Dave Wood

Memorial Day is almost upon us, and it reminds me of the days when I was a kid and marched to Lincoln Cemetery with the high school band and heard the American Legion commander read the names of the town citizens who had served in the Civil War to the present. I waited breathlessly until he got to the Spanish American War. He read one name: “James Lincoln Wood!”

And that was it. My great-uncle was the only guy in town who went off to this unfortunate war with Spain taking place in Cuba, the war that made Teddy Roosevelt famous. My Uncle Jim never got famous. He never even got to Cuba, because the Army fed him some Swift’s famous spoiled meat at boot camp in Poland, Tenn., and he almost died of food poisoning.

Although I was born after Great Uncle Jim died, I was always fascinated by his story and managed to pick up this and that about the farmer-carpenter from relatives who remembered him.  My grandpa told me that older brother Jim was kindly and generous, and when grandpa paid him a debt or for work received, “Jim always took my check and deposited it in my bank account!”  In my own father’s memoirs, Pa wrote about asking if he could purchase a Guernsey bull from a well-off farmer and pay it in installments. “Be damned if Pete said, ‘the bull is free,’ and then explained: ‘When I was a young man during World War I, it was hard to find help, so I hired your uncle Jim to help with haying, threshing and silo filling, and when I tried to pay him, he said, “Pay it forward, young man. Help out some young farmer when you can.’”

I also learned from the 20 years of Jim’s diaries that the heavy sled stored in the barn of the Wood ancestral home was built by Jim, who trained his father’s calves to tolerate its yoke. Also that Jim was a champion speller along with a classmate he called “Ollie Tull.”

And thereby hangs the real tale. Back in Camp Poland, Jim’s weight dropped to 100 pounds while he was being treated by a medic from Chicago. Jim began to recover, but the medic, who also partook of Swift’s poisoned meat, was dying. On his death bed he asked Jim to bring a message to his fiancé back in Chicago, and when Jim heard her name, he readily agreed. 

When Jim returned to Whitehall, he kept his promise and took the train to Chicago with the medic’s message. (That explains a box of Jim’s belongings that includes pamphlets on the necessity of atheism, a stack of Scientific Weekly magazines and his 1886 copy of Harvey’s English Grammar, as well as sheaves of programs from Chicago playhouses and concert halls all inscribed with different dates.)

So that was it! Jim had taken the medic’s fiancée for his own! Her name? Olive “Ollie” Tull, the very same Ollie as Jim’s spelling competitor those many years ago.

So farmer-carpenter Jim got hitched to the elegant Olive Tull, an educated teacher of piano in the metropolis further east. After a photograph-packed honeymoon to The Great Smokies, he brought her back to his farm outside Whitehall. Later they moved into a beautiful house on Main Street, one of the many Jim built when he wasn’t farming or helping some young farmer with silo filling.

By all accounts Olive Tull, whose father was the shoemaker in Whitehall and then moved back out east when everyone was shod, was quite something. She smoked cigarettes, was a gourmet cook (I own her first edition copy of the Fanny Farmer Boston School Cookbook), and she taught piano to the children of the lawyers, doctors and well-heeled citizenry of Whitehall. One of her pupils was my godmother, Evangeline Vold, the town dentist’s daughter, who spoke highly of Ollie’s polish and her insistence that Doc Vold cough up the coin to buy Evangeline the ten- volume hard bound copy of “The Ideal Home Music Library,” a collection that now resides on my wife’s bookcase.

Jim’s nephew Elmer told me that “Even during Prohibition, you could always depend on a highball or a cocktail if you visited Jim and Ollie’s home.” So that must have meant that the hard-bitten fallen away Baptist also had to learn how to play bridge.

My grandmother, Ollie’s sister-in-law, told me a tale which now can be told. “In the 1920s, the new doctor in town impregnated his new bride, year after year. Finally, during a hen party at Ollie’s, the weary wife asked Ollie: “You’ve been married for more than 20 years and have no children; please tell me your secret!” Ollie replied, “Simple. I take two aspirins before going to bed and NOTHING after.’”    

So perhaps great uncle’s sex life wasn’t all that great. But Jim kept by her side, even after Ollie was bedridden and required my mother, a nurse, to be around her full time. Jim in his 60s faithfully carried this woman who was, according to my father “very big,” out onto her porch swing every day until he died of a heart attack in 1933. Ollie died soon after.

All these details came flooding back to me when I read in my hometown news weekly in “From the Early Files” this account, dated May 5, 1898:

James Wood left last Friday . . . to enlist in the Minnesota National Guard. This young man is the first Whitehall citizen to offer his services to the government, but there are others who will go to the front in case Uncle Sam should need their help.

The rest of us Woods owe a great deal to James, who not only proved himself to be a a multi-talented and generous-hearted man, but who also holds up the family honor in Whitehall military history.