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Leave the Dishes in the Sink

Utah State University Press

Chapter One

Corvallis, Oregon, was a pleasant town to grow up in. It was small. Many streets were unpaved roads with wild morning glories along edges and sometimes down the center. Sidewalks were mostly board walks. It was easy to lose a nickel between the cracks, if you were lucky enough to have a nickel. When barefoot, you got slivers in your feet. The vacant lots often had a blooming rose bush, wild blackberries, and what we called marguerites, a white daisy-type flower with a yellow center. Elaine, my sister, and I gathered them by the armful. I had been born in 1914, and she came along two years later. A neighbor once took a picture of the two of us. I was five and Elaine was three, and we were in our Sunday white dresses, standing in the vacant lot holding marguerites. But that wasn't the first picture. Earlier our neighbor, trying out her camera, snapped a picture of us in our everyday clothes as we stood on the board walk looking like ragamuffins. Mama, much upset, dashed out to ask for another picture after she got us properly cleaned up. We did not own a camera.

Houses in Corvallis were mostly frame. Only rich people had brick homes, or so we thought. Wood was universally burned for fuel, and we used it in the kitchen stove. We had no central heating, but there was a pot bellied stove in the living room. Our father bought cords of green slab wood in four-foot lengths, which were stacked in the yard until dry; whereupon the man who sawed wood came, and the whine of his saw spread throughout the neighborhood. Our father then used a wooden wheelbarrow to deposit the chunks in the woodshed.

My early years were spent in Corvallis because my father, Newel H. Comish, had joined the faculty of Oregon Agricultural College (OAC) in 1915. He taught economics-and-sociology, a phrase I learned to spill out as one word when asked, "What does your father do?"

The lower campus of Oregon Agricultural College was not far from our house. It had winding walks, and at the bottom was the Lady of the Fountain, a Grecian statue in a circular pool among shady trees. In summer, the traveling Chautauqua speakers would come and pitch their big tent in an open area of the lower campus. Our mother bought tickets and took Elaine and me. It was usually hot and breathless in the tent, and small children crawled among the legs of audience and wooden folding chairs. There we got our first experience of lectures and operetta. I can still remember the Mikado, with slant-eyed maidens singing about marrying Yum-Yum. Going west from the lower campus and slightly uphill, one came to the administration building, beyond which was an open quadrangle with a white bandstand. The agricultural building was across the west end of that quadrangle. We used to walk there to buy ice cream. Beyond the buildings were the college barns, where Papa took us to learn about cows, sheep, pigs and horses, and about the parts of wagons and harnesses, so that we would not disgrace him when we visited our many aunts, uncles, and cousins living on farms on the Utah-Idaho border, where he grew up. Three times in my youth we visited Snowflake, Arizona, where Louise Larson, our mother, had grown up. Our last visit as a family was in 1930, and Grandpa and Grandma's home looked the same as earlier-they used coal oil lamps, they drew water from a well, and a path along the garden led to the outhouse. Grandpa Alof Larson was known as a fine farmer, but his acreage was so small, it was mostly subsistence farming.

Oregon Agricultural College, like other land grant institutions, had orderly experimental farm plots, a damp smell of growing plants in greenhouses and soils labs, and a head house with an inevitably dusty smell and look. I would one day marry a soil scientist and come to know such places well. Ice cream could be bought at the college dairy, and there was free buttermilk from a spigot, a help to poverty stricken students trying to get through college on a shoestring. It seemed that most students were poor. Later I would see free buttermilk spigots at the land grant institutions of Utah, Iowa, and Wisconsin. In the fall, "ag" students made and sold cider, real cider, which if kept a few days became hard-we called it apple jack-a transformation impossible with the insipid pasteurized apple juice that came later.

At Oregon Agricultural College, as at several other agricultural colleges, the students were called Aggies. As a small child I regarded the college students with awe. On Wednesdays the freshmen wore special attire: the men wore green beanie caps, and the women wore a green ribbon across the forehead and around the head, just above the round poof of hair over each ear. "Rats" made of hair combings were inside the poofs to keep them round. The college students went canoeing on Mary's River. For homecoming, they built a giant wooden framework that became a giant bonfire, to cheer their team on to football victory. College students liked music and played songs such as "Three O'Clock in the Morning" on Victrolas.

