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Lois Lenski
Storycatcher
By Bobbie Malone UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5386-5
CHAPTER 1
GROWING UP IN THE LENSKI HOUSE HOLD
Lois Lenski was born in Springfield, Ohio, on October 14, 1893, the fourth child born to Richard Charles Henry and Marietta Young Lenski. Her father, Richard Charles Henry Lenski, served as minister of the Zion Lutheran Church. Her mother, Marietta, had taught school before marrying and settling into the routine of helpmate, parent, and household manager. Both parents' professional experiences and their European American cultural roots contributed to the family's strong internal organization and self-conscious public representation, which provided Lois and her siblings with a firm, if narrowly constructed, sense of self and well-being. Born twenty-seven years before women achieved the right to vote, Lois died in 1974 as the first wave of feminism entered the mainstream. Her life and career demonstrate the difficulties she faced as a woman reared in a culture where submission was considered a feminine virtue. She had to assail that expectation in order to create her own professional persona before most middle-class women entered the workforce.
Lois's autobiography, Journey into Childhood, published in 1972, gives a glimpse of her forebears as she recalled them late in her own life. But over three decades earlier she actually had begun seriously documenting her family's story in a lengthy handwritten letter to her son, Stephen, in which she gathered "some of my memories of my childhood, which may interest you after you are grown." The succession of events in the years immediately preceding Lois's letter-writing undoubtedly affected her perspective:
It has recently been borne in upon me that my childhood occurred in a Vanished World — a world that is now, 1940, gone, never to return. So this will be in a sense, a record, a document from that world. In this present-day of wars and rumors of wars, turmoil, despotism, labor troubles, etc. etc., it is pleasant to escape to the quiet, simple life of the turn of the century.
Her family roots represent the two main variants of European immigration: her mother's family having arrived in this country several generations earlier, while her father was himself an immigrant. She knew relatively little about her ancestors — especially those on her father's side — some of which she recounted in her letter to Stephen, and other details that she included in a few paragraphs in Journey. Nevertheless, within these scant sketches, Lois indicates her grandparents' struggles and ambitions for their children and the sense of hard work, frugality, and dedication to task that they bequeathed to subsequent generations.
Lois's father was often known by his initials, R. C. H., although her mother, Marietta, called him Dick, and his own mother always addressed him in the German form, "Rickart" [sic]. The name Lenski is Polish, but R. C. H.'s father and Lois's "Grosspapa," Wilhelm Johann or William John, was born in East Prussia, "the youngest son in an aristocratic family." With primogeniture the rule, William's "oldest brother inherited the family title, while the younger was forced to leave home." He moved to Germany where he trained as a tailor and met his future wife, Lois's "Grossmama," Ernestine Louise Pittlekow. Her family was Russian, but she was born in West Prussia. Both she and William were the same age, born in 1837. Richard and his younger brother, Paul, were born in Greifenburg, Prussia, in 1864 and 1866. Like so many of their central European compatriots, the Lenski family emigrated to the United States after the Franco-Prussian War in April 1872, settling in Jackson, Michigan, where they had friends and William could successfully ply his trade. Even though Ernestine was aware of William's own difficult position as the youngest son, she had her own ambitions for R. C. H., in the favored position of firstborn. Birth order determined the two sons' futures. "Grossmama's one idea was to educate my father for the ministry, which they did, with difficulty." R. C. H. was sent to Capital University, the Ohio Synod Lutheran College & Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. His younger brother, Paul, suffered "a difficult boyhood," and Lois never mentioned what became of him. But in her loosely autobiographical A Little Girl of Nineteen Hundred, Uncle Paul must have been the model for "Uncle Phil" and his large family — including a memorable set of twin babies — whom Lois gets to know when the Ohio family visits Michigan. Lois remembered her Grossmama "as being warm and affectionate, especially to ... my father whom she adored, and whom she had 'given to the Lord.'" Lois felt very differently about her Grosspapa. She found him "cold and cynical," recalling her fear that "he would laugh at me, although he never did."
Marietta Young hailed from Franklin County, Ohio, just south of Columbus, where she was born in 1863. Her grandfather, Philip Helsel (or Heltzel back in York County, Pennsylvania), was of Pennsylvania "Dutch" (German) heritage, pioneering with his wife, Mary Willis Helsel, and their eight children as one of the original settlers in the Scioto Valley of Ohio in the early 1800s. Lois's maternal family had similarly strong ties to Lutheranism. The first Lutheran church in the area was organized in the Helsel barn near Valley Crossing. Despite these strong maternal German roots, Marietta had a real "hatred of all things German," never allowing the language to be spoken in the home. Later in life, Lois wondered why, since she and her siblings were surrounded by the language as children, and often "were taken to German church [services] as well as to English."
