Red Cross comes to Taylorstown
In 1943, just about everyone on the homefront was involved in the war effort, and the women of Taylorstown were no exception.
Jane Hodgens Ashmore, then just 13 years old, recalls the event pictured in the current Mystery Photo: “This was a first-aid course offered by the Red Cross. They were supposed to provide an instructor, but instead they gave us the equipment – the water bottles and things, and booklets – and I think we instructed ourselves from the booklet.”
This scene took place in the home of schoolteacher Ruth Wolfe. The “patient” (Annie Rankin) wasn’t really ill. “She was just in bed for us,” Mrs. Ashmore, who is now 87, said.
We had received no emails or phone calls from our readers and were just about to give up solving this puzzle when we received a call from Jerry Seaman of Claysville. He recognized Ashmore, who is the sister of his wife, Linda, and provided us with Ashmore’s telephone number.
Linda recalls she and her sister, Jane, grew up in a house just below Miss Wolfe’s in Taylorstown. “She had the telephone office in her house before my father got it and moved the office to our house,” Linda said.
Linda’s and Jane’s father added a room onto the home to house the telephone office, but he died a year later. “We really needed the income from that. My mother raised seven girls,” Seaman said. “Eight women in that house with the telephone. Can you imagine!”
Jane was just finishing eighth grade when the photo was taken. “I wanted to be a nurse. I think that’s why those women had me there,” she said.
Jane would not disappoint. She graduated from Trinity High School (Taylorstown was part of that district at the time) and received her nurse’s training at Ohio Valley in Wheeling. She worked as a nurse in Michigan, where she and her husband, who died six years ago, lived for 35 years before returning to the Claysville area.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.