Jennie L. Elliott

What Cudge wrote about her in Cudge.

1. When she was ill for a spell, Cudge's mother taught him, at twelve or thirteen, to bake the family's weekly batch of eight loaves.

   When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, mother was sick for quite a spell, so she taught me how to make bread and supervised the first batch.

   p. 6 →

2. She made most of the family's clothes at yearly sewing bees, and she dressed modestly but in excellent taste.

   Mother always dressed nicely, very modestly, but in excellent taste. I remember the white lace edging around her neck and the front of her dress and on her cuffs.

   p. 7 →

3. She put up with her sons' basketball games in the coal-dusted barn loft and dried their soaked skating clothes on the registers.

   Then we would come in the house with everything clothes, hair and skin covered with it. I don't know how mother stood it. What a patient, understanding soul she was!

   p. 15 →

4. With money coming in only when patients paid her husband, she kept the grocer's slips on a spindle and settled up with him at the kitchen table.

   Mother would stick that up on a spindle in the kitchen and when father finally got some cash from some of his patients, she would call up the grocer and tell him to come up the next evening.

   p. 16 →

5. She organized the church women's association and was its first president, and she sputtered whenever her husband was once again given the job of telling a minister to move on.

   I can hear my mother yet, and see her eyes snapping when he would come home and tell her that he was elected to that chore. How she would sputter and sputter about somebody else doing it once in a while.

   p. 25 →

6. When Cudge came home unannounced from the YMCA in England, his mother and father, alone in the living room, nearly fainted, and there were tears on both sides.

   I opened the door, walked in, and they nearly fainted. They had not got my telegram, and they didn't know I was coming home. That was a happy reunion, I tell you! Tears on both sides.

   p. C15 →

7. She baked Cudge's favourite cranberry pie and mailed it to him at officers' training camp at Little Rock, where it took two weeks to reach him.

   As you know, I have a very strong yen for cranberry pie. Of course, mother was anxious to please me. When I was down at Little Rock, she made me a nice cranberry pie.

   p. D5 →

8. When she was well enough to move to Madison, she lived with Jennie Harriet in a second-floor apartment, and Cudge always regretted not finding her one without stairs.

   It's always been a source of regret to me that I didnt seem to care enough for her to try to get her an apartment where she didn't have to climb those stairs. She was with us, helped pick the apartment, and she never complained

   p. G15 →

9. In an agreement kept at the back of the memoir, signed at Evanston on 20 June 1923, three years after their father's death, her four sons Jim, Wink, Cudge and Gog undertook to share the cost of keeping her, each in proportion to his income, the payments made "in the guise of purchase payments on the home property."

   In order to provide an adquate income for Mother we have made the following agreement:- ... That each of us shall pay in monthly amounts his proportionate share of the amount which we estimate is necessary to provide Mother with sufficient funds to fully meet her needs.

   scan 196 →