ETHEL M. SHAFER:

CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, UNIVERSITY YEARS

Mother grew up in a loving, if somewhat austere family, whose self-reliant outlook she adopted. Her parents taught her to value herself and came to treat her much as an adult. Dutiful, very able, she did well at school. She had but few close friends, all girls, passed hours at a time in solitary occupations, or daydreaming. Her outlet was in games and other athletic pursuits, at which she was apt and confident. At the university she learned to lead in women’s activities, but remained standoffish with men, undoubtedly attracted, conscious of her appeal, sure of her superiority, yet unwilling to expose herself. That farouche young person, clear blue eyes unblinking, would remain an aspect of the cordial, poised woman of later years.

Paris Township (1882-88)

A girl, the second of two children, was born to Marion Olive Shafer (neé Martin) and her husband Dr. Marion Amandus Shafer on a farm in Paris Township on Sunday 8 January 1882. The girl, called Ethel May, was eight years younger to the day than her brother Percy. Her given names and his first name, like those of their parents, had come to be common only in the 19th century, above all in the United States.^[1]

Dr. Shafer’s farm was in Section 26 of the township, two miles east of Bowen (more recently Crosby), on the south side of the road, not far beyond the bridge over Plaster Creek. His 80 acres were part of the 400 bought by his father John Shafer in 1843, preparing a move west from “York State” near Lake Ontario (Yates Township, Orleans County) with his patriarchal family. Ethel’s maternal grandfather, Thomas W. Martin, had arrived a decade later, in 1854, from southeastern Michigan (Superior Township, Washtenaw County).^[2]

Ethel’s parents, having been brought up in Paris Township from childhood, “Bud” Shafer from the age of six, “Ollie” Martin from five, between them knew the established families. Their own parents had the name of thrifty, self-respecting people. The Shafers had been for a time almost a clan. The school (no. 9) built in the 1880’s just to the west of them would be called after them locally, as would the road that ran north to Laraway Road from the Shafer farms.^[3]

Dr. Shafer had been practicing in the township since the spring of 1867 except for the months (from September 1872 to March 1873) spent finishing his M.D., with distinction, at the Detroit College of Medicine, later part of Wayne State University. The two confreres nearest him were to the north and west in Grand Rapids and to the south at Hammond (called Dutton by the late 1880’s), just over the line into Gaines Township on the Grand River Valley Railroad.^[4] Most families in Paris Township—some 400 in 1880—and a few to the east in Cascade Township, found it more convenient to go see Dr. Shafer or, in need, to send for him. He did his best, paid or unpaid, to minister to their sundry illnesses, injuries, and complaints; delivered their babies; comforted, in need sedated, their dying. He sometimes treated livestock.

A country doctor was often away from home, and Ethel in childhood was very close to her mother, a woman of few words and strong, well-controlled feelings, visible sometimes in her blue eyes. She was kind, but firm, with most exacting standards of behavior. And in those years she was weighed down by work and worry, as by the extra flesh two children and the years had added to her compact, once graceful, body, though she ate always sparingly.

Ethel seems to have been an adventurous, if well-behaved child, soon acquainted with creek, barn, farm animals, and woods. Her mother had to keep a sharp eye out for her; the watch must have been entrusted now and again to Nick Troost, the hired man, who worked the farm; he was like one of the family. Few children of Ehtel’s age lived close by, so she spent much of the time amusing herself until just before or after supper (as the evening meal was still called), when her parents might spend an hour with her. Her father taught her the game of cat’s cradle and sang old tunes, playing the fiddle to accompany himself. Those that he played most often had lively airs as brisk as a country dance: “Pop, Goes the Weasel,” “Old Dan Tucker,” “Zip Coon,” “Camptown Races,” “Dixie’s Land,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “The Arkansas Traveler,” which he did complete with patter—all dating from before the Civil War—also “Kingdom Coming,” a war song. Or her mother might bring out a basket of sewing and knitting, and Ethel would help unwind a skein of yarn to make a ball.

Before Ethel took her nap, when she needed comforting, or when she was ready for bed, her mother would say nursery rhymes, nearly all of them such as call for some action or dialogue—again and again, for Ethel still would have dozens of them by heart some thirty years after, as well as many children’s songs, notably ancient rounds such as “Scotland’s burning...”. In the evening, when little Ethel became sleepy, she would say, “Put me in my little bed, but don’t bend I.”

The Shafers lived comfortably, if modestly, in a frame house, well back from the road. The Doctor had built it in 1870, the year after his marriage. A young woman from the neighborhood came in by the week as “hired help.” Except on special occasions, when she may have waited on table, she, like Nick Troost, ate with the family as a matter of course. (Two photographs of the household, taken in the side yard, probably dating from the summer of 1882, are shown following p. ***.)

Food was plentiful. The farm yielded more than enough wheat for flour, green corn, navy beans, potatoes, apples, milk, and beef. Patients short on cash paid often in food. Mrs. Shafer also kept chickens and tended a kitchen garden. With the help of the hired girl she cooked and baked, served meals and washed dishes, churned,^[5] pumped and carried water, kept fires burning, as well as sweeping and mopping, scrubbing dirty clothes on a washboard, ironing, darning and mending.^[6] In season, she dried fruits under cheesecloth in racks laid against the south side of the house, made pickles (stored in a barrel), packed eggs in salt against moulting time. Percy certainly was expected to take a hand, as with feeding chickens and gathering eggs, fetching wood and water.

The Doctor, like his father, was a food crank. He had been converted to Horace Fletcher’s doctrine (Fletcherism): that one should chew each bite until it had become a liquid mass. He also subscribed to Sylvester Graham’s views about “bulk” (now called “fiber”) in food, in particular as to the value of whole wheat. But the Doctor also believed, “Only what you like does you any good.” So his children had plenty of chance to indulge their appetites. Ethel would recall maple sugar and pickles in the pantry; she and one of her friends ate sugar till they “couldn’t stand it,” then a pickle, and back to sugar. She would recall her mother’s vinegar pies, the filling of maple sugar, butter, and vinegar, all country products,^[7] as were flour and shortening. Best of all, I think, was maple sugar poured on a dish of snow, a chewy delicacy that you should try if you are ever in a place where clean snow falls.^[8]

The best story to come down from these years you already know. One rainy night, Plaster Creek flooded and the wooden bridge near the house washed out. Shouts were heard above the storm. Dr. Shafer hurried out carrying a lantern, and found in the swollen creek a sodden couple. They had been driving back from a late party, giving the horse his head. The Doctor heard, along with the neighing and struggles of the horse and the rush of water, a woman calling as if in protest, “Not anither dhrap, O’Connor (or whatever the name), “unless it’s swatened!”

Ethel would have begun early to learn the ramifications of family life. Both grandmothers had died soon after she was born, Mary Ann Martin two days later, on 10 January, and Eliza Shafer, full of years, on 2 February. But her grandfathers were still hale and hearty. Across the road with his son Oscar lived John Shafer, who was to survive until January 1890, reaching at least 101. Thomas Martin was soon to retire, in 1885, but would live until January 1901, almost 89. He, too, lived within calling distance.

And then there were uncles, aunts, and cousins. On her father’s side, five aunts and three uncles remained, of whom the oldest was twenty years his senior, and some two score first cousins, along with a number of their children, many living nearby. The Martins were fewer. Ethel’s Hankinson cousin Herbert, the son of her mother’s older sister Sarah, who had died in 1875, lived in Minneapolis. Ethel’s uncle James Henry Martin, her mother’s one surviving half-brother, would stay on the family farm until after his father’s death, then moving to town. Most of his five living children had stayed in the area; Thomas Martin would spend his last years with one, Arthur Martin, in Ada Township.

In childhood, Ethel would have begun hearing about her forefathers. John Shafer had been born in the year of the first congress under the Constitution,^[9] at Frederick City, Maryland, where his family had settled well before the Revolution. The Shafers, like so many other families in and about Frederick, came originally from the Rhineland— the Shafers, from the Archbishopric of Mainz—following a stream of emigrants fleeing heavy taxes, war, and an imposed religion. Rhinelanders, known as “Palatines,” had settled in numbers at and about Fredericktown (as it was also called) beginning in the mid-18th century. Their language remained in common use when John Shafer was growing up.

His father died when John was a boy, and as soon as he could, he struck out west, with a good stake, to make his fortune. In 1812, as a member of the Ohio militia, he took part in the summer campaign under General Hull, whose force was taken prisoner at Detroit in mid-August without firing a shot and was then marched east across Upper Canada. Upon release in mid-1813, John Shafer enlisted in the New York militia, saw the burning of Buffalo (29-31 December 1813) and fought at Lundy’s Lane (25 July 1814); afterwards he received a field commission.^[10] He was fond of recalling only the latter part of his military experience, the earlier part becoming known through his application for a pension in 1872. He acquired in his last years a certain notoriety as the oldest veteran in the state. A local Federal official (either the Marshal or someone from his office) would come out from town now and again to verify that he was still alive—that his pension should still be paid.

