Elma Jane Ellingwood

What Cudge wrote about her in Cudge.

1. Elma was present at Cudge's birth at home in 1895, and decades later her statement as one who was there was what got him a birth certificate.

   Sister Elma Jane has told me that she was present on the occasion of my birth. I did not know this until many years later when I needed a birth certificate and could not get one from the Cook County Clerk's office.

   p. 1 →

2. Elma helped her mother with the housework as a girl, and later worked as a stenographer at the Mark Manufacturing Company.

   Of course, as the girls got older, and particularly when Elma went to work, as a stenographer at Mark Manufacturing Company, mother had to gire someone to help her out with the housework

   p. 7 →

3. In North Evanston Elma became good friends with the sister of Cudge's old professor Homer Vanderbleu, and urged Cudge to visit the lonely, partly paralysed old man.

   she urged me to go over and see Homer. "Homer," she said, "was very longely for companionship and quite isolated there in the home with his sister."

   p. B15 →

4. Elma and her mother met Cudge and his new bride at the train in Chicago, and welcomed Ruth so warmly that she loved them at once.

   When we got off the train, there were Elma and mother coming down the platform to meet us. The wonderful way in which they welcomed Ruth made her love them at once.

   p. F1 →

5. At 69, Elma, who had never seen a mountain and would neither fly nor take the train, said yes and no a dozen times before driving west with Cudge to Spokane in 1950.

   She had never seen a mountain, but she was afraid to fly and was affected with claustrafobia in trains. ... When I stopped her bags were in the hall.

   p. I35 →

6. Elma said nothing about Glacier Park on the drive, remarking only on out-of-state licence plates, but her daughter Elma Virginia told Cudge she had written her all about how thrilled she was.

   "You don't know Mother," she said, "She will never express her emotional reaction to anything if she can avoid it. She did not want you to know how deeply affected she was.

   p. I36 →