Dave Wood

In the first half of the last century, roles of women changed rapidly. Rural women slopped the hogs, collected the outpouring of eggs from her chickens, which financed the rural church down the road where she served as its social secretary, and served up five cooked meals a day. City wives, who could afford it, dined at chic bistros and sipped Martinis served by the waitresses who needed the gratuities and probably poured down a few themselves when they got home from work and dove into the latest issue of “Ladies’ Home Journal.”  

A glib generalization you may think, but I well remember my late mother Florence Back, who had the all-too brief opportunity to sup at both tables before she died in 1945. She was born a farm girl and enjoyed the support of several farms settled by her pioneer ancestors. She was a registered nurse who interned in Chicago and told me exciting stories of crime and corruption in that city that never sleeps. She returned home and married my father, who was a right dapper gent at the time, and they Charlestoned  and Blackbottomed through western Wisconsin while he managed one of her mother’s farms at the start of the Great Depression, and she began learning what farm wives needed to know, like supervising the hired girls and socializing with other neighbor ladies and tending to the needs of her work-weary spouse. 

Not too much later the Depression managed to hit everyone, including farmers in our area. My father bit the bullet and landed a union job at Gillette in Eau Claire and moved to the metropolis. He worked in a giant sweatshop where, he told me, he often sobbed in private when he returned from a 10-hour day, Monday through Saturday. 

But pork chops were a nickel a pound, and they struggled along, saving every penny until they had amassed a bankroll that enabled them to rent a foreclosed farm ($50 per year) with no electricity, and a three-hole privy, a far cry from the modern plumbing—and the modernized life— in their Eau Claire apartment at the foot of Plank Hill.  

I believe the married life my mother enjoyed most were those years spent in Eau Claire’s Third Ward, near her well-placed sister (who had already shucked the family’s Methodism in favor of the Episcopal creed of the “Frozen chosen,” which replaced the should’ves and ought-to’s of the Methodist teaching.)

But my mother had no such modern notion as putting her foot down, so we packed up the ’32 Pontiac and headed down Highway 53 on our way once again to a farm in Blair. Gone was the glitter and glamour of Barstow Street, the town’s lumber barons mansions, the steak dinners at Red Stuever’s on the Chippewa River at the edge of town, and an even classier new joint whose owner was a guy named Austin Johnson who had recently hired a Chinese chef whose output earned Austin’s White House a  “Duncan’ Hines Recommends” rating.

Gone as well were the possibilities of a new dress from Samuelson’s, a pair of stylish brown and white pumps from one of downtown’s fashionable bootery, or the fun of receiving a call from sister Myrtle who urged: “Let’s tell the hubbies they’ve booked Wayne King, the Waltz King at Fournier’s Ballroom, and we just have to go dancing there Friday night.”  

NEXT WEEK: Your columnist asks the burning question: How ya gonna keep em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Eau Claire?