In 1920 I entered first grade in North School in Corvallis, a school later renamed Franklin School. It was a two-story, square, frame building, that somehow had been cut in half vertically and then moved in two parts from some earlier location and put back together again. It had very high ceilings. At the start of each morning, an eighth grade girl pounded out "Stars and Stripes Forever" on the piano in the lower hall, as girls and boys in separate lines marched in orderly manner into the building, past a framed portrait of Miss Willard on the wall. We knew she was a famous person and had done good deeds connected somehow with education.

When I was in the fifth grade, my mother became president of the Parent-Teacher Association, and when she sent me with a written message about official matters, I was allowed into the building ahead of the rest of the children. Such honor! Later she was president of the Corvallis PTA Council, when it was very new. My mother was also involved in carrying petitions to set aside a piece of land near the school for a small park. And she supported the public library when it was newly opened in a white frame house a few blocks from us. I was always checking out books, including all of the volumes of the Book of Knowledge. My mother also served as a judge of elections at voting time, on behalf of Democrats. All these activities were considered suitable for wives and mothers, but were not deemed anywhere near as important as what my father did. It took the feminist movement of the 1970s to make me realize the extent of my mother's civic activities and their influence on me.

My mother's membership in the College Folk Club and in the Women's Club were also considered appropriate for a woman in her position. The Folk Club included all women in any way connected with the college-women faculty, wives of faculty, secretaries, and even women relatives living in faculty homes. Actually, the college president's wife, Leonora Hamilton Kerr (Mrs. William Jasper Kerr) created the Folk Club. The Women's Club, on the other hand, was primarily for town women, but interested faculty wives could belong. Members dressed up for meetings, and spoke of each other as Mrs. or Miss, rarely using first names.

Home economics was an important part of Oregon Agricultural College. As a child I knew which was Snell Hall, and I heard the name Dr. Margaret Snell. Years later I learned that OAC was the fourth oldest land grant institution continuously offering work in home economics, earlier called household economy or domestic science. In 1889 Dr. Margaret Snell, who held a degree in medicine from Boston University, was hired to teach household economy and hygiene to women students at OAC. The board of regents had hesitated over appointing her because she did not have a certificate from a school of cookery, but finally decided that her physician's qualifications (relevant for teaching hygiene and sanitation) outweighed this lack. Snell returned to Boston for quick training in cookery. At OAC, her laboratory included "a small wood-burning stove, a few saucepans, and a sewing machine or two." Snell, by the way, wore loose dresses and flat heeled shoes rather than the fashionable wasp waist and corsets of the time.

When I was a high school student, I took a foods class from Lura Keiser who had trained under Snell at OAC. She told us that in the early days of the college, the shape of each saucepan was painted on the wall of the cooking laboratory to show where the pan was to be hung. We also learned from Miss Keiser that most women students were so poor they owned only two dresses; they wore one all week to class, and each evening they changed to the second dress for dinner because it was proper to change. The following week they reversed the order of the two dresses.

There were not many women faculty in the 1920s, and I think my mother knew most of them socially. She saw them at Folk Club and visited with them at all-faculty functions. I recall as a child standing beside Mama on the sidewalk near the campus, shifting my weight from one foot to another, silently, while she passed the time of day with Dean Ava B. Milam or with A. Grace Johnson, both in home economics. Something I noticed about home economists was that none of them had husbands. Only one had children, and she was a widow, Sara Prentiss, whose son Donald went through grade school with me. It seemed strange to me that most home economists were teaching about homemaking but did not themselves have husbands, and rarely had children.

I was aware that my mother valued the information she received from home economists, much of it through the extension service. On warm afternoons in the early summer of 1923, when Mama was expecting her third child, Elaine and I would walk with her over to the college where she attended lectures given by a visiting doctor, Caroline O. Hedger. Elaine and I played in the shade of a large hedge outside the building, waiting for Mama to emerge, whereupon we walked sedately home, one on each side of her as she had taught us, because in this way we helped "conceal her condition from the eyes of the gazing public." Her dark cape was also concealing.

During the First World War, Dr. Hedger had gone to Belgium as representative of Chicago women's clubs, which had special concern for children and sought to help control a typhoid epidemic. Ava Milam arranged for Hedger to spend six different summers at the Oregon campus to discuss health habits of children. Early on, my mother had been terribly underweight and tense, and when she met Hedger for the first time, asked her advice. Hedger surmised that Mama needed eyeglasses and told her to go to Portland to get a really good medical eye examination. So Mama and Papa had gone to Portland on the train, and she secured eyeglasses that solved the problem. No wonder she attended Hedger's lectures every chance she got.

