Maude 18831993 She Grew Up With the Country eBook Mardo Williams
Download As PDF : Maude 18831993 She Grew Up With the Country eBook Mardo Williams 
During her 110-year lifetime, Maude Allen Williams went from oil lamps to a microwave oven, from the horse and buggy to an automobile. She stepped onto an airplane for the first time at age 77.
Maude was married at 19, four months pregnant, to Lee Williams. She once said her Puritan forefathers might not have approved. The cold winds of winter and the hot winds of summer blew under the ill-fitting doors of the family's sprawling, story-and-a-half, 10-room farmhouse on the banks of Rush Creek. It had been built in 1853 by Lee's grandfather on a Congressional land grant. The couple had no electricity, no indoor plumbing.
While her husband plowed and planted the fields, Maude baked bread in the oven of her temperamental 400-pound wood-burning Kalamazoo stove, churned butter, canned fruits from the orchard and vegetables from the garden, did the laundry on a washboard until after her four youngsters were potty trained, made their clothes by hand from flour sacks, and read to them by lamplight.
Labor was dawn-to-dusk, but there were compensations the view of the creek from the shady front porch, spectacular sunrises and sunsets, terrifying storms, and the caroling of birds (except during the winter months when the landscape was a Christmasy extravaganza).
Maude was doctor, teacher, critic and friend. She taught her children to be self-sufficient, told them of the satisfaction gained of a job well done, and warned that "nothing is free." She taught them to love the smell of the overturned earth, the song of the robin at daybreak, of the whippoorwill in the gathering dusk, and even the croaking of frogs which shattered the peace of August nights as hundreds staged their own overture from the farm creek across the way.
She never drove a car (although her husband bought a Chevrolet in 1920). She refused to get into a bathing suit, considered holding hands in public a sign of bad taste. As a free thinker, she welcomed the advent of women's suffrage. She voted for Warren G. Harding for President in 1920--the year that women got the vote--and cast her ballot in every Presidential election for the remainder of her life.
The book is history and biography, and includes the effects of two world wars and a major depression on the life of the couple. It also reveals intimate details of the family's life how Maude subdued her joke-playing husband on their wedding night and other humorous incidents . The couple stood by one another as they survived illnesses, tragedies (two murders and a suicide), and financial losses.
The popular sayings of the period, the prices of goods, and superstitions of the day are sidelights. Enterprising, adventurous, and adaptable, Maude met every change and challenge with the spirit of adventure.
Maude 18831993 She Grew Up With the Country eBook Mardo Williams
I was excited to read this story because I wanted to read about Maude and her feelings and impressions of a changing world because she had lived through a very exciting time. This book was written by her son Mardo who was a newspaper man and that is what the book reads like. Mardo gave us the bodies of the characters in this book but he did not breath life into them. It was written as a tribute to his mother. He included a lot of facts, events and statistics concerning his family. If you are one of their family members it would be great information on your ancestry.Product details
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Maude 18831993 She Grew Up With the Country eBook Mardo Williams Reviews
Mardo Williams, a long lived man in his own right & an Ohio newspaper reporter, has written a good biography-cum-memoir of his mother's 110 years of life before electricity to seven decades later, flying in a plane.
From his career as an observer of daily life, Mardo Williams gives us a particularly detailed & fascinating glimpse into the life & times of early America. Liberally sprinkled with philosophy, humor & tragedy, MAUDE 1883-1993 is indeed a fine tribute to one ordinary woman's extra-ordinary spirit.
Year by year the reader sees a quiet hero grow with her country and raise the next generation with great compassion and humor. I loved Maude because the grit of this little lady is what made America great. I want my children to be that strong, their families to love that much and to know that very little is needed to make a good life. Every chapter brought smiles and nods of things heard from grandparents and parents about their lives before TV and electronics. This is an important book for all generations. The love of Maude's son, Mardo, shines through every chapter as he chronicles the extraordinary life of a totally ordinary Ohio farm family. Our children and grandchildren will be richer for reading Maude.
