James W Countermine

COUNTERMINE GODLEY

Posted By: Connie Swearingen (email)
Date: 4/12/2010 at 22:12:07

Woodbury County History 1984

James W and Anna (Godley) Countermine
By Ruth Countermine Blunt

(The following are the recollections of Ruth Countermine Blunt h who was born in Sioux City in 1904 and now lives in Albert Lea, Minnesota. Her father, the Rev James Willard Countermine, born in 1867 in Schenectady County, New York, became the pastor of Sioux City’s Morningside Presbyterian Churhc in 1901. Her mother, Anna Godley Countermine, had been professor of Higher English and dean of women at Buena Vista College a few years before coming to Sioux City as a young bride. Ruth Blunt’s husband, retired dentist Freeman L Bunt, is the son of Dr Charles Lee Blunt, whose first dental practice was in Sioux City in the 1890’s)

Sioux City is associated with both my own parents and my husband’s family. Starting with the wedding which united the Rev J W Countermine of the Morningside Presbyterian Church to Miss Anna Godley, only child of Mr and Mrs John G Godley of Albert Lea, Minnesota, June 14, 1902, it was new all around. He was the first pastor of that new church, which had managed to offer him a stipend of $150 a month ‘to be free of wordly cares and avocations’. He and his brother, Robert, were always close; Robert and his wife, Bessie, came to the wedding that evening ‘the party of four departed for the (James) Countermine home at 1000 Pierce Street , Sioux City’, a novel way to begina honeymoon, but Bessie and Anna were as congenial as their husbands. Papa was over six feet, of athletic build and capable of carrying his bride over the threshhold, had the thought occurred to them.

Mamma quickly learned cooking, housekeeping, and her pastoral duties. I see her name listed first among the presidents of the Women’s Missionary Society in the Golden Jubilee history of Morningside Church; she also worked with the church’s Junior C.E. My baby book records that ‘a number’ from that group came to my baptism, administered by Papa’s Uncle John Countermine, D.D., pastor of a very large church (First Presbyterian) in Topeka, Kansas. When Papa accepted ‘the call’ to a larger, older church in Sac City, Iowa, in 1906 (I was two) Morningside Presvyterian with regret ‘bid the Countermines Godspeed’, with two very useful gifts. One was a gold chain and locket (it opended!) for me (it was long cherished as my only jewelry). The other gift, for my parents, was six silver teaspoons in a new pattern by Towle (Georgian) which we all like so well that it was the nucleus of our present flatwear. (Names engraved on the spoons include Mr & Mrs Thomason, F Potter & J Hutchinson, Mr & Mrs Tyson, and Mr and Mrs Cowan. Presumably they were early members of the church.)

So from 1906 to 1910 we lived in Sac City, Iowa. It seems a very long time to a child. My parents were happy together, and I certainly was. Both Anna and Willard were very busy. He rode a bicycle many miles into the country on Pastoral calls. Mama worked hard at her domestic duties, and hours of reading aloud to me, but never neglected church work, in which she was a great favorite. Meal time in those days was my parents’ time for conservation. I sat between them, not chattering, confusing words like ‘salary’ and ‘celery’. Salary had to be important to a young man in his early career, especially one with a passion for books. Mamma, herself, had hundreds, collected all her life. Gifts from her father, always wanting to help his loved child, included black ‘fumed’ oak (who, now, remembers that?) for Anna’s personal library and a piano. They had fun shopping, doubtless in Sioux City, for the best upright, aside from a Steinway, which would have been considered inappropriate. Papa made me a delightful play house from the piano box. He spent as much time as he could in his study, preparing sermons and going over his Hebrew and Greek. His own sectional bookcases rose to the ceiling, but his books, alas, had few pictures. Always loving and tolerant, he let me ‘hunt and peck’ on the typewriter or play with the Princeton tiger, ever on his desk. (He was a 1901 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.) My parents enjoyed that parish and really wonderful friends. But in 1910 when the call came from the Cottage Grove Avenue Church in Des Moines, Papa made the hard decision to move.