Marietta was the middle child, with an older brother and a younger sister, raised almost entirely alone by "our Grandma Young," whose husband (of British ancestry) died before their youngest child was born. Grandma Young had to be "a woman of strong mind and character" to remain with her youngsters in a log cabin on land where she became a truck gardener in order to support and educate them. Once Marietta had received a basic education and was still quite young, she taught at a one-room rural school south of Columbus. Although she had many talents that may have led her to more visually aesthetic pursuits, she needed to be practical. To remind her of Marietta's paths not taken, Lois kept a round plaque on which her mother had painted a "spray of wood-bine" that the daughter judged "well observed & carefully painted." Marietta and R. C. H. met at a box supper at the schoolhouse where she taught, then married in Columbus in February 1888. Their first child, Esther, arrived the following December, with the other children following in short order: Gerhard (1891), Oscar (1892), Lois (1893), and her younger sister, Miriam (1895).
Shortly after Lois was born, the family moved from their home at 422 Cedar Avenue to the parsonage at 416 West Columbia Street, where they lived until Lois was six. The first memory she recounts from these early and "hazy" Springfield years deals with contracting membranous croup, a life-threatening condition that she described as "a membrane growing over the windpipe." At the same time, Oscar had scarlet fever, and the house was under quarantine. A member of her father's congregation, Mrs. Theodore Hax, came daily to help Marietta care for the children. Lois credits Mrs. Hax with saving her life. "I acquired a sort of halo, a reflected glory for not having died. I was so good as to be almost angelic ... but I am afraid I got over it speedily and my earthly nature began to assert itself." Undoubtedly, Lois heard this story repeatedly and accepted it as part of her persona, which tells us more than a tale of a toddler's valiant struggle to stay alive. Her early brush with death introduces two recurring themes. The first indicates Lois's tendency to contract various illnesses and endure other physical limitations that temporarily inhibited her otherwise headlong rush to be productive. The second demonstrates the pressure she felt "to be almost angelic," even as an adult, in coping with the competing roles of artist, illustrator, author, wife, stepmother, mother, and primary breadwinner. In effect, Lois's earliest memories became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 1899 the family relocated to Anna, Ohio, some sixty miles northwest, when R. C. H. became pastor of St. Jacob Lutheran Church. When the Lenskis moved to Anna, it was a little farm village of two hundred residents. As Lois told her story, "When the new Lutheran preacher arrived with his wife and five children, it increased to two hundred and seven." When R. C. H. began his ministry, the church was housed in a small white frame building. Just eight years later, he helped design and proudly oversaw the building of a substantial brick edifice.
While the pastor of St. Jacob Church held the respect and admiration of his congregation, R. C. H.'s annual salary of seven hundred dollars only meagerly supported his large family. The congregation of small farmers and the townspeople who serviced them periodically supplemented the pastor's income by organizing a traditional (at least in Anna) and unannounced "Donation Party." The Lenskis might glance up from their household activities to see "a long procession of solemn, silent people ... coming up the sidewalk from the church corner ... with packages and bundles in their arms." These hard-working congregants brought what they could, including eggs, chicken, hams, or jam and fresh vegetables, and "home furnishings like towels or pillowcases." When they entered the parsonage, where doors were never locked, a party would ensue, where "as if by magic, refreshments appeared on the table," and R. C. H. hung lighted Japanese lanterns that enhanced the festive environment.
As she grew older, Lois learned that her father's role as pastor went far beyond delivering dynamic sermons. She recalled looking out from an open school window to see a man running down the street shouting repeatedly, "Mr. F---- has hung himself." After the final bell, when classes were dismissed and students ran to see the house where the tragedy occurred, Lois was amazed to find her father "standing inside the door, his arms around the stricken young daughter, trying to comfort her." That scene remained fresh in Lois's memory, providing "one of the first intimations" that registered the force and responsibility of her father's role as "spiritual advisor in the community." Even though she had considered the tiny community of Anna "a perfect child's town," offering "all a child could enjoy and comprehend," she realized that "so did tragedy touch the lives of the children, many for the first time."
Lois quickly learned that her family's life was public as well as private. Since the doors of the parsonage were open day and night, she and her siblings witnessed their father's availability to all who entered: "a farmer with a gift of smoked ham, a troubled woman in need of advice, a passing tramp begging for a handout, a visiting preacher to spend the night (they came often); a student selling Bibles, a choir director to make a complaint ... a bereaved family to arrange for a funeral or a bride and groom to be married." All were treated with equal respect, and the Lenski children "very early learned to treat all people alike no matter who they were." The example set by their parents' dedication to serving others strongly shaped their children — just as R. C. H. and Marietta might have hoped. As Lois wrote in 1954 to a teacher she was mentoring:
As for my brothers and sisters: My older sister, Esther, "Ella," married a preacher, has 3 children & 7 or 8 grandchildren. She & her husband still live in central Ill. I visited her there in July. "Milly" or Miriam, also married a preacher, and moved to Calif. 30 years ago; brought up her 3 children out there, has come back East only about 4 times, now has her first grandson. ... Oscar (Ned) became a church architect, later designer of church furnishings. My older bro. Gerhard (Jerry) has been pastor of a large Lutheran church on 16th St., Wash. D.C. for over 30 years. ... They all stayed pretty close to the church but me. I was the odd one, went to N.Y. to study art and married an artist.
