Dec. 10, 1939: A stringer’s tale of survival
A Star-Journal headline writer’s fine work on this page one story is still effective nearly 70 years later. Who could resist reading a story about a marooned mother and baby surviving on goat meat and flour? The baby indeed survived and lives to this day. An interview with him follows his mother’s first-person account of a flood that killed tens of thousands of people in Tientsin (now Tianjin), China.
Minneapolis Girl
Describes Tragic
Tientsin Flood
Marooned Mother
and Baby Lived on
Goat Meat, Flour
Aug. 6, 1938: Miss Ada Ruth Hanson visited the Star-Journal office to report she was going to China – to become a newspaper woman, to write a novel, to find adventure.
Miss Hanson was going back home. Born and reared by missionary parents in China, Miss Hanson was homesick for China after 12 years in the United States. The war in China did not matter. She was going back.
Miss Hanson wished to send stories back to Minneapolis from China. This letter is the first received from her. It is addressed to Nat Finney, features editor of The Star-Journal.
By ADA RUTH HANSON WOSHINSKY
Formerly Miss Ada Ruth Hanson
It has been a year and a half since you and I talked about my trip to China.
I remember that it was a boilingly hot day, that you had my picture taken, and that I sat in your office telling you about the book that I was going to write when I got to China.
* * *
Well, I did get to China and married Harry Woshinsky, who is a former student at the University of Minnesota. (Mr. Woshinsky attended the university from 1935 to 1937.)
Now a year later I am still thinking about writing a book though by now I am rather vague about the whole project.
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| This studio portrait of Ada and Oliver Woshinsky was taken about the time this story was published in the Star-Journal. Doesn’t he look a little … professorial? |
We have a son, born August 6, who takes a considerable amount of my time to care for.
The son, Oliver, arrived exactly two weeks before the Tientsin flood. We were dismissed from the hospital Sunday morning, Aug. 20, and by noon that day water was rushing into the city.
Mother and I fled to the second floor of the house and there we stayed for the longest eight days I ever experienced.
* * *
That first night was the worst. Chinese who did not have second-story houses were clinging to roofs shouting for help. Explosions lit up the water since fires were raging in all parts of the city. Electricity was cut off.
Fortunately we found a small candle so I could feed my baby by its light.
As soon as it was light we shouted across to the people in houses near us to find out who had supplies.
We had a bag of flour so had pancakes quite regularly that week. Someone near had killed a goat rather than give it roof space, so sold us a hunk to be eaten in two days as of course we had no ice.
During the second day the sound of wailing had given place to hammering. Every family with tools was busy constructing boats. Peculiar crafts, also inner tubes and bath tubs were soon seen navigating the filthy water.
Men and boys got about and did business with their neighbors and then returned to their precarious roofs for the night.
Authorities soon obtained barges and were dragging in bodies to be identified.
Because my own baby was safe two stories up from the water, I was particularly shocked at the number of bodies of babies found drowned and floating in the scum of the streets.
Chinese mothers with bound feet, several small children to save and food to drag up from their room to the roof could only hope that the smallest tot would not roll off into the water.
The third day found organizations at work on the tremendous task of relieving the immediate suffering of families made homeless.
Missionaries opened school buildings to refugees and then made huge caldrons of gruel to feed them as they crouched in classrooms huddled together with their scanty belongings.
Many Chinese families preferred to take the chance of existing on their roofs rather than to be separated since it is doubtful if such families are ever reunited.
The men are often sent north to do manual labor in Manchuria and Mongolia. The children are sent to Japan to be raised in Japanese traditions, and I don’t know what happens to the women, though I can imagine them, like Evangeline, wandering for a lifetime searching for their loved ones.
Mother and I were not forgotten by Uncle Sam in our predicament. A motor boat brought out a representative of the American Consulate to ask us how we were getting along and to advise us to get to Peking as soon as we thought the baby and I could stand the trip.
Next day another motor boat brought American Marines to our front door.
* * *
They came up a ladder to our second floor to give us typhoid shots and cholera injections, and brought several cans of food to vary our pancake-goat meat diet.
We were glad to see them and decided to follow all the advice of getting out of the city, for mosquitoes and flies were thick, while the smell of decay that came from the bodies floating in the water was unbearable.
The trip to Peking, made via ladder from the house to a flat-bottom boat, from the boat to a rickshaw and then by train, was rather tiresome and uncomfortable.
* * *
We made it safely, however, with the baby sleeping most of the time. We shall probably bore him in later years telling him about the dangerous trip he took when only 22 days old.
