Dances, Seven Children, and Grampa’s Helping Hands

Ethel Katherine Williams was born in Newburg, North Dakota to Edward and Agnes Tomitum-Williams on January 28, 1911. She was the firstborn of three children. She was petite, had bright red hair, very fair skin and brown eyes. Her mother was a tall full-blooded Norwegian immigrant, who was born Agnes Tomitum. She came to America, married Edward and became a U.S. citizen through the government sponsored Immigrant Work Program. She left at least three sisters behind in Norway. We know nothing, at this time, of her parents or if she had any brothers. Ethel said she spoke with an accent but learned English and spoke it flawlessly. (Ethel did not know her mother’s national decent until later in life.) She had black hair, wore beautifully tailored clothes and loved to embroider and cook. She was an excellent seamstress and tailor who made her own patterns for the entire family’s clothing including her husband’s suits. She once delighted Ethel by making her a pair of knickers based on a picture Ethel had seen in a new Sears Roebuck catalog. Ethel was thrilled to amaze her friends by being the first girl in school to have them. Newburg, North Dakota is at the foot of the Turtle Mountains, near the banks of the Mouse River on the Sioux Line railroad. Harsh winters were a constant in this bleak land. For years, Ethel told her children stories about dealing with the unbelievable amounts of snow and the trials of bitter-cold weather. Tunneling out of the house to get to the barn in snow banks so high they reached second story windows and skiing over fences to get to school were commonplace in North Dakota winters. Ethel said she had learned to walk on tiny snowshoes even as a child. Ed and Agnes had three children all told, Lloyd in 1909, Ethel Katherine in 1911 and Ralph in 1914. When Ethel was born, the reporter got his name wrong and reported it as Edwin instead of Edward in Ethel’s birth announcement. He earned a good salary as an accountant. They had a beautiful home, beautiful furnishings and clothing and wanted for nothing. Their life, though they worked very hard and lived in a harsh environment was very good. In 1916, at the age of 2, little Ralph developed double pneumonia and was rushed to the distant hospital on a horse-drawn sleigh lying upon a featherbed and covered up with straw through a snowstorm. He was given a blood transfusion. But he died anyway. This tragedy broke Agnes’ heart. At a point in time in about 1919, while Agnes was laid up in a sanitarium suffering with tuberculosis, Ethel who was 8 and her brother, Lloyd, who was 10, were sent to live for four or five months with their Grandparents, Michael “ Mike” and Millisa “Lizzie” Lehman in Astoria, Illinois. They made the trip to Astoria by train and, according to Ethel, were terrified the whole trip. She said, “I think we just sat there on the hard train seat hugging each other and shivering all the way from North Dakota to Astoria.” Lizzie, was characterized as a fat little grandma with a very pug nose. (Aha! The Guild Nose!) Lizzie was well known for her beautiful quilts. Neighbors could keep track of her latest creations because she kept her quilting frame set up in her living room where it could be seen from the street through a doorway. Michael Lehman was known for his strict discipline, which Mother learned of during her stay. She recalled, “He was a tough one.” Ethel never questioned why her father’s brothers and sisters and his mother and father had a different name from him. She was told the “bigamy” story after Iris’ birth in 1930, by Ed’s sister, Mary, and Ethel didn’t tell her own children until they were adults. Agnes Tomitum Williams, died of consumption and complications from swine flu in 1921. Note that, in those days, any serious disease of the lungs was referred to as Consumption, but Agnes actually had tuberculosis. Ed, unable to keep up a big house, moved them all into a boarding house, where, with a little help from Mrs. Howe, the kindly woman who ran it, he managed to raise Ethel and his son, Lloyd by himself. Then, grieving his wife’s and son’s deaths, or bemoaning his past bad luck, he began to drink heavily leaving Ethel to more or less care for herself and Lloyd, and then, even for her father. Ethel was only eleven. It was 1922. Ed also managed a diner and a dance hall attached to the lumberyard for a while after Agnes’ death. Ethel tells of the night she got caught by her father smooching in the back seat of a car with a really terrific dance partner. She was banned from the dance hall after that. But Ethel dearly loved to dance, and though her father had become severely depressed by her mother’s death and was becoming harder to deal with because of his drinking, she managed to have fun in high school. She attended all the dances, and thanks to her many friends and their parents, who treated her very well, she was pretty happy. Her friends called her “Brownie” for her big brown eyes and another nickname she gave herself was “Ets.” Ethel and Lloyd attended Catholic school in North Dakota but were baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church (Agnes’ Tomitum’s Norwegian religion, it is assumed) and graduated from the tenth grade—the final grade in those days. Ethel received a certificate stating she was qualified to attend any college in the state, which she desperately wanted to do, but Ed Williams said girls didn’t need an education, and that Ethel should instead get a job so she could help pay for her own clothes. She had become a clotheshorse and loved looking well dressed her entire life. She worked as a typist in a doctor’s office in Dunseth, North Dakota. Ethel said she was a good typist. Ethel moved to Moline with her father and brother Lloyd in 1925 when she was 14. She married Floyd in 1928 at the age of 17, although she thought she was 19 due to being misinformed of her birth date by her mother and father—we know not why. She was introduced to Floyd by her best friend, Mary Hill, who thought Floyd Guild was a very special guy she would like. Floyd was said to be an excellent dancer and took Ethel to all the dances at the Turner’s Hall where he belonged to the Glee Club as he had a good singing voice and loved singing. He became an advanced tumbler and competed with the Turner’s Tumbling team. Floyd was