Madge Clark was born in Barnet, Vermont 27 August 1903, four months after her father, Charles E. Clark, died of penumonia on 19 April. Her mother, Flora Thompson Clark, was left a pregnant widow with a young son as well as a stepdaughter, Lucille, the child of her husband's previous marriage. Flora moved from Barnet to Brandon where she worked as a school teacher. Madge attended Brandon Schools and followed with a year at Baypath Secretarial School in Springfield, Massachusetts. As described in an earlier post, she married Clarence Baker on 5 July 1924 in Brandon. After her marriage she continued to work part-time as a secretary. When widowed she worked as a telephone operator, a career she followed until her retirement. By the time my memories of "Grandma" begin, she was working at the switchboard in Brandon. She impressed me with talk of "the girls" and of swing shifts and split shifts. She told me that operators really did "listen in" no matter how strictly it was forbidden. She was very afraid of progress in the world of AT & T and worried greatly about what would happen to her when phones went dial. In the end she was moved down to Rutland where she became a long distance operator. I don't think this was nearly as much fun as working the lines in a small town where she knew everyone and everything. In fact, in my old age, I have a lot of sympathy for what she went through having to leave her home and friends of a lifetime and move 17 miles south, to adjust to very different working conditions.
Madge, according to my mother, was a woman always teetering on the edge of a breakdown. Madge often told us that her "nerves" were bad, meaning that she felt depressed and Lois told me that there were whole days that Madge spent lying on the couch, not even able to get dressed. Alternatively, she would become very high energy and whiz about full of plans and schemes. One story handed down over the years involved a trip she decided to take to visit her brother in Rutland. Despite the fact that it was snowing heavily and the roads were bad, she would not be deterred. Reaching the area where the present day union high school is located, she went into a skid, flew off into the field and bounced around stones and trees, totalling the car but not at all hurt herself. She was brought home by a bystander, told Clarence of the event and proceeded to put on her hat and coat for departure. He asked where she was going and indignantly she replied "well, to take the bus to Rutland, of course!". Writing this I can still hear her voice and remember the many anecdotes she told about Eva and Clarence and "Mother Baker"; almost all stories about how she was overlooked or mistreated.
Madge was the kind of driver who honked the horn loudly whenever she came to a bend in the road and it became a standing joke that when she drove away from our house in West Whately, she went in the wrong direction. We would stand there watching and in a few minutes back she would come, honking and waving. She often told the story of getting turned around when she got gas for the car, driving several miles in the wrong direction before realizing her mistake but placing the blame firmly on the gas station attendant.
Although Madge was only 44 when I was born she was widowed at the age of 47 and seemed to me quite ancient. She wore dresses in what were called "half sizes" and often talked about her need to "reduce". She wore old lady tie shoes with sensible heels and extremely complicated corsets which had laces and hooks and ties and I was fascinated to watch her get out of the paraphenalia. Finally, she had a complete set of false teeth that were kept in a glass by the bed. She hinted darkly that her boarder, "Thad" had designs on her that she never encouraged. She did have a real boyfriend for some time and Oscar talked of marrying her but I overheard her tell my mother that she was through with sex so had no interest in getting married. To me she described her marriage to Clarence as idyllic and I have many loving cards and letters that he gave her over the years. My mother, however, believed that it was a loveless marriage and that Clarence submitted to Madge's emotional blackmail through the years just as he had allowed himself to be maneuvered into marriage in the first place. Never having heard a word from Clarence about this and knowing how ambivalent Lois was about Madge, I myself am open to the idea that their lasting marriage was much like others-- sometimes good, sometimes not so good.
My mother, Lois Baker Smith, was diagnosed with cancer in December of 1970, and died on 21 March 1971. This was a terrible blow to Madge, as one can imagine. Four years later on the 25th anniversary of her husband's death, Madge committed suicide, taking large numbers of pills.
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