His wife was born Eliza Denison in 1799 in northwestern Vermont, at Fairfax (Franklin County). Within the year the family seems to have moved on, settling down at Castleton (Rutland County) in west central Vermont. Eliza was of old Yankee stock. Her father came from Saybrook, Connecticut; her mother, from Lanesborough, in the Berkshires. Both her grandfathers and her father had fought in the Revolution.

I don’t know how Eliza met John Shafer. One might risk a guess: wartime acquaintance of John with one of her brothers. Anyhow, John and Eliza were married in 1815, in Rush Township, Ontario (later Monroe) County, in western New York. They would live in that area for about twenty-nine years, mainly on a farm near the shore of Lake Ontario. Of their nine children that survived childhood, Marion Amandus, born in 1838, was the youngest.

Thomas Martin had been born in 1812, and brought up, in the county of Lanark in the populous Scottish lowlands, at Avondale, near Strathaven, where his ancestors had lived, through some turbulent times, for over three hundred years.^[11] The farm where he was born had been in the family at least since the late 1670’s. His father, heir and descendant of Covenanters—and sympathizers—had been among the founders of the “Relief Church.”^[12]  Thomas went to the common school of the parish, until about 13 years old; he very likely had the best instruction of any of my greatgrandparents. As a younger son, he had thereupon chosen to be apprenticed to a cooper, the fees being paid from the estate of his father, James Martin, who died in 1825. In the early 1830’s, Thomas, a qualified journeyman, had emigrated. He lived for a time in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin—he was said to have owned a farm in what became the business district of Madison. He didn’t stay long in either state, for in early 1835 he was married in Washtenaw County in southeastern Michigan. There he settled for two decades, though later moving from Salem to Superior Township.

His second wife, Mary Ann Pinkney, he married in 1846, about two years after the death of his first wife. Mary Ann was born in Westchester County, New York, where an English ancestor of the name had been an early settler. Her parents moved to Michigan, Plymouth Township, Wayne County, in the late 1820’s and died in her youth, so she recalled little about her numerous connections. Thus, for example, there is no tradition to establish which of the numerous Pinkneys from about New York serving in the Revolution may have belonged to her father’s immediate family.

All in all, oral tradition was far from extensive. Of Ethel’s grandparents, only Thomas Martin could recall a family home of long standing, and he maintained the closest family ties. A nephew called James, in America (I believe) on family business, came once to see him, and in the fall of 1886 Thomas sailed back home on a visit. His children and grandchildren were to correspond with Scottish cousins well into the present century. Ethel would learn most then about the Martins. Eliza Shafer always kept in touch with the Denisons, and with a cousin on her mother’s side that had moved as a young man to Washtenaw County; with the latter and his family, visits were exchanged. (Correspondence would continue till after World War II). Ethel’s two other grandparents had, so far as I know, had nothing to do with those “back home” and had passed down only a few well-worn phrases about origins and childhood.

Dr. Shafer, as was expected of a country doctor, worked long and hard. He looked tired and withdrawn, blue eyes clouded, black reddish-tinged moustache—and a slight beard on the lower lip—straggly, though he kept in trim and held himself straight to his nearly 5 feet 11 inches in his stockinged feet, weighing not more nor less that 145 pounds from age 20 on.^[13] He enjoyed esteem, but touched less and less cash money. The middle and late 1880’s were lean years for farmers, doctor bills often going long unpaid. Or, as mentioned, they might be settled for a few pecks of potatoes or a ham, useful enough, but not for paying taxes or bills, including those for medicines, which every country doctor perforce furnished. Nor did the farm contribute to the net cash inflow, rather the reverse.^[14]

The Doctor did not lack public spirit. He was among the founders of the Western Michigan Medical Society in 1878, and a leader in the county in urging inoculation of milch cows.^[15] He took keen satisfaction in his work and position, enjoyed playing the fiddle at country gatherings, expansive affairs that often lasted almost all night as they “danced the hoe down.” But with the drying up of his cash income, he in the end decided to move to town.

Other considerations might have figured. According to Mother, he wearied of living near the Shafers—his favorite brother Mason had already moved to town, but there remained another brother’s widow next to him, two brothers across the road, a widowed sister just beyond. Years of Army life and country practice had worn the easygoing open young medical apprentice and recruit into a physician, patient and kind, but quiet and reserved. He was not much pleased still to be treated as “Bud” by older relatives that had never left the township, or to provide the unlimited free medical treatment they expected for their families. Over and above interest and inclination, he may have weighed a high school education for Percy and, in time, for Ethel.

Dr. and Mrs. Shafer very likely were in agreement on all this. She may indeed have brought to bear the energy that overcame inertia; she was said to have suffered Shafers even less gladly than he, was more worldly, and thought well of education. She herself had taught at district school no. 5 in 1872/3, living with her parents while her husband Amandus—as she always called him—completed his education.

Grand Rapids (1888-1901)

By early 1888 Dr. Shafer owned almost three-tenths of an acre (measured to the street) in Grand Rapids, at the top of Lyon Street hill—Lot 10, Block 12, Kendall’s Addition.^[16] In the spring he let the first contracts for building a house there, along the eastern side of the property. When it was finished, well into the fall, the Shafers moved in, the farm being left to the care of Nick Troost. Most of the Doctor’s patients very likely went to the man at Dutton; a few, including one or two relatives, stayed with him.

The new house built at 275 Lyon Street was a good-sized, well designed frame structure, clapboarded; painted a dark grayish green as I first remember it. (A photograph of the house is shown following p. ***.^[17]) There was a veranda all across the front and part way down the east side, along an alley (Ghilda Place).^[18] Entering the door, one came into a hall, with a stairway at the right, rising toward the front of the house, past a heavy oak balustrade. To the left was to be hung the wall telephone, Citizens 1819, near the door to the parlor.

The hall led back to the dining room, which looked east, through a double window giving on Ghilda Place. Directly to the rear was a pantry, then the large kitchen. Back of the parlor was a sitting room—opposite the dining room—with a bay window, looking over Lafayette Street and the sunset; and then a smaller room, which very likely served Dr. Shafer for consulting and examining patients. The house was shaded in front, the walls downstairs covered with dark, probably green, paper, but light flowed in from both east and west, and the ceilings were high.

To the country furniture the Shafers brought with them were added a few pieces from some local maker, among them a walnut sideboard and a dining table. Figured Wilton carpet lay on the hardwood floors. Small wall lamps gave a bright yellow light in the evening. The rank-smelling geranium, Grandma Shafer’s favorite, very likely grew in pots or boxes by the windows.

On the second floor, off a center hall, were four good-sized bedrooms and a bath and water closet. For the house had running water—boiled for drinking, when they didn’t use bottled water—as well as gas light, though they probably went on cooking with coal for some years. I should imagine they washed usually in cold water— with Pears Soap (“Good Morning! Have you used Pears Soap?” asked the ad)—heating water for baths, taken by no means daily. The first floor, probably not the second, would have been warmed by hot air vents from a coal furnace. I recall two small fireplaces at the right angles, back to back, at the corner of the parlor and sitting room; there may have been two like them directly above. By a stairway in back one could climb to an attic, doubtless used for storing the usual lumber—school texts, a disused trunk with a Civil War uniform, a wedding dress, other old clothes, excess furniture, and photograph albums.

The cellar rose above ground level, and had an outside entrance at the back, down several steps, the opening (in my childhood) protected by folding doors. The cellar was used for storing coal and firewood, and a few tools; preserves and winter fruits and vegetables; and a keg of Silver Foam beer, a local product.^[19]

Latticework fences extended from the house back as far as the carriage house on Ghilda Place, enclosing part of the property as a garden. At the far end, along the south side of the carriage house, a kitchen garden was laid out. And the Doctor planted three trees for summer apples as well as a lilac bush.^[20]

Grand Rapids by then had become a flourishing town; the population rose from about 60,000 in 1890 to 88,000 in 1900, numbers that make for a very livable place. No suburbs had as yet sprung up; the nearest villages were some miles out. From the Shafers’ a brisk walk of twenty to forty minutes or a short ride would take you into open country.

