Maude (1883-1993): She Grew Up With the Country

by Mardo Williams

Overview

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.

"Mardo Williams brings out the extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary century's worth of experiences in his fine biography of Maude."—Leonard Lopate, New York & Co., National Public Radio
"Because he was patient with the details, the scenes, the landscape of character, the author came away with an engaging and fascinating work of a courageous woman..." —Mike Harden, Columbus Dispatch
"Maude . . .puts a human face on history, showing us how the innumerable changes that occurred during the twentieth century forever altered life for one Ohio family." -Michael Mangus, Ph.D., Lecturer, Ohio State University
"Williams parallels his mother's life with the emergence of modernized America. Maude's unique story would not shine so brightly were it not for his eloquent writing"—Heidi Rinella, Ft. Myers News-Press
"The book is brimming with photographs and funny little tidbits of history--and America's growing up years... The times were tough, but it was also a golden time..."—V. Daniels, Winter Haven (FL) News Chief
"… you'll begin to understand the strength it took just to survive in a world without modern conveniences."-Wendy Green, The Logan Daily News

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011128165
Publisher:	CalliopePress
Publication date:	10/31/2010
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Mardo Williams' story is right out of the pages of Horatio Alger whose books he read as a young boy. Alger's heroes valiantly overcome poverty and adversity and this seems to be exactly what he did. He grew up on a 100-acre subsistence farm; serendipitously--after he lost his job at the Kenton, Ohio car shops because of the Depression--he answered an ad and became the only reporter at the Kenton News-Republican, a small Ohio daily. (He'd always had an inclination to write.) He had no college degree but while he'd been cleaning out the insides of the smokestacks of the locomotives up in Toledo, he'd taken two courses at the business school there, shorthand and typing, and so he was prepared to be a reporter. He did all the beats, hoofed it around the small town of Kenton digging up stories on slow news days.

Nineteen years later, after World War II ended, the Columbus Dispatch recruited him to the copy desk. He moved up the ranks from the copy desk to travel editor . . . and in 1954 he was asked to develop and write stories about the world of business. Columbus was booming at this time. Mardo, familiar with pounding the pavement to search out stories, did just that. Within the year, he was writing a daily business column with byline.

After he retired from the Dispatch in 1970, he freelanced for several years, editing a newsletter and doing publicity. He began his second career, writing books, at age 88, after his wife died after a long illness. At his daughters' urging, he learned to use a computer and began writing his first book, Maude. It was about his mother, who lived to be 110, and also about life at the turn of the century when everything was done arduously by hand. This was to be for family, but his daughter Kay read a few sections to her writers group. They loved it, and wanted more.

The manuscript grew from 50 pages to a 334 page book with a 32 page picture insert. The finished product was published in 1996, Maude (1883--1993): She Grew Up with the Country. It has been adopted by some college American history classes as a supplemental text "to put a human face on history."

Then Mardo wrote an illustrated children's book, Great-Grandpa Fussy and the Little Puckerdoodles, based on the escapades of four of his great-grandchildren. He decided at age 92 that he would try something completely different--a novel, One Last Dance. His magnum opus.

He spent three years writing the first draft while tour...