Mid, Part 1

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,

perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

                                     Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Going from Delaware through North Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, we finally get this branch of the Summers family to Wittenberg, Missouri. It was in Wittenberg that John William and Verne Cumi (Crabtree) Summers raised five kids: Mildred ("Mid"), Dale ("Bob"), Marguerite ("Pugs"), John Jr. ("Pete"), and Michael ("Mike").

The three oldest, Mid, Marguerite, and Dale, in Wittenberg, c1919.

Mildred (“Mid,” “Missy”) was the oldest, the most fascinating, and likely the most cerebral of those kids. Flouting tradition, she was a composite of Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, and Gloria Steinem, and a mixed blessing to her parents.

Born Mildred Katherine Summers on the first day of 1912 in Arkansas, probably in Boynton, where her folks were living at the time, Mid (whose nickname is said by some to have come from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) spent her childhood in Missouri along the Mississippi, first in Illmo (now part of Scott City), then in Malden, in Wittenberg, and finally in Cape Girardeau, where in 1924 she was residing at Southeast Missouri State Teachers College, probably as a pupil in the university-run grade school used to train teachers. Wittenberg had limited educational facilities and no high school at all. She eventually became a college student at Southeast Missouri, where she was a member of the 1934 junior class.

University of Tulsa Yearbook, 1936.

Mildred was attending Southeast Missouri when she married Woodrow Neubeck Estel on 14 Aug 1931 in Benton, Missouri. “Woody” was a renowned student athlete at Jacksonville High School in Jacksonville, Missouri. Rather young at the time, the two decided to live apart and keep the marriage secret until they finished school. Born 6 Mar 1913 in Altenburg, Missouri, just four miles from Wittenberg, Woodrow was still in high school and would not graduate until the following spring. In March 1934, Woodrow, who had by then moved to Oklahoma, where he continued his athletic achievements at the University of Tulsa, attempted to have the marriage annulled. He claimed that the couple were minors at the time of the marriage and had not obtained the consent of their parents. The annulment was refused, but may have been granted later. On 27 Mar 1938, Woodrow married Vera Arthuryne Trout in Holdenville, Oklahoma. 

At this point, however, another marriage was not on Mid’s mind. She had other ambitions.