Aunt Ruth

I believe that my aunt Ruth is next in line. Again I know little of her early life in the Peterson household, my recollections are all of her as an adult.



Ruth, about age 10, circa 1905

She was always a rather thin figure and I would say that her facial features tended to be on the “sharp” side. She contracted some sort of weird disease or condition characterized by an aversion to many foods (she tolerated bananas as I recall). In her illness her abdomen became distended as if there were some growth inside her. She went to a doctor in Fort Dodge by the name of Shafer and his diagnosis was that she had a tropical sprue whatever that is. [Actually, it may have been celiac sprue. —LS] Personally I think she had some sort of internal cancer.

I was often delegated by my uncle Carl to take his old Essex and take for to Fort Dodge for an appointment with her doctor there. She died sometime during my second year in Iowa City, and at my mother’s urging I made the trip back to Gowrie for the funeral. I doubt that I would have gone of my own volition.

I remember two things from the funeral. Like in the case of uncle George the casket stood for a time in the parlor of my grandmother’s house. The undertaker had curled her hair in a way quite different from the way she usually wore it. I recall my aunt Laurine commenting that the undertaker had done a poor job. My aunt Ruth (like my grandmother, aunt Esther, my mother and my aunt Lillian) wore her hair long and tied into sort of a “bun” at the nape of the neck on the back of the head.

During most of her adult years she was the organist at the Lutheran church in Gowrie. I believe she at one time was the organist at some church up in Minnesota until the position in Gowrie opened up. For most of her career at Gowrie she was paid the munificent sum of $30 a month (totally inadequate in my estimate in relation to the time and effort she put in doing her work). But she lived rent-free in my grandmother’s house where she did some of the housework. She did little cooking thought she would on occasion make a butterscotch-like cake.

She gave piano lessons, but I don’t know how extensively beyond Clarice, Vivian, me and some of the children of the preacher at the time. I well remember sitting at the piano in the little brown house doing scales, arpeggios in the various keys alongside her. And doing a few tunes like “The Happy Farmer” by Robert Schumann. In between the lessons we would practice maybe half an hour each day. I don’t think Vincent or my younger brothers ever took any lessons. For Clarice and me the lessons stopped when we moved to the Peterson farm but Vivian kept on, I guess until aunt Ruth died. By that time Vivian was in college in Dubuque pursuing her musical studies there.



Carl’s younger sister, Vivian, and Ruth, circa 1922 or 1923

Although I never did much with the lessons that my aunt Ruth gave me she did instill in me a liking for piano music. And I have come to like organ music very much. When the new church was built in Gowrie in the early 1930s a new organ was purchased and installed. The individual who supervised the installation gave a concert in which he played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in (?) minor and it had remained to this day as one of my favorite Bach compositions.

I can’t say that being musically inclined is part of my makeup. My three brothers have all developed a facility for vocal music. Vivian was of course a music major in college and I believe Marold was in his undergraduate years. When I was in high school the music program was all vocal music, late on instrumental music was introduced and I think Vincent and Marold at least played some instrument in the band. I participated in the American Junior drum and bugle corps, playing a snare drum so to that extent I was exposed to instrumental music. For a short while as a freshman in high school I tried out for the glee club but soon lost interest.

In rereading what I have typed I note that I did not write about my second recollection of my aunt Ruth’s funeral. It was the sigh of my uncle Carl after the trip to the cemetery and the visiting at my grandmother’s house, sitting morosely in his chair on the front porch. As he had done after the funeral of my uncle George.

As with my aunt Esther, I consider the life of my aunt Ruth a kind of tragedy. While they led useful lives to a degree neither of them ever developed the talents they had. Sexually barren and dominated by a rather extreme form of Lutheran fundamentalism is what I think of their lives.