The neighborhood had been slowly built up with well-kept frame houses, many of them twenty, a few over thirty, years old. There was also the occasional one of brick. The only stone house nearby was the old Leavitt place, part way down the hill on the north side of Lyon Street and the west side of Ransom Street.^[21] It stood well above street level, as a result of repeated grading of the hill.^[22]

The residents were exceedingly respectable, not at all fashionable. Many of the houses were occupied by youngish business and professional men, most of whom would stay a few years, then move on. But other families stayed longer. A scattering of houses, about one in four, would belong to the same families for a generation or more, possibly as high a proportion as at other locations. Families that would live close by on Lyon and Lafayette Streets while Ethel grew up, and for several years after she was married, included those of two lawyers, a doctor, a bank president, three wholesale merchants, another that had turned insurance underwriter, a railroad traffic agent, a senior department store employee, and three widows of some means.^[23]  Members of five of these thirteen families would still live in the same houses while Art and I were growing up.^[24] There is no longer any trace of them in the old neighborhood.^[25] Most of the houses are still there, exteriors and yards often modified, but memories are imprecise and they look much the same.^[26]

The Shafers in time established relations with three of their neighbors, the Elmore R. Treadways, who lived across Lyon Street; the Heman Barlows, just east of Ghilda Place; and the Arthur R. Antisdels, who lived nearby on Lyon, then on Lafayette Street until 1896.^[27] Whether the Shafers came to know others well enough for Mrs. Shafer to call, and be called on, I can’t say.

Children, even then, usually made their own way. Percy, though at the awkward age of 14, in his last year at grammar school, was ready to seek acceptance, and he was to be quite successful in that; he was a strong, upstanding fellow. It would have been easier for Ethel, who began the first grade that fall, at the age of 6, the best at which to meet peers and make friends. Most of the children she met in the first years would remain her schoolmates. Several had names that would be quite as familiar in my youth as in hers; some of their children would start school at about the time I did, among them those of Elizabeth Judson (Johnson), Ned Rood, Ethelyn Sweet (Quimby), Marshall Uhl, and Abbot Widdicomb.^[28]

Ethel got on easily, yet without finding, or desiring, such numerous school friends as Father had made. Though she must often have been lonely, she had become used to that and seems to have preferred the company of her elders to that of her peers. In these early school years she had one special friend and confidante, Julia Barlow, about six years older, who lived across Ghilda Place.

From the first through the sixth grade, Ethel attended Fountain Street School (no. 3), on the north side of Fountain Street between Prospect Street and College Avenue, standing in an oak grove, one plot of about one and two-thirds acres. It was a solid three-story building of red brick trimmed with sandstone, dating from 1867, more recently equipped with both steam heat and “well-ventilated” water closets in the basement. The nine rooms had seats for 450 pupils.

Staff changes came often. Some young teachers left, of course, to be married; older ones, to become principals in the expanding system: a few to teach in a high school. In 1888/9 only two still remained of the teachers of 1881: the principal, Miss H. Antoinette Lathrop (a veteran of seventeen years in the system), and Miss Julia A. Wyckoff. Three years later Miss Wyckoff and Miss Cornelia E. Newton alone were left of the staff of 1888/9. During Ethel’s last years the principal was the redoubtable (Mrs.) Constance Rourke, mother of the literary figure of the same name.

For the seventh and eighth grades, students transferred to the Central Grammar School, next to the new high school, likewise equipped by then with steam heat, and water closets in the basement. Here again there was turnover. Only four out of nine teaching in 1894/5 stayed on in 1895/6, two of them the Misses Wyckoff and Newton. By then the school had a principal, but it was still under the supervision of the high school principal, Mr. Greeson, who signed certificates for those completing the course.

Ethel was schooled more as Art and I should be than as Father had been. To be sure, graded readers (Willson’s, put out by Harper’s) were still in use. But each year’s class had a separate room, and the object was to prepare for high school. Instruction in arithmetic no longer employed such ancient expressions as the “double rule of three” and “tare and tret.” Grammar and syntax were taught systematically; memorizing and elocution carried less weight than earlier. Penmanship and spelling were no longer valued for their own sake. Ethel’s spelling was, however, satisfactory and her compositions were in a round, legible hand. All told, the standard was high, and when she received her certificate in June 1896, she was ready for high school.

Ethel’s childhood was uneventful, on the outside, that is to say, and went almost unrecorded. There remain a few photographs—one of her at about 10, standing in the yard west of the enclosed garden, and two studio portraits of her head in early adolescence. They give some idea of what she was like. As she was later to recall, she was by no means forthcoming as a girl. (Photographs follow p. ***)

Without much in the way of anecdotes and records, we can guess at what sort of person she was. We know, for example, that she was a reader. She had been given a subscription to the St. Nicholas Magazine, probably up to the age of 11 or 12. The family took Harper’s Monthly Magazine, which still published (often, not always, without repayment) fiction by established English writers while beginning to publish some of the coming American writers. In Harper’s Ethel first read Dickens, eagerly awaiting the next instalment. In time she went through many of his novels, with an enthusiasm I should never muster. From passing remarks in later years, we know she enjoyed, among other stories, Swiss Family Robinson (first U.S. edition, 1848), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Water Babies (1863), Hans Brinker (1865), Little Women (1869), Lorna Doone (1869), The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), Tom Sawyer (1876), Peck’s Bad Boy (1883), A Kentucky Cardinal (1895), and Bob, Son of Battle (1898), of course in rather different order. After glancing at Dr. Shafer’s books, one might imagine that she read stories by Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne, the plays and poems of Goldsmith. She tried perhaps a novel or two of Cooper, Scott, and George Eliot, and woudl recall poems of Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Lowell, Holmes; is less likely to have looked into the essays of Macaulay and Emerson. She may at most have glanced curiously at Grant’s Personal Memoirs and Sherman’s Recollections, hardly opening them, however. Yet I can imagine her leafing through, as I should as a small boy, the folio containing the Rev. Henry C. Carey’s long popular translation of Dante’s Purgatory and Paradise, in the Cassell edition with the then famous Doré illustrations.^[29]

Off and on, beginning at age 11, Ethel collected stamps, spent hours poring over catalogues. She perhaps bought, and on great occasions was given, batches of inexpensive foreign stamps. She also removed stamps from old letters, including those that her father had written home from the Civil War, the Indian wars, and Ann Arbor. She surely had leave. All of these she carefully mounted in her album.^[30] She was never altogether to lose interest in her collection.

Like her father, and Percy, Ethel had an agreeable gift for drawing, and spent time practicing, perhaps with advice from the Doctor.^[31] One sketch he kept, apparently after an illustration; it is shown following p. ***.

She also learned to play the piano, taking lessons for at least a couple of years, beginning at about twelve. She used a German practice book, apparently of the ‘sixties or ‘seventies,^[32] partly exercises, partly short, easy pieces. Jamie still has as well three separate pieces she would have played—a short one by Ethelbert Nevin, with her teacher’s fingering at places, and two waltzes.^[33]

She very likely accompanied the singing that was such a pleasant feature of social gatherings of the age. The young may well have sung “Ta-ra-ra-boom-d-day” (1891), “After the Ball” (1892), “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” (1892)—which she would sometimes sing in my boyhood—“A Bicycle Built for Two” (1892).

Other songs only a little earlier included “The Spanish Cavalier” (1878), “Polly-Wolly-Doodle” (1880), “Goodbye, My Lover, Goodbye” (1882), “Oh, My Darling Clementine” (1884), and “Solomon Levi” and “Bring Back my Bonnie to Me” (both of 1885). These and some others Ethel played and sang from a popular compilation of “College Songs,” chiefly humorous, a purchase, or present, from her years in high school.^[34] The simple harmonic progressions in “The Spanish Cavalier” and “Solomon Levi,” as someone had discovered, are the same, and the two songs were often sung simultaneously. The practice must have been widespread; it is mentioned by Sigmund Spaeth. In my youth she would at times take part in singing one or another of these songs.

Ethel would also have joined in singing, while playing, such old favorites: “Go Tell Aunt Netty” (traditional),^[35] “Home, Sweet Home” (1823), “O! Susannah” (1848)— only, as I recall, the first and third stanzas— “Juanita” (about 1850), “Wait for the Wagon” (1851), and “Old Folks at Home” (1851), “My Old Kentucky Home” (1852), “Listen to the Mockingbird” (1855), “Darling Nelly Gray,” “Seeing Nelly Home” and “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” (1856), and “Silver Threads Among the Golden” (1872). She was to remain especially fond of this nostalgic music.

Older still, of another kind altogether, were Schubert’s songs, a selection of which she had, with German  and English words, and piano accompaniment.^[36] Ethel’s interest in these songs must date from her last years in high school, when she had acquired some proficiency in German. I can well believe she found them sympathetic. I don’t remember her singing or even mentioning them; that’s just one of many cases in which she would edit her recollections and tastes so as to avoid seeming “different.”

