Tag Archives: Lissauer

Bethie

Elizabeth Moseley Woods, 1865-1967

Elizabeth Moseley Woods, 1865-1967

Elizabeth Moseley Woods was born in Mississippi in the last months of the Civil War.  When she was six, her family moved to Glasgow, Kentucky and, when she was sixteen, to Bowling Green.  By the time she joined the WKU faculty in 1911 to teach modern languages, Elizabeth had traveled around the world and studied in England, France and Italy.  She retired from teaching in 1937, but spent the next decade applying her passion for gardening and landscaping to beautification of the WKU campus.

To her younger sister Martha (Woods) Potter, however, Elizabeth Woods was just “Bethie,” and it is from Martha that we get an affectionate and intimate glimpse of this longtime WKU faculty member.

Bethie’s absent-mindedness caused particular mirth.  Standing with Bethie in her living room one day in 1933, Martha noticed that “her pink panties were around her feet where they had dropped down and she never had noticed them.  It would not have been so funny if it had been anybody but Bethie,” she wrote her children.  Several years later, Martha reported that “Bethie distinguished herself by parading around the streets of Bowling Green with a strap to her panties hanging down between her legs almost to the ground.”  Bethie explained that “the panties were the old fashioned kind with strap (a concession to what we used to call ‘open drawers’). . . .  I went into stitches,” laughed Martha.  “I told her I hoped that nobody took her for me.”

Bethie could be both clinical and sentimental in her opinions.  After a 1934 visit to a venerable Bowling Green senior citizen, “Bethie said never again,” reported Martha.  “She thought that old lady belonged under the ground.”  Bethie was no more enamored of humanity’s other half.  “She is a hard boiled man hater,” concluded her sister.  Nevertheless, Bethie mourned the death of WKU president Henry Hardin Cherry in 1937, saying “no one ever knew what a good friend he had been to her.”  She also liked Virginia Garrett, the wife of Cherry’s successor, because of their shared love of flowers.  And when Bethie arrived at a friend’s house for lunch and realized that the friend had forgotten about the engagement, she “hot footed it down the alley,” said Martha, to spare the woman embarrassment.

Both Martha and Bethie were beset by failing eyesight in their later years, but reacted quite differently.  “I know that Bethie can’t see as she should but she never admits it.  All old people get that way,” said 82-year-old Martha of her 86-year-old sibling.  After learning that, during dinner in a poorly lit room, Bethie had put down her fork and been unable to find it again, “I told her she should have just asked,” Martha wrote, “but she isn’t that way.”

Perhaps it was her willingness to let her older sister be herself that allowed Martha to coexist peacefully with Bethie until Martha’s death in 1963 at age 94.  But hers was an early death, relatively speaking, for Bethie lived until 1967, reaching the age of 102.

Martha Potter’s letters about her sister Bethie are part of the Lissauer Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  For more collections about Elizabeth Woods, the Potters and other Bowling Green families, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on Bethie

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Thoughts of Battercakes

Cadet Thomas Woods

Cadet Thomas Woods

Born in Wahalak, Mississippi, Thomas Rawlings Woods was only a year old when his mother and three young sisters died in 1863 of diphtheria.  His father, John Dysart Woods, remarried and in 1871 moved his family, which now included another son and three daughters, to Glasgow, Kentucky.

Nineteen-year-old Thomas entered the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in summer 1881.  His first letter home was full of news about his preliminary exams, his temporary lodgings with “Mother Stewart,” an elderly woman who taught the Bible to cadets and still railed against “Jeff Davis, the traitor,” and the mild hazing he witnessed, especially toward the “stuck up or smart chap that comes here.”

Thomas was struck by the attrition rate among his classmates.  “Of 145 candidates that have applied with me only 87 have remained this long,” he noted a few months into his term.  But overall, he was happy with his circumstances.  His demerit count was respectable, he was keeping warm with the help of a shawl sent from home, and was adjusting to Academy life–including the martial atmosphere in church, where there “were no old ladies who come half an hour early” and “no young folks who come in after the services are half over.”

Nevertheless, Thomas waxed nostalgic for the comforts of home.  “I never really knew how happy we were,” he wrote his half-sister Elizabeth.  Mother Stewart reminded him of his grandmother, and Sunday evening leisure time brought memories of his family’s “Mississippi talks,” when they would “get after Papa to tell some of his recollections of ‘when he was a boy.'”  His roommate’s breakfast choice made him think of visits to an uncle, where “[we] used to pile our plates with battercakes and have them almost floating in molasses.”

Thomas’s life after West Point, sadly, was short.  In 1883, John Woods moved the family to Bowling Green, where he became editor of the Bowling Green Gazette.  Thomas appeared ready to follow his father into journalism, but died that same year of typhoid fever.

The letters of Thomas Rawlings Woods from West Point are available to researchers as part of the Lissauer Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  For other collections relating to military life and service academies, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on Thoughts of Battercakes

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives