Aunt Nettie

Aunt Nettie Banister, Gladys Banister was my grandfather’s sister. Her name popped up in conversations as I was growing up as well as when I was an adult. Little things would trigger my mother’s memory about this extraordinary woman. At least she was extraordinary in my mother’s eyes.
Aunt Nettie was a spinster. She never married and never wanted to. She was very independent for a lady in those days and was very educated.
I had an opportunity to talk to my last living uncle the other day and I coaxed him into talking about his ancestors. Uncle Les is almost ninety three and is sharp as a tack. Aunt Nettie’s name came up and he started to laugh and said, “She was a spinster, you know.” Every time someone talked about her, they prefaced their conversation with the “spinster” description.
Aunt Nettie traveled to Ames, Iowa and attended the college there as did my brother in later years.
For a woman to travel about two hundred miles unescorted was unheard of. Nettie was a determined woman and nothing deterred her. My mother never told me what she got her degree in, I don’t think that it really mattered, she had one.
Aunt Nettie was an astronomer. She loved the atmosphere and it’s mystery. She had a telescope and taught my mother how to use it. When I was little my mother taught me how to pick out the little dipper, the big dipper, and other constellations, which I cannot do now.
Aunt Nettie, like her brothers and sisters did not have much of a sense of humor. She saw life as something that was serious and short. She was determined that her nieces and nephews would get the same interest in education as she had. Yesterday I opened up an old encyclopedia that was copyrighted in the 1800’s. They were a gift to my Uncle Leslie from her. It was difficult for me to envision the full of fun Uncle Leslie that I knew, even opening one of the books. There were only four books in that set. Imagine a set of encyclopedias with only four books.
My mother Gladys Banister, was an overachiever and finished high school early and was awarded her Normal Teaching Certificate when she was sixteen. My mother didn’t like teaching, she wanted to be a nurse, but that was not allowed. Her mother told her that only prostitutes became nurses. Ladies did not look upon a naked man’s body unless it was her husband’s.
Aunt Nettie, of course, also wanted mother to teach. She insisted that mother go to Junior College in Cherokee. There she took courses that were for ladies. She told me one time, “ The courses I took at that college did me no good whatsoever for my future.” I remember she said she took two years of French. Young ladies were required to take that. I know she took a lot of mathematics also. That she enjoyed, but saw no use for it. She did see a use for it many years later. When Mother was sixty three or four she enrolled in Morning Side College in Sioux City, Iowa and took accounting. Needless to say, she got straight A’s. All she could talk about though were the good looking young men in her class.
There were stories about Aunt Nettie that I don’t know are true. Some stories are handed down from generation to generation and they tend to lose some of the truth and gain imagination.
The other day, I was digging through Mother’s memory box and there was an article that Nettie had written for the Cherokee newspaper concerning my ancestors. I will put that article in my blog, probably will paraphrase it because it is extremely long, but also extremely interesting. Also interesting, and I would say it to her face, she was a terrible speller. I checked the dictionary to see if the words that she misspelled were spelled differently in those days. They were not. Sorry, Great Aunt Nettie, I just had to add that for posterity’s sake.