Edythe Gertrude Finseth was born in 1918 to a classic
second-generation Norwegian immigrant
family in
southern Minnesota, in an era when children were expected to help work the farm. She wore a huge bonnet in the summer sun, so that neighbors said "it looked like a big hat was driving the rig." She learned to drive that team of horses in a straight line so the cultivating tines wouldn't disturb the planted corn (and in that era, cornfields were cross-cultivated). She was 8 years old when she did the field work; a hired man had to hitch up the work horses, but after that it was her job to cultivate and get the team back to the barn. As an elderly woman she told me one of the proudest moments of her youth occurred when she successfully maneuvered the horses pulling the haywagon so that it went backwards up the ramp where her brothers could hoist the hay to the loft.
Her first school is pictured above - a one-room schoolhouse on a far corner of the farm, to which she walked each day (in cold weather her little brother went earlier to get the fire started before the students and teacher arrived). The teacher lived upstairs in the family farmhouse.
She did well in school, and was admitted to
St. Olaf college (at age 16) at a time when girls were expected to study secretarial skills. She preferred science courses, so she left college to attend nursing school in Rochester, Minnesota in the hopes of earning some money to help support her family.
In the early 1940s the fledgling commercial aviation industry needed a new type of employee called a "stewardess" to take care of passengers on what at the time were many-hour-long flights across the country, and they recruited nurses for this work. She received her "wings" in the
first graduating class of stewardesses for American Airlines, and was assigned the Chicago to NY route, cooking individual meals aboard the flights for the passengers, and being lodged by American Airlines at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago and The Plaza in New York during layovers. It was a glamorous lifestyle in an era when everyone dressed up to go on a plane trip, and stewardesses knew the names of all the passengers.
She met and married a young Navy officer; they settled in
Washington, D.C., where her two
children were born, later moving to Minnesota in the 1950s. When the children were reasonably self-sufficient, she went back to school to catch up on 20 years of nursing innovations, then resumed working, first as a school nurse, then as a burn unit and dialysis nurse in a county hospital, then in her 70s as a private-duty home care nurse. She lived as a widow in our old family home, mowing the lawn and clearing the snow until age 70, when she opted for a condo in a senior living center.
She had saved and invested her nursing salary in mutual funds during the boom of the 70s and 80s, then used those funds to purchase the condo unit; two weeks later the market crashed in October of 1987. She let the rest grow during the bull market of the 90s and the dot-com bubble, cashing out in June of 2007, just before the market cratered again. And after 60 years of voting for Republican presidential candidates (including George W. Bush x2), she switched allegiance in 2008 to cheer wildly for the election of Barack Obama.
She lived quietly in her condo unit, following world events via television (but not the internet), and cheering for all Minnesota sports teams. Every day, without fail, she solved the "Crytoquip" in the local newspaper.
In 2011, at age 93, she walked from her condo unit down to the central office area to pick up her mail and realized she couldn't remember how to get back to her unit after having lived in the building for about 20 years. She knew what that meant, and immediately phoned me, and we began making arrangements for her to move to my home city of Madison, Wisconsin.
In Madison she insisted on living independently as long as possible in a nice "senior apartment," but as the dementia progressed she agreed to downsize to a single room in an assisted-living facility that offered meal service. Later it became necessary to hire "sitters" to prevent nocturnal wandering, and finally on the morning after her 97th birthday she passed away quietly.
She was greatly loved by her passengers, patients, and those who spent time with her. I will always remember that as we wheeled her body on the gurney from her room out to the waiting mortuary vehicle, the nurses, cooks, and cleaning staff of the assisted living facility had formed a "color guard" on the sides of the hallway to say goodbye to her. I had been calmly composed during all of the final hours, but that group response brought tears to my eyes.