However dreamy on occasion, Ethel was always physically active, exceptionally so for a town girl of the time. There were no organized sports for girls at grammar school or high school, though room had been left for a girls’ gym in the new building of 1893. But she did not want for activities. She would recall playing “one ol’ cat,” which preceded baseball; there was just one base. They played in the side yard. She was, as one said then, “something of a tomboy.” She had a bicycle from the age of 9 or 10; improved materials, design, and manufacture had made cycling all the rage. We see her in a photograph (following p. ***), probably of 1892, with Percy and a girl of about his age,^[37] by their bicycles. She must have been fairly adept, if they let her ride along with them. She climbed trees as long as it was decorous, if not considerably longer. A few years later she learned to ride bareback at the Martin farm on a docile carriage horse. The Shafers would first spend the summer there in 1902, but went calling in earlier years (before 1901, when a would-be purchaser was in possession), and Ethel now and then stayed on. During visits she also practiced walking the hewn beams in the barn, as I should never venture to do.

Still another view of Ethel comes from Don Denison. He remembers seeing her pull a cart carrying two of his small contemporaries, Chester and Walter Idema, as I recall, whose family lived for a time across Lyon Street and then on North Prospect Street. That would have been in the mid-1890’s, at about the time Ethel was finishing grammar school.

And she soon explored the town. (A map following p. *** shows the residential district about the Shafers’, together with part of the business district.) There were errands to run, visits to the dentist, parades to watch, shopping (with her mother) for clothes. The town was safe enough for young girls, who had a good deal of freedom. The chief danger was from a frisky or runaway horse.

But Ethel always hesitated to go alone into the business district after mid-afternoon; she would be sure to encounter many drunks, shameless or shambling, some of them among the numerous beggars on the street, not to speak of one or two lying in the gutter. Grand Rapids had 149 saloons in 1890, 156 in 1900, that is 1 for about every 150 men, not at all remarkable.^[38] Mother would recall the scene with repugnance, a feeling widely shared by her generation, which would help to change community sentiment, swinging support to the 18th Amendment, as well as the institution of more comprehensive public welfare.

Grand Rapids in 1890 still had “many of the aspects of a village,” as mayor Edwin F. Uhl complained.^[39] Streets were lighted with gas lamps, but few were “improved” other than several in and near the business district—Monroe, Fulton, Pearl, Bridge, Jefferson, and Division Streets, each paved with stone or blocks of hardwood. In that year Canal Street was surfaced with macadam between Pearl and Bridge Streets. Lyon Street, which carried much of the traffic up and down hill, had been paved with wood blocks in the 1880’s. To lay sidewalks was still the affair of property owners, and many in residential areas had neglected to do so.

Horsecars provided transport in the business district. In the spring of 1888, the year the Shafers came to town, a cable car, far from reliable, began running up and down Lyon Street hill. In a view downhill in 1888, taken from near the high school, the car tracks and a slot for cable are visible. The Leavitt house stands just beyond. (Photograph is shown following p. ***.)^[40] Electric cars would replace the cable car and horse-drawn cars soon after 1890.

In the center of town, two of the public buildings I remember from boyhood were already in place—the new City Hall on Lyon Street at Ottawa Street, and the County Jail, on Campau Street just east of the river. Soon to be built (ready in 1892) were a new Police Headquarters and the handsome County Building, on opposite sides of Crescent Street, one east, and the other west, of Ottawa Street. They were finished in solid masonry, for an illusory permanence. Many of the principal factories of my youth were already standing along, or near, Grand River, especially from Lyon Street to Bridge Street: flour mills, printing and engraving shops, the Bissell carpet sweeper factory, an iron works, knitting mills, and a wagon and sleigh works, along with several furniture makers. Through the 1880’s most of the logs used in making sawn wood for furniture were floated down the Grand River.

A number of the commercial and office buildings that I remember then stood or would shortly be built: the Blodgett Building, the Kendall Block, and the Waters Building, all on Ottawa Street; the Houseman Building between Lyon and Pearl Streets on Ottawa Street; the Michigan Trust Company Building on Pearl Street; and along up Monroe Street the Wonderly Building (no. 23), the Widdicomb Building (nos. 34, 36, 38), the Gilbert Block (no. 124), and the Porter Block (no. 132, at Division Street).^[41]

Some hotels were in business at familiar locations—the Morton House on Monroe Street (a new one was built in 1923); the Warwick (later the Cody) and shortly the Livingston at Fulton and Division Street. At the foot of Pearl Street was Sweet’s Hotel (later the Pantlind, expanded and finally, in 1912-16, rebuilt). The Powers Grand Opera House (later the Powers Theater) was also on Pearl Street.

St. Mark’s Church, the oldest then standing, at the head of Pearl Street, and Park Congregational Church, facing Fulton Street Park, were already landmarks. They are among those that have survived, along with the St. Cecilia Building on Ransom Street east of Fulton Street, put up in 1893.

Of a dozen or more shops with names long known most were open before 1895. Along Monroe Street were Houseman and Jones (men’s clothing, nos. 34, 36, 38 at Waterloo Street, later Market Street); The Giant Clothing Co., of Abraham May (afterwards A. May & Sons, also men’s clothing, nos. 20-24 Canal Street, later lower Monroe Avenue, at Lyon Street); Studley and Jarvis (first called Studley and Barclay, then simply Jarvis, sporting goods, no. 45); Herkner’s (jewelry, no. 57); A.J. Shellman (optician, nos. 65, 67); White and White (druggists, no. 99, at Ionia Street); Peck’s (or Peck Bros., also druggists, nos. 129, 131, at Division Street)— a supplier of drugs and other preparations to Dr. Shafer— Raymer’s (books, no. 132, from 1899 in the Porter Block, on the opposite corner); Jandorf’s (pastry, baked goods, and ice cream, no. 153). And there were the coming department stores— among them were the Boston Store (nos. 14-18), F. W. Wurzburg’s (no. 56), Voigt, Herpolsheimer (which later became Herpolsheimer’s, nos. 78, 80, 82 at Lyon Street), and finally Steketee’s (no. 83, first extended to 81, then to 79). Photographs from the head of Monroe Street taken in 1888 and about 1896, which follow p. ***, show Peck’s drug store, and give an idea of how the business district looked when Ethel was a girl.^[42]

Three daily newspapers were published locally throughout those years, under changing names and ownership. The Grand Rapids Democrat, a direct successor of papers going back to 1855, would survive into my boyhood through its descendants, the Evening Post, the Daily News, and the Grand Rapids News. The Daily Eagle and the Evening Leader, the two next oldest, were bought up in the early 1890’s by two recently founded papers, the Telegram/ Herald (later the Herald) and Morning Press (later the Evening Press and the Grand Rapids Press), which came to dominate the market.

Some of the younger professional men of the time would still be active during my youth; three of them would have a connection with the family. Dr. J.H. Palin, the Shafers’ family dentist, began practising in the Wonderly Building; in 1902, he was to move to the Porter Building, where he long remained—indeed, until it was torn down. Dr. Walter H. Booth, Father’s dentist, practiced (along with Dr. Burt G. Winans) in the Wonderly Building. One, then the other, would have the care of the Snell boys. Jacob Steketee, who started practicing law in the 1890’s with his father at 83 Monroe Street, would be the family lawyer, succeeded for a time by his son John, in turn consuls of the Netherlands.^[43]

As such far from exhaustive lists suggest, the business and shopping district of Mother’s youth had much in common with that of my youth, an unmistakable identity in spite of changes, which were of course extensive. While growing up, she saw the beginning, as Art and I were to see the end, of a full generation—from ‘94 to ‘29—of steady development and general prosperity for the “inner city” of Grand Rapids. That was a time when the town could fairly be called—as it was to be one day by the Chamber of Commerce—“a good place to live,” of course not for everybody.^[44]

Ethel went to Sunday School and later to services—as I recall, at Park Congregational—with her mother, who had been brought up subject to the influence of Thomas Martin’s evangelistic Presbyterian training as a boy. Dr. Shafer had a deep vein of religious feeling, but went seldom to church. Churchgoing was a social as well as emotional stimulus for Ethel; otherwise she had little to do with strangers. I do not know of any boys she ever saw, except Neil McCallum, an attractive lad a couple of years younger. His parents, the Peter McCallums, who lived on Madison Avenue, were friends of the family.

