Always interesting, got emotionally involved

A book is great when it holds my interest as strongly as this one and gets me emotionally involved with the folks in it. Even the simple diary entries were fascinating. Inspired me to purchase a Thought A Day diary. Loved Elsie and her world. ( )

A few years before her grandmother Elsie’’s death in 1987 at age 99, Barbara Anne Waite innocently asked her if she ever loved anyone before Barbara’s grandmother. In response, Elsie teared up. She said, “There was this cowboy...” but didn’t continue.
Barbara knew that Elsie had taught in Arizona from 1913 to1916. Elsie loved teaching and literature as well as life in Arizona. Following that, she wrote and published short stories, poems, and articles. A year after Elsie died, Barbara found an autobiographical manuscript as well as her grandmother’s diary. Together with newspaper articles, letters, and, later on, interviews with some of the people who knew Elsie while she was in Arizona, Barbara saw her grandmother as a single 20 something woman living in a very different environment from the California she had known and to which she would return. VERY LOVINGLY YOURS, ELSIE is a memoir compiled by Elsie’s granddaughter based on those writings and interviews.
After graduating from Pomona College in Claremont, California, Elsie had planned to get her teacher’s training at the University of California in Berkeley. Her doctor thought she was too fragile to handle the work, despite spending two years after graduating to rebuild her strength. When she had the opportunity to teach in Cornville, Arizona, she thought it would help her financially and physically. So, despite lacking credential or teacher training, she left the city for a small, one-room schoolhouse in an undeveloped part of Arizona.
The book relates her experiences with living arrangements, the other teacher in that school (as well as those in the town where she taught the following year), the students, the school routine, and her social and religious life. Rules in Arizona in 1913 prohibited teachers from “keeping company with men,” dying their hair, wearing fewer than two petticoats,” loitering in downtown ice cream shops,” wearing dresses shorter than “two inches above the ankle” or dressing in “bright colors.”
Most of the book is Elsie’s diary. It is probably the weakest part. Elsie made entries nearly every day but most of them were very brief and repetitive: Read a book. Ate a meal. Washed clothes. Taught Sunday school. Visited a neighbor. Thought about my family. The segments at the beginning of the chapters, written by Barbara, flesh out some of the details into story form but also make the diary even more boring. The letters, newspaper articles, and footnotes add a lot to the story, however, as do the pictures. (There is one with her dancing with Thornton Wilder while he was still a college student.)
Of interest to today’s reader are the prices she paid then: “Meals at Harvey House were 75 cents....Harvey ‘girls’ [worked] 6 months in the desert locations before they ended up marrying a rich mine worker or ranchman.” “Fifty cents for hamburger steak with a bit of potato.” She was impressed that at one lunch she was served Campbell’s Tomato Soup. At a conference she attended she was shocked that some people paid $50 a day for their hotel suite. She and her fellow teacher paid $2 a night for their lodgings.
I was surprised how quickly mail and packages were delivered from California to Arizona, often within a day or two. She and her friends would take walks of 15 to 20 miles on a regular basis. And living in Arizona did improve her health.
She does write about her relationship with one man but they seem to have different plans. She wants to be friends. He wants to be married. Later on, when she met the man she does marry, she isn’t sure if she loves him (a few weeks after they meet) but decides rather quickly. At this point, she doesn’t seem to know what is meant by being in love.
The book is charming and informative. Though, as I mentioned before, a lot of the diary could have been omitted.
This book was a free Amazon download. ( )