Spence, Polly 1914-1998

views updated

SPENCE, Polly 1914-1998

PERSONAL:

Born 1914, in Franklin, NE; died, 1998; married Levi Anderson; children: three sons (one died in childhood).

CAREER:

Homemaker; secretary.

WRITINGS:

Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, edited and with an afterword by Karl Spence Richardson, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Polly Spence lived the life of a typical Nebraska rancher's wife, homemaker, and mother until she realized, at age fifty-six, that her marriage was over. She then left her husband, moved to Los Angeles, and became a secretary. She wrote her autobiography and placed it in the hands of her son, Karl Spence Richardson, for editing, before her death in 1998, at age eighty-four. The result was Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, published posthumously. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews called it "a small work of art from the plains."

Polly Spence grew up in Franklin, Nebraska, a small town with conservative values, including the intolerant Ku Klux Klan, church suppers, and barn raisings. Her mother, whom she criticizes in the memoir, was a piano teacher. Her beloved father, Karl Spence, was a newspaper publisher with a love for justice and for language, which he passed on to his daughter. Spence's autobiography contains vivid detail about conventional Midwestern life, including a humorous description of an aunt modestly changing clothes in front of young Polly. The Spence family moved to the northwestern-Nebraska ranching town of Crawford in 1927, where attitudes were freer and the people, although conservative, were more tolerant. There they lived through the Great Depression. During that time Spence married cattle rancher Levi Anderson, and they began raising a family. One of their three sons died in childhood, and the author's narrative of overcoming the devastation of losing him reveals a strength of character that served her throughout her life.

Spence helped her husband run the ranch, cooked for logging crews, and helped make the ranch into a guest operation. Her stories of the last days of the Old West in a time of mid-twentieth century world war and the industrialization that followed are of historic interest and inspiring for modern Westerners. In 1949, the year that Levi Anderson built the family a new house, he also fell in love with a married neighbor. Although Spence was able to force an end to the affair, her marriage fell into a decline and, by 1970, she was ready to move out. She chose a new life in southern California, where she supported herself by working as a secretary.

The Kirkus Reviews contributor observed, "The idea that the Midwest is a reserve of puritanical cornshuckers disguises a more complicated truth, one compounded of many lonely acts of will." A Publishers Weekly contributor praised the book as one that will be of interest to many women and concluded, "Spence renders these moments unsentimentally, yet with emotional depth, richly informative detail and noteworthy balance."