As she entered her teens, Ethel was still a loner, had not acquired a wider circle of friends of her own age. But her mother and father began to accept her as an adult; she must had made no difficulties. Though diffident, she would have taken part when they had friends in, perhaps even playing the piano or plucking the mandolin when they sang. Once in a while, in the late afternoon hours, she may have accompanied her father as he played old favorites: we have her copy of a compilation of dances of all kinds, including jigs and reels, for violin with piano accompaniment.^[45]

In 1896 Ethel started high school. There, as stated on her certificate, she followed the German-English course of study, one of the five recognized.^[46] The prescribed sequence of courses ran as follows:

Grade 9-1               Grade 9-2            Grade 10-1         Grade 10-2

German                  German               German              German

Civil Gov’t              Botany                 Rhetoric             Rhetoric

Arithmetic              Algebra                Algebra              Algebra

Reading                  Reading               Reading              Review Geog.

Drawing                 Drawing              Drawing             Reading^[47]

Grade 11-1             Grade 11-2          Grade 12-1         Grade 12-2

German                  German               English Lit.        English Lit.

Ancient Hist.          Modern Hist.      German              Physics

Grammar               Grammar            Physics               German

Geometry               Geometry            Arithmetic         Reiew Algebra &

                                                                                       Geometry^[48]

Rhetoricals          Rhetoricals             Rhetoricals         Rhetoricals^[49]

Ethel very likely followed this course of study in her first two years. But in 1897 the University of Michigan set new admissions requirements, adding a term of solid geometry for all applicants and, for those who (like Ethel) intended to present four years of a modern language rather than Latin or Greek, one year each of chemistry and the history of the United States.^[50] Ethel must have rearranged her studies to add or substitute these, probably American history in her third year (1898/9) and, solid geometry and chemistry in her last year (1899/1900).^[51]

So far as anyone can tell, then, Ethel was qualified on graduation in 1900 to enter the University, like many of her classmates, without examination.^[52] But she already had made an alternative plan. In her last year she had added to the other extra work undertaken a first course in Latin, of no use in the University unless followed by a second course.^[53] She very likely did so at the advice of some senior teacher, such as Alice James or Florence Milner. On being told that Ethel hoped to teach in high school, one of them might have suggested she add “another string to her bow.” So she had a very busy last year.

We can identify some, not all, of Ethel’s teachers. In the first year, she had Edwin F. Snell for arithmetic and the first semester of algebra; in drawing, (Mrs.) Elizabeth C. Crittenden; in botany, Miss Emma L. Cole. By the second year she will have entered the German class of Miss Helen C. Christ (rhymes with kissed); in rhetoric, for one or more terms, Miss Agnes Ginn. In her third and fourth years she continued with some of the above teachers, also Frank A. Bacon in American history, Edward J. Hall in chemistry, Miss James and perhaps Miss M. Adele Hoskins for plane geometry, Burton L. Smith in physics, (Mrs.) Cornelia Steketee Hulst for English literature, (Mrs.) Florence Milner in senior English composition (“rhetoricals”) and solid geometry, Miss Anna Susan Jones in Latin.^[54]

Ethel sat in Mr. Snell’s session room her first year. I don’t know who then had the sophomore session room. She was in Miss James’ room her third year and finally in Mrs. Milner’s session room, rather less bare than rooms for underclassmen, according to a contemporary description and Mrs. Milner’s recollection.^[55] Tradition was present in desks and chairs saved from “the old building,” together with a skeleton and manikin. The blackboards were decorated with dihedrons and trihedrons in color, and there was a “jolly round sphere.” Potted geraniums flourished by the south windows, ferns and a large bowl of goldfish by the lofty east windows. Bookshelves hung on both sides of the southeast corner, a window seat under them with bright red pillows. At the front off the room stood a piano, on which for a time lived a captive horned toad.

Ethel clearly did well; we do not have her standing in specific subjects,^[56] but there remains a letter to her from the principal, A.L. Volland, stating that by consensus of the teachers she was granted “an A diploma.”

Instruction seems to have been more thorough than in my schooldays. For example, in studying Chaucer, students read the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, as Jamie’s class would. In German they were well drilled in composition, writing as well as reading the German cursive script, had a good deal of practice in conversation. In the last year they read Ernst von Wildenbruch, Das Edle Blut, a retired colonel’s narrative of a deadly boys’ fight; Gustav Freytag’s often played comedy Die Journalisten, about a retired colonel (a familiar character in German literature), his daughter, and a liberal newspaper editor, the last two in love, with politics interposing difficulties; Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, and Heine’s Reisebilder— the first two nearly contemporary, all but the last in American school editions, with notes and vocabulary. The high standard of mathematics instruction I have already considered, in recounting Father’s early years at Central.

In high school Ethel began to show interest in organized activities.^[57] She, along with Mary Whitney, a close friend, worked for the school athletic association in 1897/8, but at what, I don’t know; bake sales? In that and the following year they belonged to Sorosis, a girls’ organization, which offered readings, lectures, and practice running a meeting. Anyone could join; that is, it was not a social club, and it wasn’t very active. Both dropped out in the last year, when Ethel joined the Literary Society, an amorphous collection of students that seems to have held an occasional reading or lecture. Ethel also belonged to the committee that chose the class colors when they were juniors.

She was not a personage in the class. In the yearbook of 1900 (the Manteion) she did not figure in those allusive stories nor the “in” jokes (“grinds”) devoted to popular or notorious seniors. If she made any impression, it was through ability in drawing; in the class prophecy her line reads:

Miss Shafter’ll [sic] sketch for truth and life…

Her slight interest in, as for, her classmates is suggested by her having neglected to buy (or at least save) a copy of the Manteion.

Many of her contemporaries she had known through school, and she was in a way well acquainted with them. But so far as I can tell, she had only two close friends in the class, Jeanette Holt and Mary Whitney; they both would marry out of town. Her contemporaries at school were to play little part in her life. A few of them she would see casually at the university. Later on, one might occasionally appear in some business transaction. In my boyhood she sometimes would see one or another while shopping; they might stop to say hello and exchange notes about children. That was all. A notable exception was Marion Powers (Central, ‘02), eldest daughter of Father’s old friend Will Powers. She, too, would in time marry out of town.^[58]

The “Commencement Exercises” of Ethel’s class were held at ten o’clock in the morning on Friday, 22 June 1900 in the Auditorium. The seniors were all garbed in cap and gown. (A photograph of Ethel in cap and gown follows p. ***.) Like a great many of her classmates, Ethel was eighteen (Arthur Vandenberg at sixteen may have been the youngest.) In the evening the junior class gave a reception and “hop” in honor of the new graduates. The reception went on from 8 until 9, followed by a “grand march.” Then the dancing began; to twenty numbers in the program six were added, and “they danced until morning.” According to The Grand Rapids Press, “nearly all members” of the senior class were there. We learn later on that Ethel had somehow learned to dance, so she could have gone, too. But she apparently didn’t save invitation or program, suggesting that she stayed away. Her absence would hardly have been remarked.^[59]

Of her class—of 63 boys and 62 girls—45 had asked for recommendations to the University of Michigan; seven, six of them girls, were planning to “go east” to school.^[60] Ethel, too, was determined to go to the University, with a view to teaching high school. She did not belong with those friends looking forward to an early marriage; that is hardly to say she never thought about it. She must have reasoned that she ought to prepare herself to lead an independent life. From experience, perhaps from inclination as well, she could view herself as a teacher. Teaching in high school was the career most readily open to a woman, though with a different bent, she might have studied medicine.

So while staying home in 1900/1, she went on to second-year Latin—forever Caesar’s Gallic Wars—as a “postgraduate” student, with Louis Goodyear. She was not alone; there were always a few students then taking postgraduate courses, for whatever reason. I doubt she was actively unhappy. Other girls as well were at home, some helping with the housework. It is entirely in keeping with the view of her that I have formed, and presented, and not so hard to reconcile with the busy, in the end, restless woman we shall see later.

It was in this school year that she began to go with the Doctor on his rounds, especially on trips from time to time to see old patients in the country. On these occasions she held the reins. From the winter months, and perhaps from Christmas holidays in the two years that followed, date her recollections of rides by buggy or sleigh in the snow and cold weather. They would start from the carriage house on Ghilda Place, with hats, scarves, coats, and lap robe, not otherwise protected, and drive for an hour or so. On a long day they might get home in the blue dusk into evening, finding lights on at the back door and supper waiting.

On these trips Ethel came to learn the neighborhood in Paris township, of which she had heard tell so much, but had seen little since childhood. The Doctor would talk then, as he seldom did at home, about early memories and his medical practice. Ethel took her sip from the flask of whiskey the generally abstemious, but not “teetotal,” Doctor took along to combat the chill. She served as nurse when needed, even as anæsthetist, thereby acquiring the ease and competence she was later to show in dealing with injuries and illness.

