yesterday in a fit of procrastination, i went digging around in some old papers i collected my senior year of college for a project i did getting to know my great-grandmother through other people's memories. zina lenore cannon wood is my namesake, and was a lovely woman from what i've gathered. she was well-educated, loved shakespeare, hard working, service minded (she was a social worker in berkley for a long time), and loved by all who knew her.
and she was loved by this man
wallace bennett (who went on to become a repulican senator from utah, as did his son who still is). apparently they were sweethearts for quite sometime, and yesterday while reading some documents i found he even gave her a diamond . . . which she kept for some time, but finally gave back. i wonder why? not that i mind. i'm not sure how i'd feel about being bob bennett's grand-daughter instead of owen and lenore's granddaughter. still funny to think how s many lives may have been changed. funny to think how our decisions affect people we never meet years later. i've always taken comfort that she wasn't married till 28 or was it 29? there's still hope for me . . .
9 comments:
I am so glad that Grandma fell in love with that dashing young man form Bluff Utah.
I really wish I could get the dirt on that story...so interesting. this is why we should always write about boys and romance in our journals. Right?
"always keep a diamond in your mind"
That dashing young man, Joseph Earl Wood, was from Montcello, Utah. Grandma was his high school English teacher and chaperone for the basketball team he played for at LDS High School in Salt Lake City. Fact check this one for me some of you family members out there.
I thought they met at Ricks, she was his shakespeare teacher.
I had always thought that she was his college teacher. I am glad that she married the younger man.
I don't know when she got married but I do know she had snow white hair very early and dyed it because she was married to such a young man.
Oh my, Zina from what your grandma B has said, Grandma Wood loved Wallace F. Bennett's family and thought very highly of him. But for some reason not enough to marry him. From what I've been told Wallace Bennett's wife was Grandma Wood's very good friend. Your Grandma also said that Grandma Wood wouldn’t have liked living in Washington and being a Senator’s wife. The woman he married was much better suited for the job.
Grandma Wood met Grandpa Wood at the LDS High School, now West High, in SLC. She was his English teacher. I think he was something like 22 years old at the time. He was on the basketball team. Yes, 5'10" was tall back then. They really hadn't started dating. But after a train trip with the team as a chaperone they began dating. After a while Grandpa Wood stopped coming around. Then one day his mother Anna Lillian called on the phone all upset saying that she was very sorry. Something like she was responsible for Grandpa stopping dating Grandma. Grandma Wood said that wasn’t true. It wasn’t long before Grandpa Wood started dating Grandma again.
It was at Ricks, now BYU Idaho, that Grandma was Marion G. Romney’s English teacher. She was also his future wife, Ida’s, room mate. Ida also was a teacher at Ricks.
The sources of my information are Grandma Wood, my mother, and her brothers and sisters.
thank you anonymous! are you aunt kathie? its good to get the story straight!
I always wondered why she was 8 years older...
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