earh and Elmore, Ascher Pirsig made the best moonshine in the county.” 

On the other side of the law was Elsie’s cousin Maynard Pirsig, former Dean of the U of M law school and Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court and an author of several books, like his son Robert Pirsig, who wrote the cult classic, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

Elsie chose a different vocation, riding herd on eight grades of rustics warmed by a pot-bellied stove in the corner of a tiny school room. One member of her herd was Elmore’s only vice president Walter Mondale. Fortunately she also sometimes put pen to paper and was once published on the op-ed page of the Minneapolis Tribune, a hilarious account in which she related the trials and triumphs about being stranded overnight in her schoolroom with all her students after the horrific Armistice Day Blizzard of 1941. She was a tough cookie, despite her slender form, and when passages to the twin outhouses behind the school were too perilous to traverse, she hung a curtain in the cloakroom to separate the sexes, sent one group to opposite end while one gender and then the next managed to get their jobs done. And well they needed to, since they were all stranded by the blizzard through the night, and Elsie managed to get them all fed by gathering up and divvying anything the students had left over from lunch, supplementing that with the split pea soup supplied by the government.

I recently discovered among her affects a diary she had begun in 1942, picking up where Armistice Day left off. It should suffice to confirm rural school adventures hadn’t improved much:

Sunday, January 4, 1942 — Wowsie! Was it ever cold this morning. Walter’s (her older brother) thermometer says 30 below, Otto’s (her cousin) said 32. Walter couldn’t get either car started, so Jack (the hired man) hitched up the team and pulled the green car. They got it started and began working on mine, pulled it all the way to Otto’s and got it running 

Monday, January 5 — My school was zero when I arrived at 7:30. I made a really big fire and got it up to 70 when the children got there. My floor was nicely oiled and the blackboard was (recently painted) black. I hope there will be no more complaints about not being able to read the blackboard. 

Tuesday, January 6 — Another terrifically cold day. My car wouldn’t start again so I took the green one but forgot to change my suitcase over and worry that I might have to stay overnight again at the school for the snow is already drifting badly. Selmer (school board member?) said it would be ok to go ahead and get supplies we need for cooking hot lunch in school. We’re getting the extra commodities, and the children are bringing potatoes and a nickel a week to supplement the program. Selmer came again around noon for his children and said others would be arriving for theirs and that roads are so bad the school would be closed for the rest of the week. (Wowsie!)

Wednesday, January 7 — Today topped the previous highs for coldness. Walter and I worked on the cars until noon when they both started, and we went to the courthouse. Irene got nine cans of beans and a big box of nice apples. When I get mine, I hope I don’t get more beans, which I got in December. I’d prefer grapefruit juice.

So you see, we breed our school teachers tough and resourceful in Minnesota. Ruth’s Aunt Elsie, the teacher cum cook, cum weather forecaster, cum board painter, car mechanic and commodities officer who soldiered on during that icy cold winter of long ago at a little school near the little town in Minnesota, appropriately called Frost(!) until she earned her M.A. and got a job in Faribault where the classrooms were heated and they plowed the streets. I think Walz has earned his stripes too.