John and Harriet Scudder went to Ceylon and then on to India. Their first three children died from heat-related illnesses, but the Scudders went on to raise ten more children, eight sons and two daughters. Ida’s father, John Scudder II, was their second youngest child.
Seven of the sons, Henry, William, Joseph, Ezekiel, Jared, Silas, and John, returned to the United States for their education and then returned “home” to India. All of them were qualified doctors of medicine as well as pastors, and two of them earned doctorates of divinity. The eighth son, Samuel, would have joined them, but he drowned while he was a student in theological college. The two daughters, Harriet and Louisa, both married Englishmen who also served in India. Now various cousins of Ida’s were beginning to trickle back from college in America to take their place in the ranks of Scudder missionaries in India. Among them were Dr. Harry and Bessie Scudder, cousins who had married each other and had come to Vellore to take Ida’s father’s place at the medical clinic.
The trip to the United States was the first sea voyage Ida had ever undertaken. She had been born at the mission hospital in Ranipet, India, on December 9, 1870, and had spent her entire life in southern India.
On the voyage to America, Ida’s mother taught her to knit and told her stories. Ida loved to hear about her parents’ voyage to India seventeen years before. James Buchanan had been president when they left. The first news they heard from home when they landed in Madras was that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president, Fort Sumter in South Carolina had been bombarded by Confederate troops, and the Civil War had begun.
The ocean voyage itself had lasted four long months, since they had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and then across the Indian ocean to India. They had been out of sight of land nearly all of the way. Ida’s mother, who had been born and raised in Ohio, had found the seascape unsettling and depressing. To make matters worse, the ship had been delayed for two weeks by lack of wind. Ida’s first voyage to the United States, however, was not nearly as long as her parents’ voyage to India had been. Two months after setting out, the ship arrived in New York harbor, and Ida soon set her feet on American soil.
The first thing Ida noticed about the United States was how well fed everyone looked, and the second was how many other people had blue eyes and pale blond hair like hers. She could walk all the way down the street from the boarding house to the church without one person reaching out to pull her hair to see whether it was real.
John Scudder decided he needed country air to recover fully. Much to Ida’s amazement, the family moved to a farm in Nebraska, where her father took up practice as a country doctor.
Once she adjusted to the changed scenery, Ida was happy in Nebraska. She loved the family’s horse, the wide-open fields, and the flat landscape. And as the days rolled by, she came to the conclusion that America was a lot better place to live than India. No one was starving or wore rags, neighbors helped each other, and the countryside smelled sweet compared with the stench of the market in Vellore on a hot afternoon. By the time she had been in the United States for three years, Ida had made herself a promise: no matter what, she would never live in India again.
Chapter 3
“I Will Make My Own Way in the World”
In 1883 twelve-year-old Ida Scudder learned that her father was returning to missionary work in India. John Scudder told Ida that initially he would go alone to see whether he was strong enough to survive the hot climate. Then, if all went well, Ida’s mother would join him in a year or so. In the meantime Ida’s brother Lewis would take over running the farm in Nebraska so that Mrs. Scudder and the three youngest children could continue to live there.
Life was just not the same for Ida without her father around. She found herself becoming increasingly resentful of the fact that so many members of her family were missionaries. She became even more upset two years later when she learned that her mother was going to be joining her father in India and Ida was to be sent to live with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Fanny in Chicago. Uncle Henry was her father’s oldest brother, and he had retired from missionary life in India twenty years before because of ill health.
Up until this time Ida had never been separated from her mother, not even for so much as a night. The thought of being on different continents from her parents filled her with dread. To make matters worse, when the day arrived for her mother to leave, it was raining heavily and the adults decided that it would be unwise for Ida to accompany her mother to the train station. Instead Ida was left to watch through the upstairs window as her mother disappeared from view in a carriage. When the carriage was out of sight, Ida flung herself down onto the bed and wept into her mother’s pillow. The smell of her mother’s perfume on it only increased her sadness.
Slowly Ida adjusted to the idea of being alone in the United States. Her uncle and aunt were kind to her, although they were much sterner than her parents. However, the return of Ida’s mother to India stirred up long-buried dreams in Uncle Henry, who eventually announced that he, too, was going to look for a way to resume missionary work. As a concession to his poor health, he set his sights on Japan rather than India.
By 1886 Dr. Henry Scudder had made all of the arrangements for his new work in Japan except for one thing—what to do with his niece. Ida, for her part, did not have the slightest idea what should happen to her next. She was torn between wanting to be with her parents and the dread of setting foot in India.
The problem was finally solved when a well-known preacher named Dwight L. Moody came to dinner. Mr. Moody described a seminary for girls that he had founded in his birthplace of Northfield, Massachusetts. By the time the meal was over, it was settled. Ida would go to Northfield and attend the seminary. Ida loved Northfield from the start. The Connecticut River ran through the small town, and when Ida arrived in the fall of 1886, the trees were a blaze of autumn colors.
