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Neighbor's life captured
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Edna Thayer is the author of “Feisty Lydia, Memoirs of a German War Bride.” John Cross
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Lydia Ross, German war bride, is subject of a book
On the day that Edna and David Thayer moved into their home on Lake Francis in Elysian in the summer of 1976, they met their next-door neighbors, Lydia and John Ross.
“Lydia greeted us with a warm hug and her German brogue and invited us over for coffee,” Edna Thayer says. “She told us we were working too hard and needed to take a break.”
That coffee break, and the stories Lydia Ross told during it, eventually become the genesis of Thayer’s recently published book, “Feisty Lydia, Memoirs of a German War Bride.”
“I always thought her life would make an interesting book,” Thayer says. “It had been in the back of my mind for a long time.”
Lydia Ross was born in Neuötting, Germany in 1925. She was a teenager during World War II and experienced the hardship of that war firsthand. She also, however, met her husband, John, because of it. John, the son of a Minnesota farm family, was sent to Neuötting in 1945, where he and Lydia first met. They were married in Germany in 1947 and, when John returned to his home in Elysian in 1948, Lydia and their son, Johnny, followed.
It was Lydia’s bright personality — her feistiness, as Thayer calls it — that endeared her to the people of her adopted home.
“She was always laughing, and she always had a joke to share,” Thayer says. “She was so very warm and friendly; she loved everybody and everybody loved her, too. She was just fun to be around.”
Her popularity explains the popularity of the book that tells the story of her life in dozens of short vignettes. More than 800 copies have sold since its release in June, including many to her friends and family in the area. Thayer recently sent a copy to one of Lydia’s nieces in Indiana, who remembered visiting Elysian as a child.
“She told me that she was still on the bottle when she came here, and Lydia thought she was too old for it,” Thayer says. “So Lydia let her dogs chew off the nipple. ‘My aunt was definitely feisty,’ she said.”
Thayer’s initial interest in Lydia’s stories came out of her own heritage. She was 5 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and vividly remembers hearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt say “Today is a day that will live in infamy” on the radio.
“My family was German and proud to be German, so it was hard to understand why we were going to war with the Germans,” Thayer remembers. “Listening to Lydia’s stories was great for me; I really wanted to know what the war had been like in Germany.”
Lydia loved to tell those stories.
“Talking about it was a way for her to get it off her chest and to get it out of her system,” Thayer says. “She was always ready to tell stories, and she always told them in such an entertaining way.”
When Thayer first approached Lydia about writing the book last summer, Lydia said no one would want to read about her. Eventually, however, she agreed to let Thayer collect her stories and put them in print — as long as she could approve it along the way.
In October, Thayer started visiting Lydia in the nursing home once a week to gather information and to read what she had written in the meantime. By the first week of March, she had finished the first draft, with Lydia’s blessing. Her subject was especially pleased with the title.
“When I asked her what she thought of the title, she said, ‘It’s perfect,’” Thayer says.
Just a few weeks later, Lydia Ross fell and broke her hip. She died on March 22, 2009.
“Her family is grateful to have the book,” Thayer says. “They see it as a wonderful way to pass their heritage down.”
“Feisty Lydia” is available at Enchanted Forest in Mankato, Mama’s Mercantile in Elysian, Berg’s Pharmacy in Waterville, A Country Loft in New Ulm and Zinnias in Waseca. Thayer has also scheduled several readings and events around the book, including a reading at the Tacy House in Mankato on Sept. 26. For more information about the book or upcoming events, visit www.feistylydia.com.
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The results are in.
Every year, we at The Free Press poll our readership. We want to know where you eat, where you take in a show, where you take the fam’ when they’re in town to show off the Mankato area to outsiders, and so on.
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Here are the 2009 Readers’ Choice Award winners in Activities and Entertainment. -
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The results are in.
Every year, we at The Free Press poll our readership. We want to know where you eat, where you take in a show, where you take the fam’ when they’re in town to show off the Mankato area to outsiders, and so on.
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