Towards the end of his mother’s very long life, retired journalist and octogenarian Mardo Williams began collecting her reminisces of a long bygone time in antique rural America. The result, three years after the death of Maude Williams at 110 years old, was a biography and memoir of sorts, Maude (1883-1993) She Grew Up with the Country, published in 1996 when Mardo himself was 91, and with encouragement from a writer’s group expanded by nearly 300 pages in the two years that followed. Mardo passed away in 2001, but a revised second edition of Maude was released in 2016, which I received through an early reviewer’s program.
In 1903, a pregnant nineteen-year-old Maude Allen wed Lee Williams and moved into a family homestead already more than a half-century old on farmland in remote rural Ohio. There was no electricity, telephone or indoor plumbing. Their second child, Mardo, was born in 1905; altogether there would be a total of four children born in every-other-year intervals. A mix perhaps of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, Maude revisits a much simpler time in America when close-knit families worked and played together through hardship and celebration. As a kind of primary source, the book is almost instantly fascinating as the narrative reveals in colorful detail how the Williams family went about their day to day lives – preparing food, keeping warm, washing clothes, doing farmyard chores, and the like – in a kind of primitive isolation. There is a pronounced charm to it, along with a certain heartwarming glow, especially in its survey of the more innocent America of Mardo’s childhood, replete with amusing anecdotes of Maude’s proverb-laced mothering, and Lee’s homespun practical jokes, as well as tales of long buggy rides to town or the occasional country fair, and winter sleigh rides to visit extended family and friends.
Yet, perhaps more fascinating is what is missing; that which remains unsaid. Primitive isolation there is no doubt that sums up the farm where Maude and her family resided. But why? In 1903, Maude was living much like her grandparents would have lived. It was indeed remarkably similar to Little House on the Prairie, but yet it was early twentieth century America, on a farm in Ohio no less, hardly a desolate wilderness on the edge of the western frontier or a forgotten pocket of poverty in the deep south. And it hardly changed in the years to come. One day a telephone was installed, and the isolation was reduced, but not by much. Maude had a cistern to collect rainwater for washing, but she did not get an indoor pitcher pump for it until the 1920s [p235]. Around that time, she finally went from a washboard to a “hand-propelled washing machine.” Lee got a car in 1920, and there are later stories of the children hanging out in the in the evenings, listening to the radio. Incredibly, there was no radio in the house until the late 1940s, just as the era of television dawned for the rest of the country [p12-13]. Maude thought it something of a miracle when the house was finally wired for electricity – in 1947 – when she and Lee were in their sixties! For twenty-first century Americans, there is perhaps a quaint rustic charm to the description of their privy, located a full one hundred feet from the back door, “. . . a two-holer equipped with a sack of lime . . . and a fly swatter,” and neatly accented with a Sears Roebuck catalog hanging from the wall – the pages of the catalog doubled as a “wish list” and as toilet paper [p34]. Of course, it is dubious that such charm extended to those who had to relieve themselves outdoors with no lights or plumbing day after day in every manner of weather. In 1960, three years after Lee’s death, and with the property in deep disrepair, Maude moved away. She was seventy-seven years old and had used an outhouse for the entire fifty-seven years that she lived there.
The careful anthropologist as reader cannot help but ask why did conditions remain so primitive for Maude and Lee for some six decades? It certainly did not start off that way. Lee’s family was apparently somewhat well-off, even sending Lee off to college. When he opted to drop out in favor of farming, Lee brought his new bride to a sprawling ten room house where his grandfather had lived, on land that included a barn, granary, windmill and more. His parents donated odd pieces of furniture to them. Three years later, Lee’s father paid to have the house repaired and renovated. This was a promising start for the young couple, and hardly abject poverty, yet by all accounts Lee and Maude lived a hardscrabble and weirdly anachronistic existence ever after. It appears that life was markedly different for others in their shared geography, who enjoyed at least some of the more modern conveniences conspicuous in their absence on the Williams farm. Long before he had his own car, Lee hiked through the mud to bum a ride to town in his neighbor’s vehicle, a town firmly anchored in the twentieth century, not trapped in the faded nineteenth where Lee and his family seemed helplessly glued. But again why? The narrative neither reveals the answer nor openly begs the question. Was Lee an incompetent farmer? There are vague hints that he may have been an alcoholic, but this is never fleshed out. Was he unlucky? Was he simply lazy? Or was the primitive state of things a kind of “hair shirt” Lee liked to wear? It is never made clear. Vast changes occurred in American life in the twentieth century, but life on the Williams farm essentially stood still. The subtitle of the book, She Grew Up with the Country, is starkly misleading; the country grew up, but Maude was somehow left behind.
