My mother-in-law, Gladys, was born on June 4, 1904. Her husband was born in Oklahoma in 1900, before it became a state in 1907. Northwestern Iowa, including some of the country’s best farmland, had been steadily growing in population since its statehood over fifty years before. Gladys was not yet a teenager when her father moved his family to Osgood, a small settlement that consisted of a train depot, a grain elevator and a few houses. He was the stationmaster and telegrapher there, supporting his family which included a son and three daughters. Osgood no longer exists as a town and never was very large since it was located within just a few miles of both Emmetsburg and Graettinger.
Following his wife’s death, he eventually married a widow with two daughters of her own who taught piano lessons to a few locals, her daughters and stepdaughters. Gladys and her sisters Esther and Agnes, each thoroughly memorized one “piece” of classical music before their stepmother lost interest in them and overtly favored her own daughters. Gladys, the youngest, worked with her father in the depot as much as possible, learning Morse Code and becoming a reasonably proficient telegraph operator. It was her ambition to pursue that as a career. To her disappointment, she later learned that the railroad hired only operators who had attended their school of telegraphy and that the school did not accept women as students.
The stresses of the growing economic depression and the souring second marriage were too much for their father and the three girls found themselves abandoned by their father and then banished from their home by the stepmother. Gladys was just fourteen at the time and left with only her own few possessions and her mother’s old trunk containing a meager collection of photos and other mementos. With the help of her older sisters and kind neighbors, she found work as a live-in hired girl. At age sixteen, she was hired to help care for a young man who was recovering from surgery for a ruptured appendix. Because he would not have survived the trip to a town with a hospital, the surgery had been performed, on the kitchen table, by lantern-light, in a home without electricity. His recovery was lengthy, requiring several months and, when he was well again, he began courting the patient, caring girl who had so diligently cared for him during the ordeal.
The couple lived for a time in a small farmhouse near Osgood, where my husband was born in 1930. By the time I knew him, the house had been abandoned for years and was in use as storage for hay, with one room providing quarters for a couple dozen chickens. He delighted in telling our children that he had been “born in a chicken house.”
I think of my gentle, patient mother-in-law every year on her birthday. She died of cancer in 1968, at home with her husband caring for her as meticulously as she had once cared for him.
June has lots of things for us to celebrate. There are weddings and their anniversaries, graduations, Father’s Day, and over 100 other designated “days” to commemorate if we so choose. Today, June 6, is D-Day, the anniversary of the invasion of Normandy that turned the progress of WWII and stopped Hitler’s campaign to rule the world.
June 11 is National Corn-on-the-cob Day for Americans. While Iowa produces more corn than any other state, less than 1% of that is sweetcorn, the majority of corn grown here is field corn that is used for animal feed and manufactured products. Our 3,400 acres of sweetcorn sounds like a lot, but the top sweetcorn producing states are Washington and Minnesota. The Sweetcorn Capitol of the World is in neither of those states but is Hoopeston, Illinois. At one time, eating regular field corn in its milky stage was common. I remember enjoying it myself at one time. Those were the days when the directions for cooking it began with. “Bring the water to a boil before you pick the corn…” Genetic engineering has changed things a lot since then!