Our family was marked for tragedy in Des Moines. (That pastorate lasted only until 1915.) During it my baby sister, Anna Margaret, was born (in 1911) but died in infancy. I had heart trouble, and for a year was ‘flat on my back’ and cared for by a trained nurse. Awful for Mamma, especially when the doctor gloomily predicted I couldn’t live and she, herself, had the delicate health which had plagued her since childbirth. Early in 1913, my mother died, a victim of cancer. She had urged Papa to remarry. He felt he couldn’t, but in that case I was to go to her parents. Papa strove nobly to care for me as his own, with the aid of a dour Scots housekeeper, wholly unused to children. I fear he shocked his congregation by thinking that he could park me during the church inone of the two big plush chairs in the pulpit reserved for visiting dignitaries. Of course it didn’t work, but he realized how desperately I wanted to sit near him.

Papa did remarry, most fortunately, in late 1914, to a wonderful woman (Margaret Madaline Weyer) who had known him in boyhood days. (He grew up in Iowa’s Linn, Benton and Cherokee Counties, the son of William and Ellen Dougall Countermine.) Margaret and Papa were married by a friend of Papa’s, the renowned Dr John Timothy Stone of Chicago, who told him after the ceremony, ‘You may now say ‘I count her Mine’. ‘ Margaret was home ‘on furlough’ from her missionary work in Puerto Rico. (She said she’d followed the United States Army in – in 1898. She was a very young at thetime so was a truly a pioneer missionary.) The Board in New York City soon besieged her with requests to return to Puerto Rico and bring her husband. My stepmother wanted so badly to take me along but my grandparents were adamant about their Anna’s legacy. So to Albert Lea I went.

In Puerto Rico Papa developed typhod and was seriously ill. He and Margaret (I called her Mother) returned to the mainland. He spent the World War II years in YMCA work in El Paso, Texas. A pastorate in Olympia, Washington, followed and then then years in Honolulu, a delightful climate. Papa taught in the Honolulu Theological Seminary. I joined them for my freshman year in college, at the University of Hawaii. In 1927 I graduated from Mamma’s University of Chicago. She had graduated in 1897 and I sat under some of professors.

After my marriage to Freeman L Blunt (a 1934 graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Denistry), we continued to live in Albert Lea. Papa was visiting us ehen Freeman drove to Iowa in the 1930’s to pick up a trailer in which to practice dentistry by going to small towns in our county. Papa went along and they had a ‘ball’. (Freeman’s mobile office was a success from the start and he soon had a GM chassis built to an architect’s specifications for an office. It made headlines all over the country and even brought inquiries from the United States Army. It is now common practice but his was the pioneer model.)

James Willard Countermine seems to me, in retrospect, a man of many facets. He and his brother, Robert, both had a mechanical bent, and together on their family’s farm, they invented an implement only to learn that it had been patented. Papa tood meticulous care of the Cadillac. Mamma’s last gift from her father. (It went to Puerto Rico, came back and was sold in 1920 to a pleased Iowa farmer.) Papa was a good businessman, the Yankee background. He loved sports: tennis, golf, billiards, baseball and football games. He and my husband shared those interests. Geology was a real hobby. He could combine it with his reverence for his Bible Department of Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, and his eulogies by students, at his death, are truly moving on. Dr Countermine could also get things done, on campus, such as organizaing competing teams to rake leaves, with recognition for the winner. He dearly loved his grandmoterh (Mary E, Margaret L, Garry G, and Julianna G Blunt, all since married), as did Mother (Margaret), who was an ideal grandmother. Anna (‘Grandanna’, I called her, to my children) would have been, also. After Papa’s death in 1945, I brought his ashes from Spokane and they are buried on our Godley lot in Albert Lea between his two loving wives. His marker is inscribed with a favorite phrase, ‘Servant of the Most High God’. Mother ‘Margaret’ survived him, dying in Long Beach, California, in 1957.