She also saw rather more of how people lived. I recall this one illustrative incident: once after the Doctor had finished—with delivering a baby, perhaps—he was invited to join the family in their meal, a pot of “milk pop” (from the Dutch melkpap, a thick milk soup) set in the center of the table; some were already dipping with their own spoons. He replied with thanks, asking, “If I might trouble you for a boiled egg.” 

Ann Arbor (1901-04)

That year past, Ethel entered the University, without examination.^[61] To go to Ann Arbor was to take a step toward independence. Until then she’s not likely to have been far from Grand Rapids, or away from her family overnight, except when staying at her Martin uncle’s farm or perhaps next door with the Barlows. If a little uncertain at first, she will nevertheless have felt ready.

The cost was considerable, measured against Dr. Shafer’s modest income. Ethel paid at least $20 a month for room and board, cheap for Ann Arbor. Students from within the state, enrolled in the liberal arts, paid a $30 annual fee.^[62] With other expenses—among them books and supplies, train fare, and amusements—the total would have amounted to some $250 a year, or substantially more than her father had paid at Ann Arbor in 1866/7, though not more than one-fifth of my expenses (including $400 tuition) at Harvard in 1931/2.^[63]

The University of Michigan, in operation for sixty years, was well established, with a national reputation. Some sign might attest to the force of popular enthusiasm that had helped to bring a university into such vigorous life: for example, it still maintained, as did several other of the younger American universities, a small homeopathic medical college, in addition to a flourishing medical school of the usual sort. Such a survival had no bearing on the University generally. The teaching staff were well qualified and numerous, in a high proportion to students; the course of study was grundlegend und sachlich.

It was a classic period in American undergraduate life, prosperous, confident, free and easy socially, yet rather old-fashioned. At Ann Arbor, girls and boys were enrolled in about equal numbers. The girls, almost as one, wore the piled up, swept back hair and often the shirtwaist and long skirt of the “Gibson girl.” The boys sported the Edwardian stiff collar, shaped jacket, peg leg trousers, with a tight chesterfield, casual loose-woven ulster, or raglan greatcoat in winter. Student life was vigorous; a great many cycled, skated on the river when it froze, rowed or swam in the warm months, picnicked and hiked. Younger, more citified, better educated, with more money, the students at Ann Arbor often looked and acted somewhat like those of two decades earlier; the great change would come after the World War.

But with the confidence went complacency; the middle to upper-middle class tone of undergraduate society discouraged expression. Along with all the outdoor life went more or less tolerant indifference of a majority to scholarship, the arts, ideas, and causes. At Valparaiso, in Father’s time, the students had struggled for education, as had their teachers; they were all part of their world—a saving grace. At Ann Arbor the academic standard was high, but to students generally in the oughty-oughts, the university represented a comfortable, if increasingly restless, extension of high school, a condition long endemic in American higher education.

In the early 1900’s Ann Arbor was a pleasant county seat of about 15,000 in a setting of rolling farmland. The Huron River ran along the north side of town, accompanied by the Michigan Central Railroad. The sizable students’ population (close to 5,000) lived on the economy, there being yet no dormitories (other than fraternity and sorority houses, not open, of course to first year students). Ethel found a room in a home on Church Street, which runs south from the campus. She had at most a half-mile walk to reach classrooms. Beginning in 1902/3, Ethel shared a room with Marion Powers, who was then in her first year, at Mrs. Meier’s, 920 Monroe Street, eating in one of the cheaper boarding houses. They had a five-minute walk north to the campus, still confined in those years to the original 40 acres just up from South University Street. (A photograph following p. *** shows the tree-studded campus in winter, looking along the diagonal walk.)

Ann Arbor offered ample entertainment of a serious kind. Ethel kept a schedule of the students’ lecture series in the year 1902/3, featuring notables of the day.^[64] She may have listened to some of the lectures. And she went often to the series of concerts given by both local talent and visiting artists, enjoying especially the instrumental music; she would recall with pleasure performances by Fritz Kreisler and Paderewski. Least of all she liked the divas; their singing and behavior on stage she thought intolerably artificial and ridiculous, characteristically commenting that she wasn’t up to it. She and Marion, perhaps with others, would treat themselves to a rare trip to Detroit—something over an hour by train—to see a play. They came back late; once arriving at four in the morning after seeing Viola Allen in Twelfth Night, they climbed in a window at Mrs. Meier’s.

Predictably, Ethel had not joined a sorority. Given her approach to life, she would hardly have been considered; her sympathies were all with the “independents,” or “barbarians” (those, that is, not in Greek-letter societies). And she still had little to do with men, not necessarily from lack of interest. As she would write to her future husband:^[65]

I have often been called cold and unsympathetic by people who saw me as a rather bashful and reserved girl. Mr. M[arkwardt] has told me upon several occasions that he never knew anyone who could make a man feel more uncomfortable if he attempted to show any interest in her affairs.

She went on to confess that it was a failing, even if largely unintentional, to be so short. She lacked not social skills so much as a readiness to rely on them in situations she did not seek or was not sure she could control.

Yet she was growing. She became active in the Women’s League; in her third year she held a seat on the executive committee. In her second and third years she had duties to perform as captain of the women’s basketball team of the class.^[66] She attended meetings held by the women’s athletic director—and a good friend—Dr. Alice G. Snyder; announced, probably acquired a voice in deciding, which members of the squad would play. In her third year she became “manager” as well as captain. She served as timekeeper for the women’s interclass gymnastic meet in her third year, and then took charge of the reception that followed. Her duties were all-encompassing: when the dumb waiter with refreshments became stuck between floors, Ethel climbed down to work it loose. Her energy and capacity and, I assume, her popularity among the women of the class, led her teammates at the end of the spring term 1904 to propose putting her up as candidate for senior class vice-president.

Here I pause to reflect that Ethel, though distinctive, a leader, was one of a considerable species of young woman, apparently classless, identified and introduced into polite letters about a generation before by young Henry James, Jr., perceptive, if at the same time too much concerned with what these creatures were not, to make out quite what they were. Or it may be that he was interested, not in sources but only in possible consequences, of their behavior. Ethel and her kind, like their literary predecessors, were free spirits, uncommitted, ready to take their lives into their own hands. It would forever escape the Master that those independent young American women of his early stories, without “family or fortune,” were not “self-made,” had instead been formed and “motivated,”, in adolescence—as much perhaps by fathers and old-maid school teachers as by mothers—to show the same boundless “good faith” as would the heiresses of his later novels, burning with the like ambition to prove themselves worthy of freedom through choice. That may be the secret of their enduring charm.

Ethel and Marion were great sports fans, especially fond of football. It was the golden age for Michigan. Fielding Yost’s “point a minute” teams went undefeated from 1902 to 1905, or beyond Ethel’s time at Ann Arbor. The 1902 eleven won the first Rose Bowl game, against Stanford, 49-0. Their game, recognizably football, differed greatly from today’s, even from that in the years just after. The playing field was 110 yards long, and the team in possession had to move 5 yards in 3 downs. It was a physical sport, recalling its recent origins in rugby. Players were allowed to handle the opposition; massed formations, including the feared “flying wedge” on kickoff or punt returns, were acceptable practice; forward passes were not. Yost depended on running the ball straight ahead, using sheer power, waiting for the breaks. There were no substitutions in the 70-minute games. Marion and Ethel were hardly unusual; a great many coeds shared the excitement.

Ethel also followed basketball; if less stirring, it had its appeal. And in season she went to track meets, on one occasion reporting prospects in advance, afterwards announcing results event by event. In her second year I believe, she lost interest in baseball; too slow, understated?

Women’s basketball, she observed, was “decidedly tame,” partly because of restrictive rules.^[67] Still, she found it “splendid exercise”; she played hard, not so very well, she said, others, the contrary. She always held herself to a standard higher than applied by others, or by her to almost anyone else. In the last game she played, in which the juniors defeated the freshmen, she made all the baskets, and the writeup speaks of “Miss Shafer the bright particular star” of the first half, during which it was “all junior.” And on the opening minutes of the second half, “it looked all junior again, Miss Shafer scoring two baskets in quick succession, ably assisted by some clever play by Miss Faling.”^[68]

Although restricted, especially from dribbling the ball, the women were not ladylike in their play. Ethel was bumped and bruised more than once. Looking forward to a big  game with the seniors, in which she was to face a strong redhead, taller (5 foot 11) and “several pounds” heavier, she noted that she was to go skating on the river the next day after, always provided she got off lightly from the game. Play was lively; after one game she reported having lost a pound and a half.

In her junior year, if not before, she also went in for gym work: tumbling, handsprings, group exercises, the high jump (she “easily” cleared 4 feet); rope climbing (she went up the 20-foot rope). They did not work out on the parallel bars; at least she never mentioned that. In the spring she played tennis, not too badly; in her second year she handily defeated the assistant athletic director for women.

