Dave Wood

Years back I was blessed with the opportunity to teach a teacher from Nigeria who had won an Elks scholarship to spend a year in the U.S. to learn our educational practices. On her first essay for me she wrote that she was awed to discover that no one in River Falls, not even the college president, had a servant. In Nigeria, she wrote, “everyone has a hired girl!”

I explained to her that in olden days when help was plentiful, lots of people, even relatively poor folks such as my family had at least one hired girl.

And my Grandma Wood, a newlywed who hired a Norwegian immigrant family’s daughter Louise to help her out on the farm, who early on in her service cried out “Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Wood!” she shouted, “There’s a tramp coming into the yard!” Grandma looked out to see an elderly man dressed in a sailor’s pea cap and shabby dogskin coat, smoking a clay pipe.

“That’s no tramp, Louise. That’s my father,” a Swede immigrant who owned hundreds of acres in a nearby township. Louise was a quick learner and stayed on to eventually marry Grandma’s older brother Hilmer. Good at settling in, she became what some Norwegians called The Queen of Hale Township.

A generation later, my father hired Mrs. Christianson to help my mother when she was great with child (me). At dinner, my father noticed the hiree was buttering both sides of her bread.  When asked why, she replied, “Ma told me you folks was real rich and probably buttered your bread on both sides, so I was just following suit.”

A generation later while I was growing up, my folks bought a restaurant and needed help to tend to their unruly brats. They hired a Polish farm girl, Monica, who relished the idea of living in a metropolis like Whitehall. She loved even more her bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s hidden under the kitchen sink, which she nipped on daily, not just for those troubling times of the month. The potion made her very merry and we hated to lose her after she went to a dance at Midway Pavilion, met a farmer who swept her off her feet and spent the rest of her life milking cows.

She was followed by Laura, the best of all. She played the oboe in the school band, was smart as a whip and helped me write a term paper on William Makepiece Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” for which I received the only “A” I ever earned in high school. Laura also taught me how to dance the waltz and two-step, after her younger sister agreed to accompany me to my first prom.

Laura was typical of the rural kids who came from large families and wanted to earn a high school diploma. Hired girls like my stepmother’s sisters, Palma, Alice, Florence, and Pauline, worked for room and board to be close to a high school. There were, of course, side benefits, i.e. their sister Lucille worked at the home of the banker, whom she discovered wore a girdle (tee-hee, but only told the sisters).

And all of them found husbands and lived happily ever after—which gives the lie to my Grandfather-in-law’s reason for denying his daughter (my mother-in-law) the opportunity to be a hired girl for a year, to save up the money to attend teacher training school: “No daughter of mine,” he declared, “is going to end up an old-maid school teacher!”