There is a telling photo on the cover of this edition of Maude. Maude was only twenty-six, Lee twenty-seven; each look at least forty. Perhaps it was the times. Or maybe it was that hard life on that farm where every day was more like 1858 than 1908. For all of Mardo’s abundant nostalgia, it seems that in fact it was a life that none of the children really cherished, at least once they were old enough to juxtapose their world with the world outside. The book contains vague references to their teenage years, but then the story fast forwards as all four children have married and moved away – for good. Hard times and primitive isolation seems to have held very little appeal. It is never explained why neither Maude nor Lee attended any of their weddings.
Despite encouragement from the writer’s group, the second half of the book should never have been written. It is less about Maude than about the extended family, including tales of murders, madness and alienation that have little to do with the themes of Americana resident in the first part of the narrative. Until the last years of her life, her children seem to have been markedly disengaged from her. But Maude lived on and, at least at first, thrived in a whole new universe replete with such marvels as indoor plumbing, and color television, and jet travel to visit relatives on the other side of the country! She does not seem to miss her days as a kind of cave-dweller. Still, she remained a simple soul, for better or for worse. Maude proudly voted for fellow Ohioan Warren G. Harding in 1920, the first national election after women had won the franchise. When President Bill Clinton sent her congratulations on reaching her 110th year, she did not hesitate to tell anyone who would listen that she had voted against him. The Williams’ hosted a stubborn conservatism that opposed even that which benefited them, as when Lee, barely scraping by, complained against the “hand-outs” of FDR-era WPA programs that partially subsidized his ever-struggling ventures. Mardo, reveling in celebratory nostalgia for a life he clearly fled from on fleet foot as soon as he was able, clearly echoes these sentiments with not-so-subtle underscores.
Maude’s slow, tragic physical decline in the latter stages of old age is painfully chronicled in the final chapters. Much of what is revealed would better have been withheld. Despite the challenges of physical frailty, however, it seems like the best favor anyone ever did for Maude was to whisk her away from that farm and resettle her in a warm suite of rooms with a flush toilet and a refrigerator and lamps that switched on and off. Those who are entranced with romantic notions of a traditional pre-modern America never lived it. Camping in the wilderness is indeed inspiring and comes highly recommended, but – for most of us – hardly recommended for each and every day. Maude spent much of her long life more or less camping, with four walls around her, while the rest of the world moved on. Perhaps it was charming. Probably, it mostly was not, as evidenced by the flight of her children at their first opportunities to flee. Overall, this is hardly a great book, and Mardo – while a competent writer – was not an impressive author. But there are indeed parts of Maude, especially the first half, that are worth the read. If nothing else, it is a reminder that it was not that long ago that there were people who lived very different lives than we can easily imagine today. Nor, I should add, lives that we should, in our starry-eyed musings, miss too much.
Reminded me of my childhood.
Loved this book. I learned so much from it.
I read this before and live near where her and her husband and children lived. I loved this and I will read it again.
this is a fantastic story of Maude's life & times. Heartbreaks & happiness......a wonderful book. Made me think of a bygone era and enjoyed this read.
Written by Maude's son Mardo.
I was excited to read this story because I wanted to read about Maude and her feelings and impressions of a changing world because she had lived through a very exciting time. This book was written by her son Mardo who was a newspaper man and that is what the book reads like. Mardo gave us the bodies of the characters in this book but he did not breath life into them. It was written as a tribute to his mother. He included a lot of facts, events and statistics concerning his family. If you are one of their family members it would be great information on your ancestry.
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