In photographs taken of the basketball squad of the class of 1905—unfortunately, none showing them in action—the women look rather serious, in blouses and bloomers, but they seem to have enjoyed themselves. Ethel thought basketball was especially good because “it brings the girls together in a way that nothing else does.” The best picture of them that we have, with Ethel seated in their midst, the personification of modesty, is shown following p. ***; a framed enlargement used to hang upstairs at home.^[69]

She still found time for a full, indeed heavy, academic schedule,^[70] mainly German and mathematics. She also had a year each of English literature and history, one semester’s course in philosophy, three courses of a term each in “the science and art of teaching,” a year of English composition, and one of freehand drawing. She did not follow up on her supplementary courses in high school Latin by any further study. She undoubtedly did well. The official transcript does not include course standings, and I haven’t found any reports at home. But one of her instructors in mathematics would later recall that she was a good student, and someone in the German department must have thought the same.^[71]

In the German courses Ethel read a generous selection of classical German literature, varied with more practice in composition and conversation and an introduction to the history of the language. A description follows, year by year, with a few comments.

1901/2

German 3         Modern prose, narrative and dramatic, with practice in speaking and writing

German 4         A drama of Lessing, Goethe, or Schiller with collateral prose reading and practice in speaking and writing

German 5a       Schiller’s Wallenstein and Braut von Messina

German 6a       Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Torquato Tasso, Hermann und Dorothea, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

I don’t have the texts in use in the first two of these courses. In the last two, the class used American students’ editions with notes—that of Wallenstein, published in 1901, extensively annotated by her professor, Max Winkler—except for Wilhelm Meister, read in the two slender volumes of the Cotta’sche Bibliothek (which I should one day use).^[72]

1902/3

German 5b          Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen; Leiden des jungen Werthers; Schiller’s Die Räuber

German 11          Composition

     & 12

German 25a        Life and works of Luther  

The text of Götz, perhaps unavoidably, was a students’ version; otherwise, they usedGerman editions. The texts I have for the course on Luther are the Tischreden (or table talks) and Ein Sendbrief an den Papst Leo X (an open letter to Pope Leo the tenth). 

1903/04

German 13          Practice in German conversation, especially for students expecting to teach German

German 15          Goethe’s Faust, Part I

German 17          Introduction to Middle High German, with Paul’s Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik, vierte Auflage; Bachmann’s Mittelhochdeutsches Lesebuch

German 14          German conversation, continuation of German 13

German 16          Goethe’s Faust, Part II 

In addition to all the above, she was taking a course on the “Middle High German Folk Epic,” which she dropped in the spring of 1904. The only texts I have are for Faust, again in the Cotta’sche Bibliothek.^[73]

The courses that Ethel selected were not exactly those required for a teacher’s certificate in German; the others could with ease have been fitted into her senior year. She was soon to have an excellent background, for in her junior year she was selected to head the biweekly German table in a boarding house nearby. For keeping the conversation alive, correcting mistakes, and answering questions, she was paid $2 a session, with lunch (did she find time to eat?). She was quite pleased to be chosen for this job, and to be able to carry it off.

You may form an impression of the course of study from a quick review of the examination in German 15—Faust, Part I—held on Monday 8 February 1904. Students were assigned, first, two passages to translate, all told 67 lines from the long conversation early in the drama in Faust’s study after he awakes, as Mephistopheles sets out to convert him. For flatfooted translation these two passages seem to present no great difficulties, and they apparently didn’t to Ethel; she stumbled over one word (Krittel, “captiousness”). The rest of the examination consisted of eighteen questions, of which the student had to answer fifteen.

I assume that each of these questions had been considered in lectures, and a basis given for approved answers. But they cover a great deal of ground—the Faustbücher, popular versions of the legend; the personal experiences that moved Goethe to dramatize it; the dates of writing, along with an explanation of why he was so long about it; a description of his first efforts, the Urfaust and the Faust fragment; the influence of the protoromantic Sturm und Drang; a comparison of Marlowe’s with Goethe’s treatment; the prologue in heaven and the attitude of Mephistopheles, the “dramatic irony”; Faust’s motives for turning to magic, and the view thereof taken by the mediæval church; the Erdgeist (“earthspirit”); Faust’s assistant Wagner; Faust’s decision to commit suicide and later change of heart; the compact with Mephistopheles (three questions); Auerbachs Keller, a scene in a student hangout in Leipzig; the Hexenküche, a scene during which the witches brew a potion; the tragedy of Gretchen; and still another question on Mephistopheles.

One would have had to be fairly well briefed and well organized to turn off fifteen of these questions, taking about ten minutes for each. The exam differs from those I was to take one day—never in the German department—in that the questions are so numerous, and so narrow. That was not simply a matter of personal choice by Professor Winkler; it’s likely to have been the usual approach. And I am far from sure Ethel would have liked “essay questions.” For many, or most, students the approach used in their own generation may be the most suitable, though that may perhaps assume greater harmony between school and society and more consistency in education from age 6 to age 20-plus than sometimes exists. And Professor Winkler no doubt agreed that students in their early 20’s—Americans at that—were not yet ready for Faust, and surely not for Part II. They would have to grow into it and, meanwhile, should be encouraged to refrain decently from pretentious discussion. Such a case scarcely had to be put then; now, nobody would presume to do so.

Ethel’s mathematics courses obviously, were selected to qualify her for high school teaching:

1901/2        Mathematics 1             Plane trigonometry and algebra

                    Mathematics 2             Plane analytic geometry 

1902/3        Mathematics 3e           Calculus

                    Mathematics 4e           Calculus and mechanics 

1903/4        Mathematics 9             Differential equations

                    Mathematics 10           Teachers’ seminary. Algebra

                    Mathematics 20           Teachers’ seminary. Geometry

The “e” used to identify the calculus courses indicates, it would seem, courses especially designed for engineering students, that is, wishing to learn applications (problem solving) rather than theory (deriving theorems and examining the assumptions of what was still “the infinitesimal calculus”). The choice will have reflected Ethel’s own preference, not a requirement.

The three half-courses that she took in the junior year in the Science and Art of Teaching were also, of course, for professional use:

1.   Practical pedagogy. The nature of mind, the end of education and the means to be employed in reaching it, the impulses and tendencies which make education possible, the course of study, methods of teaching, education values, school management, etc. Text book: Gordy’s A Broader Elementary Education.

5.   School supervision. General school management, the arts of grading and arranging courses of study, the conduct of teachers’ meetings, how to estimate a teacher’s work etc.

9.   Practical problems. A discussion of the problems which confront every inexperienced teacher at the outset of his career, such as discipline, class organization and management, examinations, and of the teachers’ relations to those in authority, to the pupils, the parents, the community, etc.

Long descriptions—and the “etc.”—seem fitting for courses in pedagogy.

The other courses would represent her choice as a matter of general culture, perhaps in part to meet requirements for diversification. They follow, by years: 

1901/2          English and rhetoric 1            Paragraph writing

                     English and rhetoric 2            Science of rhetoric. Essays in exposition and argument.

                     History 3 & 4                          The general history of England to the ascension of Henry VIII.

                     English and rhetoric 5            English literature. Chaucer and his age.

                     Philosophy 1                           Philosophical introduction. Textbooks: Wenley’s Outline Introductory to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

1902/03        Drawing 4                               Freehand drawing; pencil work; pen and ink; sketching

                     Drawing 5                               Freehand drawing (advanced)

1903/04        English 4                                 Essays in description and narration.

Ethel’s personal interests are reflected particularly in the study of writing and drawing, to which she retained an inclination. Even academic exercises of the sort offered a welcome relief from reading, problem solving, and preparing for recitations and exams. (A fair example of her freehand drawing, rendering of some illustration, is shown following p. ***.) Her pleasure in both skills would remain, as is to be shown, in accounts of camping trips.

English history, with Gardiner’s students’ history as a textbook, was probably something that she felt she “ought to know”; it had long bulked large in the general knowledge of Americans. To learn about Chaucer and his troubled century could have appealed to Ethel as a result of having enjoyed what she read in high school. For instructor she had J.S.P. Tatlock, who was to become an eminent Chaucerian. The half-year’s course in philosophy, taught by Professor R.M. Wenley (editor of the introduction to Kant), should have given her useful background for studying nineteenth century thought. Ethel probably took it, however, simply in order to enter an advanced writing course, for which, curiously enough, it was prerequisite.

Very likely few of those that knew her—perhaps not even Marion Powers—realized how little university work appealed to her, how rarely it aroused her curiosity or touched her imagination. She had an objective, to qualify as a teacher, and the satisfaction of proving herself, reasons enough for her to persevere. When she could, she enjoyed herself, in high spirits, in the company of friends. But she spoke with pleasure only of such moments, or of some active occupation: sports, committee work, directing the German table.

