Dave Wood

My wife has mentioned that the worst part of growing up without a father (her parents divorced when she was seven) was that two years prior the family had moved from the “home farm” to the big city of Chicago, where no aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents were available to help the family survive the traumas.

By contrast, I had not only the pillar of support that Aunt Illie Back was, but a wonderful variety of personalities amongst those Back sisters that provided this semi-orphaned boy with a whole lot of survival mechanisms.

Let’s start with my Uncle Chet’s wife Myra. Chet married late in life to this French Canadian-Polish sparkplug, who gave old Chet a raft of kids and took care of me to boot. My mom was always afraid Chet would teach me even more swear words than I already knew. But I couldn’t resist Myra, who was sultry and beautiful and stuffed me with her signature peanut butter cookies, studded with redskin peanuts. She also introduced our family to garlic, which still keeps the evil spirits away from me—and a few others in our clan.

Unfortunately, her husband managed to lose two of his mother’s farms, which boasted expensive registered Guernseys and Percheron matched teams. What had seemed like an ideal marriage forced this sharp-tongued lassie to enter the job market as produce manager at the local supermarket. A break for me! When I got to high school, I was hired as her assistant. Myra and I liked to sneak out on the store’s loading dock and smoke Pall Malls and bitch about Carl, the humorless Swedish manager. And when I was headed for college, Myra showed up with a very generous going away present. A twenty-dollar bill, one of the ones she earned each week in her life at her 50-hour-a week job. I lost track of this generous and spirited auntie when she left town to live in a Buffalo County nursing home—which allowed smoking.

For some reason I never lost track of the auntie who suffered from manic depression. She lived in Black River Falls and never forgot to send me presents. She knew I liked to read, so when she was depressed she sent me books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which were good, and when she was manic, she sent books like stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s whodunit “The G-String Murders” and the Glencannon books, a series about a drunken Irish sea captain, which were even better. Her vocabulary crackled (she always called diarrhea “Greenapple Quickstep” and her excellent sour cream pancakes and pork sausage balls “Cowpies and Horseapples),” which she whipped up the morning after I and my camping buddies slunk over to her house near midnight, drenched to the skin from a downpour.

Aunt Myrtle was the only jet setter to ever enter our clan, proud to announce that her Uniroyal executive hubby told her she looked just like the notorious and beautiful actress Mary Astor (“the Maltese Falcon”). I just watched it on TCM and be darned if Myrt wasn’t there on screen. She and the factory exec lived in a new home in Eau Claire’s then posh Third Ward. It featured an automatic dishwasher and garbage disposal—in 1940! Myrt worried about me being stuck in Whitehall (probably because she grew up in nearby Blair!) and every summer invited me to spend time at the lovely family lake cottage near Augusta.

Afternoons she took me downtown to watch newly released matinee movies, like “The Story of Ruth.” At home she chain-smoked Camels, chain-drank highballs and gossiped with her once-a-week maid while telling me how smart my father was and how I shouldn’t waste any of the brains I may have inherited from him. When I attended college five blocks from Myrt, she invited me to study for exams in her lovely and quiet breakfast nook, where she always fixed lunch for me, beguiled me away from my studies with lobster dinners, and banjo concerts from Uncle Floyd.

After Floyd died, Myrt sold the fancy house and moved into an elegant apartment in an old mansion on Barstow Street, where Ruth and I were encouraged to drop by any time we drove through Eau Claire. Myrt’s auburn hair had turned silver, she had quit chain-smoking, but she still ordered her liquor by the case—delivered, of course, and lived cheerfully into her 90s. Thanks for the fun, Myrt, whose middle name was ADINE, a name I promised never to reveal, but, heck, who else has such a unique auntie??

Finally, we come to the eldest of my late mother’s sisters: Hazel. I was close to Hazel because she never left our hometown. But I sometimes avoided her because she tended to be grumpy, strait-laced and tee-totaling—and thus the target of many nasty tricks—one being the habit her younger sisters had of hiding in a ditch on the road where Hazel walked home from teaching, arm-in arm, with her beau. The girls would await their approach, and then jump up and yell “Boo!” which predictably caused Hazel to scream and wet her pants.

I have regrets about being on the side of the relatives who bedeviled Hazel, for, in truth, she was the Caregiver of the Twentieth Century. She never forgot a birthday, usually with a fiver in a card, once an elegant Holy Bible. Besides maintaining strong and loving relationships with all her nieces and nephews, she took over the care of her daughter’s two children when the daughter could no longer do so. On her very modest budget, she saw to their care and schooling from grade school through high school. Grandson John settled in Minneapolis, but visited frequently and treated Hazel to dinners out. Once he convinced her to order a Grasshopper for dessert. “When I returned the following week,” John reported, “I looked in Grandma’s refrigerator and found of a bottle of green crème de menthe, hazelnuts and a quart of ice cream in the freezer.” HAZEL nuts? No. Just a little mellower than we gave her credit for.

I’m very grateful for this cadre of caregivers—and Ruth’s too (as soon as she left home, she took care to get to know and spend time with some equally maternal and quirky aunts)— who helped us through some bumps in our lives. Happy Mothers’ Day to all the great aunts of the world.