REGINA – When your mother isn’t handy, who do you ask? For five decades prairie women have turned to Emmie Oddie, The Western Producer’s farm living columnist. But the author of “I’d Like to Know” has decided to retire next week at the age of 79.
Emmie Oddie didn’t set out to be a prairie institution. She just followed her instincts as a trained home economist.
Her career with the newspaper began with a bylined article in 1946.
“The first thing I did for The Western Producer was for Mrs. Mac (Violet McNaughton, the paper’s first women’s editor),” said Emmie. “It was an article about a piece of furniture for newborn babies and moms to use. I got paid for that article but I don’t remember how much. The second article was about pressure canning.”
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She began writing the Emmie Oddie column in 1949. Emmie, as a self-confessed night owl, would often write at night after the farm chores were done and the children in bed. The column simply bore her name for the first nine years then changed to the present title in 1958. She said she was “fairly free to write what I wanted” and has saved every single one. The pasted-up columns now take up two trunks in the attic of her Tregarva farmhouse.
Oddie views her readers as “nice people, like friends.” Their requests through the years have changed, she noted. Now the readers want to know specifics and many have a grounding in the basic issues she used to cover. The questions come out of people’s lives so it’s no surprise the focus has moved.
“Rural electrification meant changes to the kitchen and bathroom and there were lots of questions about that. … We have all sorts of services now. People have more income and can travel now. You can go to a paint company and ask for yourselves. And there are more magazines.”
While Emmie personally tests most of the recipes in her column, she’ll only admit to difficulties with bread making. She said it’s because her mother never liked making bread so “I didn’t grow into it.”
Emmie’s column has always been hand-written because she never learned to type. As for computer and the internet, Emmie admits they would have been useful if she had been inclined to use them.
The changes through five decades have also hit her own profession of home economics, with university courses lost and jobs cut in agriculture departments. But Emmie is optimistic that home economists’ broad, general education will always be useful in bringing people together.
“A whole lot of people still think that home economists are people who tell others how to cook and sew.”
Emmie smiles. Some might say that’s all her column did. Her readers know better. See more about Emmie Oddie’s life on page 60.
