This week's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" prompt is "This Ancestor Went to Market," and led to the realization -- and surprise -- at how many of my ancestors were involved in retail ventures and especially in restaurants and bakeries. If asked, I would have said my forebears had come to North America in order to find land, where they could build a house and grow their own food and not be dependent on landlords for those things.
However, once in the New World, it seems many of them had little talent for farming, and rather than expand their holdings as machines began to make larger-scale efforts possible, they sold up, moved to town and opened a store, or a restaurant or a confectionery, or sometimes a single establishment that did all those things.
Some of them did come to America already proficient in food sourcing and preparation, a concept that just boggles my mind because I am so absolutely challenged in those aspects of daily life. Friends blithely trade recipes and speak knowledgeably of good prices on artichokes and how best to keep spices. They toss around exotic concepts like "braising" or "searing" or "poaching," but I remain immune; as is the case with internal combustion engines, I might be able to learn how cooking works, but there's usually someone else around that will step up when things get dire enough and there are other things I really want to do with my time, so here we are.
But baking, now... baking is pretty fun, not least because it's pretty danged hard to produce something that doesn't taste much better than anything else you're going to get to eat that day. So I have a bit of a soft spot for those ancestors who were bakers, and especially those who went the next step and bravely added "confectioner" to their signboard.
My father's maternal grandfather and two great-grandfathers were all bakers and candymakers at some point in their lives. And I've written here about the peripatetic youth of my maternal great-grandfather George Calder Thomas, and how he traded farming for town life. He operated the first restaurant in his little town, augmenting that with sewing machine and musical instrument sales and repairs, and, of course, confections.
I believe the big copper kettle that we inherited was his -- I think it came to George's son, my grandfather, Shug, and that his wife, my grandmother, Inez, kept it after Shug died. Do you suppose that was at all responsible for Inez's otherwise inexplicable decision to open a candy store in Burlington, Iowa, with her third husband, John Daniel Smith?
Shug died on June 19, 1941 at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, of pneumonia following surgery for a pituitary tumor; he was 49. Inez, 45, was now twice-widowed. She spent the next year in the little house in Woodward with my mother and her half-sister, Jean, but once Mom graduated from high school in May of 1942, Inez left her work as principal and teacher at the Woodward State Hospital School and went to work two hundred miles away at the Rock Island Arsenal. Since the attack at Pearl Harbor in December of '41, the Arsenal had been in production around the clock. Inez was one of the 12,000 production workers they added to support that effort, three-quarters of whom were women. In September of 1942, the workers were awarded "the coveted Army-Navy “E” (Excellence in Production) award for excellence in war production." I have Inez's medal.
Somewhere along the line, Inez met John Daniel Smith Sr. Mom recalled him rather cryptically as a "typical Pennsylvania Dutchman with whom it was very difficult to have a conversation." JD was a former inspector for the US Treasury Department, and its unclear what he was doing in Iowa. I've learned that he had married young and had five children with a woman who would refer to him as her husband for the rest of her life, but they had all moved on to homes of their own by the time that marriage was legally ended. Mom said one of Inez's good friends was very miffed at her when Inez teased that she was seeing a new fella, "John Smith." "I guess you don't want to tell me his real name," Mabel said, "but it's just mean of you to make one up." JD called himself a "merchant" on the application for a wedding license. He and Inez were married in Burlington, Iowa, on July 14, 1947, with her two girls, her sister and one of Shug's cousins in attendance. I don't know what the connection to Burlington was, but the couple, very quixotically, to my mind, next opened a candy store there. They called it 'Danez.' In addition to candy, they apparently sold a lot of flavored popcorn.
In the meantime, her absence from the lives of her daughters had taken its toll. Maybe that's not fair -- young women who are just become adults have been known to make their own bad decisions. But I don't think things would have gone south quite so thoroughly had Inez been around. Jean eloped with a much-older married father of five, and vanished for half a decade. Dorothy lost her job (and reputation) when found canoodling with a slick car salesman after hours at the newspaper office. She and the salesman married, but on a weekend when the new husband was 'traveling for work,' a friend insisted Mom come with her to watch a spot where road construction narrowed out-of-town traffic into a single slow stream, so Mom had plenty of time to see her faithless husband laughing and smooching in their Thunderbird convertible with another woman. At least Mom got the Thunderbird out of the deal.
But JD did help her make Mom "new start" move to Michigan, loaning her the money for her divorce and paying the rental deposit on the travel trailer she lived in there. She also believed that he paid for renovation of the Woodward house. I think JD and Inez both really wanted their marriage to work, but, in the end, it didn't. JD found solace in the arms of a woman he'd met in Burlington and they married a year after he and Inez divorced in 1957. Bernice and JD moved to Florida. He died in 1971, the same year as Inez.
At some point in her life, Inez was also the buyer for gloves and unmentionables for the department store Petersen Harned Von Maur. I gave away the most beautiful gloves forty years after she died -- kidskin, silk, shirred, elbow-length, daintily embroidered with matching handkerchief. And she sold encyclopedias door-to-door during the Depression and apparently did quite well. I love that she was not afraid to try new things (or maybe she was, but she tried them anyway) and that she was able to turn her hand to so many different things.
And there are worse family mottos to have than "when in doubt, make confections."
Comments