very proud of his muscular body and made a biceps muscle for his kids whenever they asked him to. Ethel said she thought he was a “dreamboat” when they met. Ed Williams lived on and off with Ethel and Floyd in his early years in Moline and permanently beginning in about 1934, when he suddenly stopped working, possibly because he was severely depressed. Before then, he held several jobs no one can recall. Ethel’s brother, Lloyd Williams, was married shortly soon after arriving in Moline. Then he divorced and never remarried. He never had children. At some point, he moved from Moline to Savannah, Illinois. The jobs he’s known to have held there were as a bartender before the war and as a chauffeur to a rich eye doctor, after. He joined the army early on in the war. He was a semaphore expert in the Army Signal Corps. Lloyd was honorably discharged just before the war ended. As a result of injuries he incurred in an amphibious landing in New Guinea, he later suffered a collapsed lung for which he had two surgeries. One of these surgeries was in 1965 preventing him from attending his father’s funeral which upset Ethel terribly. He eventually disappeared from Ethel and her family’s lives much to their sorrow. Ethel’s kids all liked him very much and got excited whenever he came to visit. His legacy to the family was teaching everyone how to make bread and butter and peanut butter sandwiches on a piece of folded-over white bread, and then how to dunk them in cocoa for breakfast, a tradition that lasted all through their childhood. Grandpa Williams lived at home with Ethel and Floyd from 1934 until his death. He helped Ethel raise her kids, did housework, gardening and canning and did not take an outside job until quite late in life. When he did work, he gave his entire earnings (except the two dollars a week he spent on whiskey) and his entire savings to Ethel and Floyd, including the two thousand dollars, which he withdrew from his postal savings account, for the addition of the two bedrooms and the bath to the house on 39th Street. He told Ethel and Floyd the little house would never hold seven teenagers. He was seriously injured on the job at the Herman Nelson Corporation when he slipped off a catwalk into a vat of metal stripping acid and burned his leg from the ankle to the knee quite badly. He was treated successfully with Tryptar, an experimental drug that chemically removed the dead skin so the wounds could heal rapidly. His leg healed completely with the help of two skin grafts. Ed stopped working after the accident and started walking with a cane. Called “Grampa” by his seven grandchildren and “Gramps” by Floyd, he was really loved by everyone. His favorites were Delores and Bob but he was nice to all the kids. They all knew he was a great help to their Mom, who adored him. Ed Williams, who drank whiskey, would sometimes get drunk at Harvey’s Bar in Highland, and Floyd would have to go pick him up. Once, Floyd had to go looking for him when he showed up missing entirely and finally found him sleeping in a railroad boxcar. Ed Williams died of a heart attack on February 22, 1953 at age seventy-one and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Moline, Illinois. He has no headstone. After Ethel married Floyd and gave birth to a daughter, Iris, she worked sorting buttons in a button factory, where she was paid by the pound. Her next job was as a telephone operator. She also worked at the Moline candy factory where they made Nibs Licorice Bits for a while. Ethel Guild gave birth to seven children. The first child, Iris, a daughter in May, 1930, the second, a son, Bernie after the Great Depression ended in 1936, and the remaining five (one more son, Bob and four more daughters, Carol, Delores, Diana and Barbara were each born about eighteen months apart except Barb who came three years after Diana. Some reports say Ethel’s father, Ed, was more or less permanently on Floyd’s case for keeping her pregnant all the time. But Ethel loved having kids and would have had even more if she could have afforded them she told her children many times. She nearly died from a goiter in 1934 at age twenty-three. It was successfully operated on by a doctor who, oddly, himself later succumbed of the exact same malady. She wore her scar or “thyroid necklace” as she called it, the rest of her life. This hypothyroidism occurred before iodine was added to salt, and the Illinois soil provides none to things that grow there. Ethel took thyroid tablets from then on. Though, two years later, she was pregnant again with Bernie. Stories of the Floyd and Ethel Guild’s life together with their family are well, if not exhaustively, documented in the individual stories of their children in this book. After all the children had left and Floyd had died, Ethel was by herself but she led a full and satisfying life. She spent time with her handcrafts, became an artistic expert at making Christmas ornaments and played cards at her home or at her friend Florence Britz’s home almost every evening. She took in Carol and Chris after Carol’s divorce, and then Dee and Susy after Dee’s divorce. She loved helping to raise her grandchildren. Ethel loved babies above all. She spent three months of the year with her daughter, Diana, in Florida and often made short visits to her other children’s homes as well. Her lifelong dream was to go to Europe. Her son, Bernie, sent her to Germany, her father’s forbearers’s national origin country, to visit her daughter, Carol, Charlie and Chris when they were stationed there in Mainz with the Army in 1979. Bernie joined her there and they all traveled in a big government-issued Mercedes to Denmark. On her yearly visit to Diana’s home in Hollywood Florida on April 22, 1988, Ethel died, at age 77 from complications of an ovarian cyst surgery and congestive heart failure. She is buried in Riverside cemetery in Moline Illinois next to her husband Floyd with the wrong birth date on her pre- engraved head stone. It says, “Born 1909,” but should read 1911. But that never bothered her, because she was delighted to find she was two years younger than she thought when she researched her birth records to get a U.S. Passport. Ethel was a hard-working dedicated mother above all. She gave pure unqualified love to each and every one of her children. They each loved her with all their heart.