Kurk Shrader gave us the background about the Bess Streeter Aldrich, mother, wife, teacher, business woman and author. Bess Genevra Streeter was born February 17, 1881, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, the last of eight children born to James and Mary Streeter. Bess graduated in 1901 from Iowa State Normal School, now known as the University of Northern Iowa, and taught for four years. She returned to Cedar Falls and worked as Assistant Supervisor at her alma mater, receiving an advanced degree in 1906. She married Charles Sweetzer Aldrich the following year. Charles Aldrich graduated with a law degree from Iowa State University and had been one of the youngest captains in the Spanish-American War. Following the war, he served for years as a U.S. Com missioner in Alaska.
and John Cobb, bought the American Exchange Bank in Elmwood, NE, and moved there with the Aldrich's two-month old daughter, Bess's widowed mother, and the Cobbs. Elmwood would become the locale, by whatever name she called it, of her many short stories, and it would also be the setting for some of her books. In 1925, Charles died when their oldest daughter was sixteen and the youngest child was four. Bess knew she had to do something to make a living. Bess won her first writing prize at the age of fourteen and another one at the age of seventeen, having been writing stories since childhood. In 1911 she saw a fiction contest announcement in the Ladies Home Journal and wrote a story in a few afternoons while her baby girl napped. Her story was one of six chosen from among some two thousand entries. Many times she wrote whenever she could find a moment between caring for her growing family and her household chores. She did make a comment that many of a stories was liberally sprinkled with dishwater as she jotted down words or ideas while she worked.