Salisbury Post Columnist Recalls Day With Home Demonstration Agent

“Scrapbook brings memories of young Eleanor Southerland” by Rose Post in the Salisbury Post May 29, 1990

A young Eleanor Southerland hovered over me as I read the story in Sunday’s Post about the Extension Homemakers scrapbooks that are being given to the Rowan Public Library.

Those scrapbooks, Juanita Lagg said, are the story of the times, times that change so gradually we can’t see it happen until the day something draws our eye back, and we think, “Oh, my! It was like that, wasn’t it?”

Eleanor came to Rowan as home demonstration agent in August of 1952 and left just over four years later to go to Colombia, South America, as a home agent with a federal program that sent technical assistants all over the world.

But that was long enough to make an impact on women in Rowan County—and an impact on me. I knew her casually even before we did a series on weekly stores about days in the life of just about everybody.

It was my good fortune to spend a day with J.H. Knox, city schools superintendent, who guided the system with the help of one secretary and knew the names of all 4,000 children by the time they graduated. And I got to spend a day with a public health nurse and a welfare caseworker when they spent most of their time making house calls.

And with Eleanor Southerland.

Dedication

All of them taught me about dedication. They were public servants. Their days started early and ended late as they tried to make life better in a world that was happy with hope and bursting with energy and prosperous at last after the Depression and World War II and Korea.

Eleanor Southerland was at her desk by 8:30 that morning in late May. She’d been able to sleep a few minutes longer than usual; most mornings began with a call by 6:45 from a farm woman with a question. It didn’t end until 10 that night, because she gave her club demonstrations in the afternoon and at night. The words “comp time” hadn’t entered our vocabularies and air conditioning hadn’t entered our buildings. It was hot.

But neither the hours nor the heat marred a good day. As we hurried from one task to another, she told me a story.

One day a woman had asked her what a girl needed to be a home agent. Her daughter, she said, wasn’t smart enough to be a teacher or strong enough to work in the mill.

Eleanor said she didn’t know how smart or how strong she was when she started, but she’d learned a lot from the women she worked with and her back had held up under heavy loads of suitcases and boxes full of materials for her demonstrations, cookbooks, and even hoes, which she carried all over Rowan.

But the day was routine. No weekly column to write for The Post, no extra talk, no Monday staff meeting; and it wasn’t Saturday, so she didn’t have to load her car for the next week.

Routine was putting away dishes borrowed by the Salisbury B&PW Club, arranging 4-H dairy demonstrations for civic clubs, reporting a club meeting to The Post, unpacking materials for an arts and crafts workshop, answering mail, handling nominations for a delegate for a United Nations tour, filing government brochures, turning in money for cookbooks and a music workshop, planning a quarterly council meeting and meeting with the executive board (and cleaning up after their refreshments), arranging for a woman to report on a baby beef show—all before noon.

On her way to and from the afternoon’s demonstration she made home visits, responding to calls for help with everything from supervising the design of a anew home to repairing a toilet, planning a wedding reception or helping someone select a gift for a high school graduate, choosing paint for a new baby’s room or telling someone how to apply for welfare help.

By the end of that day, we were friends, and when I discovered she was going to leave the end of that year, I knew we’d be poorer for it, but another corner of the world would be infinitely richer.

Basic Demonstrations

And today, anytime people talk about going to Third World countries to improve lives, I think about Eleanor and what she told me when she first came back from Columbia to visit.

She loved working with women in Rowan, but knew someone else could do that job as well, someone who might not be willing to go where life was so basic that no one would even know to wish for air conditioning on a hot day or think about making drapes. In Columbia she taught people to put a long handle instead of a short handle on a broom so they wouldn’t be permanently bent over by the time they reached middle age. She taught them to lift their beds off their dirt floors so the cold damp of earth wouldn’t seep into their bones and erode their health and shorten their lives.

She taught them to build brick stoves with chimneys to carry the smoke outside instead of surrounding their open indoor fires with three stones and coughing in the smoke that blackened their walls and damaged their health. She taught them to build tables instead of eating on a banana mat on the floor, and to raise rabbits for protein because they did what rabbits do much faster than chickens.

Home demonstration in Columbia was real, she said. So real she went back when her tour was over, because she had to finish organizing a school of home economics in a Colombian university so that they could train their own home demonstration agents. Now married and living in Clinton, she’s still involved with development in Colombia.

I lost track of Eleanor Southerland long years ago, but she taught so many—that one person can make a difference without making a splash.

And I’m sure she’d be happy to know the scrapbooks are preserving a chapter of history about so many who did so much to make life better for the people around them.