Time Machine: Ethel Penningroth

Ethel Blythe Penningroth, born in Williamsburg on Jan. 13, 1897, lived on a farm east of Iowa City in 1956.

She was a homemaker and a lifelong poet who also took time to write letters to children from Peter Pan, the fictional boy who wouldn’t grow up.

In the letters, Peter Pan, keeping up with the times, found a fairy friend named Sputnik, the name of the Soviet Union satellite that launched the Space Age in 1957. Sputnik, Peter reported, went “faster than any fairy.”

Penningroth’s letters began as a project to connect with children. She offered subscriptions to mothers, grandmothers and friends who wanted her to send personal letters to their children from Peter Pan.

The letters became popular with people of all ages. One of her readers was a 78-year-old nursing home resident.

She stressed love in each letter — “love from Peter to the children receiving the letter, love for the rest of the fairies, the world and even for all humans,” The Gazette reported.

Penningroth often included one of her poems with Peter’s letters.

After World War II

But Penningroth was known for more than letters to children in the mid-20th century.

Penningroth, as a member of the American Friends Service Committee, toured Europe for two months, from December 1949 to January 1950, to observe its recovery after World War II. She wrote a series of articles for The Gazette about what she saw.

When she and her three Iowa companions — Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Vice President R.L. Stephens, Alden farmer Martin Lauterbach, and Mrs. William Davidson of Stanwood — returned, they relayed Europe’s desperate need for help to Iowa’s Christian Rural Overseas Program, or CROP.

They reported finding many people who were not covered by displaced persons programs, including those returned to their home countries even though they hadn’t lived there before the war. That meant a half million people had returned to Austria and 12 million to Germany, “overtaxing the economies of those countries,” Stephens reported.

Fundraising drives to assist these people began in earnest.

Writing poems

Penningroth had written poems since her childhood, often stopping what she was doing to jot down an idea. She won a poetry prize when she was a student at the University of Iowa.

Her first poem was published in 1929, but she mostly kept her work filed away at home, where she raised her four children, releasing the poems for publication in The Gazette and other publications and for reading on WMT Radio.

She wrote poems for a Chicago paper for about 30 years and published a newspaper column in Davenport when she lived there, starting in 1934. While the Penningroths lived in Davenport, she often was asked to speak to women’s groups and writing classes.

She also started giving poetry programs in 1934 when The Gazette published two of her poems. A friend in Tipton thought a poetry presentation was perfect for a party in the friend’s rose garden because “poetry and flowers go together.”

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One of her fans said she liked Penningroth’s poetry because “she always sounds as though she’s had her hands in dishwater.”

People would ask where they could buy a book of her poems. “I guess I thought they weren’t worth being collected,” she would respond.

Her family and friends, however, disagreed. In 1965, she gathered her favorite poems into a book called “No Sorrowing.” It was published by Inspiration Press of Iowa City.

UI grad, four children

Penningroth married Louis Penningroth, a Tipton native, in 1919. Both graduated from the University of Iowa. Her brother-in-law, Charles Penningroth, was a district court judge in Linn County.

The Penningroths lived in New York City while Louis — I’ll write about him next Sunday — went to Union Theological Seminary. After his ordination, the couple served churches in Minneapolis, Tipton and Davenport.

All four of the Penningroth children went to the University of Iowa. While the two youngest were there in 1950, their mother was named the school’s Mother of the Year.

In 1965, the Penningroths retired to Valley View Farm at the east edge of Iowa City. They rented out most of the farm’s 146 acres, but reserved the buildings and some pasture to raise Shetland ponies.

Louis Penningroth died in 1973. Ethel died at age 87 in 1984 while visiting a daughter in Hastings, Neb.

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