Once in Peking, there was nothing to do but wait for the flood waters to recede in Tientsin. Harry went back to work. Mather went back to Taian, baby and I stayed on in Peking.
But now the Woshinsky family is reunited in Tientsin. Harry, young Oliver, and I have a tiny house rented from the English missionaries and are busy these days trying to get it settled.
Drying out furniture, repairing warped doors and straightening out floors are tasks that are keeping all the local workmen busy.
The only good from the flood is that local workmen are able to get higher wages than they have ever had before.
* * *
In spite of the overwhelming tragedy the people are valiantly trying to recover their losses. Drying in the sunshine these days are ledgers and bank books from offices on first floors.
Secondhand stores have bought up water-soaked article for resale. One man has cigarets drying outside his shop, another is painting rusty stoves and kettles.
The Chinese merchant is a plucky individual working day and night with no time out to moan his losses.
In every back yard and alley are discarded boats which perhaps will never be used again. Certainly Tientsin has never had a flood like this before, and everything will be done to ensure security from such another one.
DECEMBER 2008 UPDATE: Oliver Woshinsky, now 69, lives in Portland, Maine. He taught political science at the University of Southern Maine for 30 years, retiring in 2001. He’s married and has one son from a previous marriage.
He remembers his mother as a “gentle rebel” and “a bit of a noncomformist.” At age 21, while the rest of her family voted for Herbert Hoover for president, she cast her first ballot for the Socialist candidate. She trained as a journalist, Oliver says, but always had trouble finding work as a journalist.
Oliver Woshinsky She met Oliver’s father in Minneapolis in the mid-1930s. Along with several of her siblings, she was in town to be with her father during the year of his 60th birthday. Harry Woshinsky, who was born to a poor Jewish family in Odessa, was in town to pursue an engineering degree at the University of Minnesota.
Harry and Ada had attended the same American school in Tientsin years before, but had never met because of their age difference (she was seven years older). Ada’s family was in Tientsin because of her father’s work as a Methodist missionary. Harry’s family had sent him to Tientsin to live with a prosperous uncle. Two of Harry’s friends and classmates at that American school – Ada’s brothers – persuaded him to travel to Minnesota to go to college, and it was these brothers who introduced Ada and Harry to each other in Minneapolis.
“How she got back to China was kind of romantic and crazy,” Oliver says. She and Harry dated for two years in Minneapolis before Harry’s uncle sent him a one-way ticket back to China after finding out the young man was no longer studying engineering. During a yearlong separation, he wrote long letters to Ada, pleading for her to come to China to marry him, which she did in 1938. But not before visiting the Star-Journal offices. How did she end up pitching her story ideas there?
“She always subscribed to papers in the towns she lived in, and read them cover to cover,” Oliver says. “She realized she was going into war zone and might be able to parlay the writing into a full-time correspondent job.”
While in China, Ada wrote for the North China Star, an English language paper in Beijing. As an “ambulance chaser,” she covered fires, accidents and crime — and her work did not go unnoticed. “She was several months pregnant with me when an AP editor asked to meet her to ask her to be a stringer. When he saw she was pregnant, he just smiled and said this isn’t going to work.” Harry worked in journalism as well, mostly as a proofreader.
The new family fled Japanese-occupied China in 1941, just six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ada had an American passport; Harry had a Soviet passport. She suggested they go to Russia, but Harry convinced her that America was a better option. “Russia was not a pleasant place in 1941,” Oliver notes.
“My grandfather [Ada’s father] had to pull a lot of strings to get the family U.S. permission to settle in the United States,” Oliver says. They lived first in Texas, then Kansas and finally Vermont, where Harry had landed a job on a farm before sending for Ada and Oliver.
“My father was not good at holding down jobs,” Oliver says. He “just bounced around” after the family moved to the United States. He enlisted in the Army and ended up in Berlin as a Russian translator at the end of World War II. He and Ada had three more children, and Ada eventually found a job as a proofreader at the Hartford Courant, where she worked for 20 years until her retirement. Harry died in 1993, Ada seven years later.
Oliver earned a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin College and a Ph.D. at Yale. He has written a few academic books, including “Explaining Politics: Culture, Institutions, and Political Behavior,” published this year, and is just now starting to sort through his mother’s papers.
“She was always writing stuff,” Oliver recalls. “She was always jotting things down in a writer’s notebook. Not deep, but much of it was quite interesting, quite good.”