In her autobiography Milam wrote that Hedger reminded her a good deal of Margaret Snell-"Tall, large, but not overweight. An advocate of hygienic living, she wore men's shoes and decried the shoes decreed by fashion for women's wear." Were Hedger and Snell part of first wave of feminism? It seems to me they were, though I doubt they used the term. Fifty years later I read early extension records of Utah Agricultural College to find out the nature of early programs of farmers' institutes and homemakers' conferences. Caroline Hedger was a visiting speaker at these Utah conferences in the 1920s, just as she was at OAC. There was a circuit of agricultural colleges that she and other professionals visited.

The Utah Agricultural College records also mention a health score card for children. I know that Elaine and I were scored on a health card. And there is a suggestion that a home-constructed trapeze is good exercise for children. I still remember when Mama hung a trapeze made of two ropes and a section of broom handle on the back porch for us. We became quite adept on it. Faculty families had as much access to extension service information as farm families of the state.

After our baby brother, Newel William, was born in 1923 (having surprised an unsuspecting public), he was raised according to government bulletins put out by the United States Children's Bureau. The bulletin Infant Care emphasized establishing good habits in the baby. Keep him on a rigid schedule, it said. Feed him every four hours and pick him up to soothe his crying only if there is a physical cause, such as wet diapers or a pin sticking in him. Mama was unaware of the behavioral assumptions of this bulletin and the history behind it. She followed the four hour schedule, but defied the bulletin by rocking and cuddling her baby whenever she wanted. She took Newel to the well baby clinic, one of thousands established across the country by the Sheppard-Towner Act.

At this time intelligence quotient tests were being used in the schools, and our parents were pleased when we did well on them. In fact, when she was in second grade, Elaine was placed on the school stage at an evening PTA meeting and given an IQ test as a demonstration. The audience laughed when, replying to the question of where pork came from, she said "cows." As I watched I suspected that Elaine was being exploited, but this incident shows the enthusiasm of Oregon schools for "advanced" educational ideas. The idea that IQ tests support social mobility and justify inequities would come later.

My parents were "upwardly mobile," to use a term from sociology, but they never used such a term. They both had grown up on small subsistence farms, and now they were in the academic world. In his autobiography my father tells how he acquired the habit of correct speech. In 1905, at age seventeen, he drove by horse and wagon the twenty miles from the family farm in Cove, Utah, to Logan, where he found lodgings and entered a high school level class of 115 students. On that day he began six years of education, first at Brigham Young College in town and then at Utah Agricultural College on the hill. The 1911 Utah Agricultural College yearbook, The Buzzer, shows Newel Comish as a senior, a debater, and president of the Ethical Society (ten male members), which he organized because there was no course on ethics at the college, and he wanted to know about ideas of right and wrong. The society had speakers and did reading.

Newel Comish was the youngest in the family and the only one to complete college. Many years later he wrote of that experience:

I grew up in an environment in which anything but the King's English was spoken. Everyone said, among other provincialisms: "It ain't so." "They was comin' home." "I have went to town." "We had saw him in the morning." "They was theirselves to blame" ... My English habits were atrocious. I didn't know what was grammatically right and wrong. To me, a good course in grammar was a God-send ... Yet it consumed considerable time to overcome bad English habits. I broke them largely by correcting an incorrect sentence by immediately repeating a correct one; and by thinking carefully before speaking. This latter device slowed my speech, but the results in time paid dividends. Indeed, by the time I received my Bachelor's degree, I could speak and write effectively and usually correctly. In fact, I even headed the English department in the Snowflake Stake Academy for two years after graduating from college.

While teaching at the Snowflake Stake Academy, a Mormon high school, he fell in love with Louise Larson, his brightest student, and they married in 1913, soon after her graduation. Louise had always spoken good English because her mother, May Hunt Larson, had been trained to teach and came of a line of women school teachers. Louise's great-grandparents, Louisa Barnes Pratt and Addison Pratt, firm in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, kept journals that were published by a later generation.

Newel and Louise Comish lived in Chicago and then in Madison while he pursued graduate work in economics, first at the University of Chicago and then at the University of Wisconsin, where he completed his master's degree. Many of his professors were Progressives, and when he took the position at Oregon Agricultural College in 1915, Oregon was known politically as a Progressive state because of its legislation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Leave the Dishes in the Sink by Alison Comish Thorne Copyright © 2002 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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