Although moving well beyond the sphere of her family's tight devotional circle, Lois found a way to combine communitarian compassion and creativity to serve children, parents, teachers, caregivers, and librarians.
Both parents managed other aspects of their extremely busy lives in ways that easily impressed their progeny. Marietta was quite a horsewoman and enjoyed decorative flower gardening as well as raising vegetables for the family table. Because of the family's tight budget, she was able to use her eye for fashion and enormous skills as a dressmaker and tailor to provide the entire family with all their clothing, including suits for the boys and R. C. H. Lois remembered her mother's "great love of beauty, which ... had few outlets." Lois clearly empathized with her mother's inability to spend more of her time fulfilling her own creative imperatives.
In addition to being a pastor and a serious religious scholar, R. C. H. pursued a series of hobbies that included gardening and raising various kinds of fowl. An excellent photographer and the only one in town, he "did all his own developing and printing of negatives (glass plates) and pictures, and mounted them with professional skill." By helping him, Lois learned the entire process. R. C. H. photographed every aspect of the community's family life cycle events — wedding couples, new babies, family parties — the photographs becoming "a social record of a rural Ohio community at the turn of the century." As was customary in the years of her childhood, people often wanted photographs of recently deceased family members. R. C. H. obliged them with photographs of their loved ones in their coffins, and Lois imagined that these mementos must have been "a comfort to the survivors." She and her siblings saw "nothing morbid" in them and often played funeral: "We put the dolls in shoeboxes, dug holes in the ground, buried them with a long sermon and a few hymns, and put flowers on the graves" before digging them up again. The Lenski children accepted darkness and death as a part of life. The value of visually documenting a community in all its aspects resonated with Lois's emerging sensibilities. Such experiences undoubtedly shaped her ability to share the unpleasant realities of daily living that she wove into her realistic books for middle-level readers.
Lois described herself as a child who observed more readily than she participated. Even in play with her beloved younger sister, Miriam, who shared "my every movement and thought and activity. ... Miriam's play was active, mine was passive. Miriam enacted drama with her dolls, while I, busy sewing for mine, watched her. ... I watched and listened." Miriam had a best friend across the street; Lois did not. Instead, she "watched and listened" (and remembered) very intently, for she was able to use details of what she experienced when she was very young as fodder for her own fiction over two decades later.
Beyond the handsome, newly constructed St. Jacob Church of 1907, Lois thought that the small town of Anna contained "no particular beauty or grace." Yet its lack of aesthetic appeal was insignificant. The small village contained all the basics needed to service its inhabitants and the surrounding farms, and Lois developed a firm and secure sense of her place within it. Anna, she fondly recalled, "soon became my own, a compound of sights and sounds and smells and buildings and people that became a part of me." Lois remembered her delight in running errands for the family. The parsonage sat in the block just north of St. Jacob. When Lois turned right at the intersection dominated by the church, she immediately passed the doctor's office and his residence just beyond as she headed down Main Street into town. The next block was more exciting to a child, with a fire station, town hall, commercial buildings, saloon, and finally Woehrle's Grocery on the corner where she could dash in, ask for "a pound of Arbuckle's XXXX Coffee," shouting back, "Charge it!" as she dashed out. The ice cream parlor across the street tempted her, and that side of Main Street also held two imposing corner mansions, the drugstore and Finkenbine's Department Store: dry goods on one side, groceries on the other. Further down, she could race by the hotel to pick up mail or deliver a letter to the post office, then take off for the depot by the Cincinnati Hamilton and Dayton railroad tracks to see a train coming into town, or stare at the grain elevator beyond. She soon felt that "the town that looked so commonplace and unpromising at first improved with time. ... The little stores were places of enchantment ... The fields and meadows and orchards and vacant lots unexplored kingdoms of thrilling adventure."
The power of Lois's accurate observations and memory supplied enough material to furnish her first two, largely autobiographical, storybooks. The charming cover imagery of streets of Victorian homes and endpapers with a bird's-eye map of "Greenhill" set the nostalgic tone of Skipping Village (1927), augmented by the whimsical pen illustrations sprinkled liberally throughout the text. A less generously sized companion volume, A Little Girl of Nineteen Hundred, published the following year, was similar in style.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lois Lenski by Bobbie Malone. Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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