For the first time in her life, Ida was surrounded by girls her own age, and she made up her mind to enjoy every minute of her time at the school. She found schoolwork easy, which gave her plenty of time to spend playing silly tricks on her classmates and teachers. She soon paired up with another high-spirited girl, named Florence Updyke. If anything went wrong in the East Hall of the seminary, it could inevitably be traced back to the two of them. On one occasion, when homework was particularly boring, Ida spied the horse and carriage of a visiting German teacher tied up in front of the school. She convinced Florence to join her, and the two girls crept up to the horse and carriage, unhitched them, and led them away. Once they were out of sight of the seminary, the girls climbed onto the carriage and went for a joyride. When they finally tired of joyriding, they tied the horse and carriage to a tree about two miles from school and hiked back in time for dinner.
When the two girls were summoned to the headmistress’s office after dinner, neither of them could keep a straight face. As a result of their actions, they were assigned to kitchen duty for weeks afterward. Still, whenever they saw each other clad in their aprons in the kitchen, they burst into giggles.
Later on, a larger group of the girls, the “bunch” as they were called, devised a game whereby everyone had to collect some item from somewhere in the school and meet in the furnace room to explain the daring way she had come by her object. The girls took turns gleefully recounting how they had “borrowed” a pot from under the cook’s nose, a pen from the headmistress’s private desk, and even the screws from the hinge in the seminary’s front gate! Of course, the greater challenge became putting the items back undetected.
On Thanksgiving Day during her second year at the school, Ida and some of her friends decided to go into the nearby town of Brattleboro for dinner. On the way they met up with some boys from Mount Hermon School. Although the girls of Northfield were forbidden to mix with the boys of Mount Hermon, except at specially chaperoned school events, the group decided to have dinner together. They were halfway through their turkey dinner when the English teacher at Northfield Seminary walked into the dining room. The girls, their faces white with fear, turned to Ida.
“Don’t worry,” Ida whispered. “Let’s enjoy the meal, and I’ll think of some way out of it.”
The meal went on, and by the time it was over, Ida had a plan. She stopped at a florist on the way back to school and bought the biggest bunch of flowers that were for sale. She wrote a note to the English teacher, thanking her for allowing them to have such a nice Thanksgiving dinner with those well-mannered young men who insisted they join them at the dinner table, and she left the note and flowers in the teacher’s office.
Ida was soon summoned to the English teacher’s office, but her plan worked, and she got away with just a warning not to mix with the boys again. As Ida left the room, she was sure she saw a slight smile on the teacher’s face.
For Ida’s fourth Christmas at Northfield Seminary, one of Ida’s aunts sent her a diary as a gift. Ida was soon filling its pages with accounts of her adventures and run-ins with authorities. On January 11, 1890, she wrote:
This evening Spook [Florence], Annie, Bessie, Mittle and I were going to have a big time having cream, coffee and lobster but as we had prayer meeting in chapel ending the week of prayer, we only had fifteen minutes and so couldn’t have our fun. Spook and I went into the attic and smoked cubebs [cigars] and had a great time over them.
Two days later Ida was complaining in her diary:
Miss Ford went for me for whistling again. She called me into the office and talked to me about having coffee and cocoa and said that I had done wrong to take that oil stove [another prank].
Ida was well behaved for a while, but on March 3 her entry read:
Over a month since I last took my pen to write, and much has happened. One day about the 20th of Feb. Edna Skinner and I got to laughing in chapel and oh how I was squelched by Miss Hall. She very kindly told me I had been a stumbling block to some and would still be if I did not do things differently.
Still, Ida found it impossible not to get into mischief of one sort or another. As her four years at seminary slipped by, Ida wondered what she would do next. It was not a question many of her friends had to ask. Most of them were from wealthy families and had come to Northfield to round out their education before a “stepping-out” party and the proposal of marriage that normally followed. But Ida had no parents in America and no one who was interested in sponsoring her stepping-out party. Somehow, though, she would work it out so that she could step out and catch the eye of some very rich and handsome young bachelor.
Much to Ida’s dismay, her parents assumed that she would return to India to become a missionary. Ida had not yet found the right words to tell them she had no intention of doing any such thing, especially after the grim letters she had received from them.
One of the letters Ida received from her father at the end of 1889 started,
We are in the midst of our hot weather and it is fearful, I don’t think I have ever fretted more over it. If it is dry I do not mind so much, but in this place which is not very far from the sea, the air is full of moisture and consequently the evaporation is less, so that we are in a reeking sweat most of the time.
Her father went on to explain that the thermometer read 102 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and did not fall below 86 degrees at night. Ida recoiled when she read such descriptions. Just how was a lady supposed to keep her hair perfectly curled and her dress immaculate in such conditions?