In this, Ethel surely was distinguished from most other undergraduates mainly by depth of feeling. How she felt is suggested by her response to two popular German novels of the day, read during her third year. In her copies of these two novels, Die drei Getreuen (Three Comrades) and Jörn Uhl, by Gustav Frenssen,^[74] she underlined many passages, a most unusual practice for her. In the latter, read in the spring term (24 February - 8 June 1904), she noted, even cross-referenced, and began in mid-May to enter the dates of reading. She very likely used the material in her German conversation courses; the choice of passages is nonetheless striking.

Die drei Getreuen and Jörn Uhl incorporate the elements of the “Bildungsroman,” a novel of being formed by, and for, life; as well as of “Heimatskunst,” regional or “local-color” literature—of youthful heroes growing to manhood against a background of traditional North German peasant life. Such a combination now produces an odd effect, if only because both novels include long passages of “deep” conversation, all to be imagined as spoken by peasants, with little schooling, in Plattdeutsch. Among the themes underlined by Ethel are the imperative call to move out among people,^[75] the deadening, distracting influence of booklearning and university life,^[76] the utter lack of nourishment in official religion,^[77] the need—the unavoidable necessity—for all to experience sin and suffering before coming to learn love and faith,^[78] the obligation of writers to provide the people with inspiration (“about the strong fresh wind coming in God’s great work under way all about”),^[79] the relevance and vitality of old chronicles,^[80] the need for guidance during the period between childhood and maturity,^[81] the value of inwardness.^[82]

I prepared a selection of such passages to include here, but it became far too long. I shall present just one, from Jörn Uhl, which Ethel underlined in part in ink, the only one she so treated:^[83]

Then for the first time there entered Jörn’s soul the feeling of the inadequacy of human strength, the feeling of a lack, the feeling: whither, my soul, in your terrible great loneliness and abandonment? And now it was good that he had heard in school about “the Father in heaven”: otherwise he would have been all too much afraid of the overwhelming dark forms that stood hostile about him in the night; he might perhaps have prayed to them. But now he turned in modest faith to the invisible, strong consecrating powers that are in the Gospel.

And that was a mighty step that Jörn took, till then so sure of himself. For only to the humble does God give grace, as a clever man has rightly said. Only to those that search deeply, often, and seriously question, only to those that marvel, are astonished, and humbly honor; only to them are opened the doors to a whole, broad human existence. The breadth and depth of human existence, wonderful and beautiful, are attained only by those that know nothing.

Ethel’s selection of this passage, read and underlined in late April or early May 1904, could indicate that she had had “a religious experience.” Probably it means just that she was attracted to this approach to life, which she never before may have seen so baldly put. In any case it seems to go along with her new feelings of exaltation, relief, and ardent expectation. She had fallen in love, become engaged, would leave the university to be married, to enter the “real world.” She had found in these novels, as never in Goethe, an expression, or reflection, of her inner thoughts and needs, giving us at least a notion of “where her head was at,” as Jamie or Suzy might have said at the same age, “...Really.”

---

^[1]Percy as a given—one can scarcely say Christian—name appears in the D.N.B. far before 1800. It may have been taken from the name of the Scottish clan, or from the Arthurian Percival, which was also in use as a family name. Ethel suggests an old English origin; it was used (as Hethel-) in a great many compound names. But I cannot trace it as a given name back of the American verse writer Ethel Lynn Beers, born in 1827.

The Shafers had been given both Germanic names (e.g. Oscar, Amandus) and characteristically American names, including family names (e.g. Marion, said to be for the South Carolina general of the Revolution, the “swamp fox’; and Mason, after some colonial figure). The Martin names were more conventional: Marion (less conventional in spelling) and Sarah, the girls; and John Henry, the boy.

^[2]Family papers and tradition provide a large part of the biographical data on Mother’s parents and grandparents, all consistent, so far as I have checked, with published records. Information is available on dates and places of birth, marriage, and death for them, and for most of their parents and grandparents, as for their collateral descendants well into the present century.

^[3]Today Shaffer Road. Neither John Shafer nor his family wrote the name so, and I recall Mother’s annoyance over the spelling when the road was so designated officially. To judge from ships’ lists, the common spelling by immigrants was Schäffer, variously rendered into English in the colonies. John Shafer, following his father’s practice, wrote Shaver (often copied Shover, sometimes Shever or Shefer, once Sherer) until after 1860.

^[4]Mentioned in an unsourced clipping of 1888. Another doctor, Elmer Barker, lived in the township, according to the state census of 1884, but he is not listed in any early directory.

^[5]According to the 1884 agricultural census, 375 pounds of butter had been made on the farm in 1883, accounting for most of the cream from the three milch cows. Even given the tastes of the time, the household would hardly have used more than one-half that amount. The rest must have been marketed; the skim milk and buttermilk, exchanged with one of the Shafer brothers that kept pigs.

^[6]As a girl, she had been taught to spin, but would hardly have kept that up.

^[7]All from the farm except the maple syrup, which probably came from Sherman or Oscar Shafer. From place to place, “vinegar pie” might be any of seven kinds of pies with sweet, or meat, filling. Flour was used to thicken the filling and probably should be added to the ingredients given in the text. Information from Mr. and Mrs. Russell Hale.

^[8]According to Helen and Scott Nearing, those reborn survivors that wrote The Maple Sugar Book (New York, 1970), “the practice probably originated from the early tests of sugar making”; they describe (p. 189) just how “sugar” on snow” varies in character with the concentration of maple syrup.

^[9]That is, in 1789; some sources put the year earlier, one even in 1786.

^[10]John Shafer’s military records are confused, because his surname had been spelled variously. Cf. fn. 3, above.

^[11]The names Avondale and the Avon, the local stream after which the village was called, in Thomas Martin’s youth were still spelled Avendale and Aven, the latter at one time pronounced “avain.” The stream, a tributary of the Clyde, was called, like a number of better known English streams (and a few in France) by the Celtic word for “river,” which takes various forms. “Strath” in Gaelic means “broad river valley”; Strathaven (“Strevn” in the local speech) lay in the valley of the Aven.

^[12]Organized in 1761 by three ministers of the Established Church seeking “relief” from the “yoke of patronage and the tyranny of the church courts.” A little background on the Martin family appears in Martin Memories, by the Rev. W.F. Martin, about two missionary uncles—nephews of Thomas Martin—that had served in India. The work was published by Andrew Eliot, at 17 Princess Street, Edinburgh, in 1886. My copy was preented to Thomas Martin by an niece, in the fall of the same year.

^[13]The Doctor’s height and color of eyes, from Army records (which put his height at 5’ 10 1/2”); color of beard, from a description made by Percy, accompanying a sketch. (Percy gave his height at six feet even.) His current appearance is from a portrait of 1882. His weight is as reported by Mother, from his own statements

^[14]According to the 1884 farming census, the gross value of output was $358 in 1883/4. Of this the Shafer household would have consumed approximately $150 worth of food and fuelwood (at farm prices), in addition to garden produce not included in the estimated output, goods received by the Doctor as payment in kind, and food bought in town. Feed, seed, and waste might have come to $50. The gross cash income from the farm will then have been about $150. The cash outgo included $200 paid to Nick Troost (in addition to board and room), payment of real estate taxes, and something to buy pesticides, seed, hardware, tools, and the like for the farm.

^[15]The Western Michigan Medical Society was organized at a meeting at Sweet’s Hotel in Grand Rapids, at the foot of Pearl Street, on Wednesday 22 May 1878, with 34 charter members, among whom M.A. Shafer was listed. (History of Kent County, Michigan…, Chicago, Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1881, p. 465.) For Dr. Shafer’s efforts to encourage the inoculation of milch cows, I am relying on Mother’s recollection.

^[16]Laid out in 1850.

^[17]Taken in the winter of 1906/7, 1907/8, or 1908/9, it is the earliest photograph available.

^[18]As a result of foreshortening, the photograph referred to above hardly suggests the width—18 feet—of Ghilda Place between the Shafer house and that of the Heman Barlows, the next to the east.

^[19]“Export Alt Nuernberger Bräu,” produced by the Grand Rapids Brewing Company. I rest on Mother’s recollection for that, also for Pears’ soap.

^[20]The beginning of the fence on the west side is shown at the left edge of the house in the photograph referenced above, following p. ***. The fences were still in place when I was a baby—they appear in a baby picture in a later section, but were taken down by late 1917, for I scarcely remember them. The fences enclosing the garden, with the carriage house in the background, are shown in a photograph of Ethel in about 1892, following p. ***, below.