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| Otto Plath's first wife Lydia Bartz, as she looked when they met. |
Here's a new-found photo of Otto Plath's first wife, Lydia Bartz, in 1910 a clerk at the Fall Creek, Wisconsin, general store her father founded. She married Otto in Spokane, Washington, in 1912. The couple then moved to Berkeley, California, where in 1915 Otto split for New York without her, complaining that she was "not educated" and sexually cold.
Not only was Lydia Bartz "very pretty," as the town clerk told Harriet Rosenstein she was: Lydia was diligent. [1] When Otto abandoned her, owing her prosperous family a crippling amount of money, Lydia with Otto's sister Frieda enrolled in a Chicago nursing school, graduated in 1918, went to Ohio for post-graduate studies, moved back home, and soon supervised the surgical unit of Luther Hospital in Eau Claire, the city nearest Fall Creek. Below, in 1953, Lydia is honored by her college's alumnae for her years of service and for teaching "more than 500 nurses," but
her service wasn't over; she passed her final annual nursing-license exam in 1960, age 71.
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| April, 1953 |
Caption says: "Mrs. Lydia Plath was guest of honor at a dinner given by the Luther Hospital Alumnae Monday night for 28 years of service in the Luther Hospital surgical department. . . ."
Although honored in 1953, Lydia's life wasn't anywhere near finished; she lived until 1988, dying at age 99. She was the only one of six Bartz sisters to marry, and even after a 15-year separation from Otto and no children she refused to divorce him, making his life difficult. Otto -- immortalized by his daughter Sylvia Plath as "Daddy" the fascist and "brutal male," doubtless deserved it, because Lydia, and Otto's second wife Aurelia Schober, learned to hate him, and Sylvia as a child "many times wished that he were dead." [3]
1. "very pretty": Fall Creek town clerk Marjorie Shong to Harriet Rosenstein, 22 February 1977, Emory.
2. Luther is now a Mayo Clinic satellite campus.
3. Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 293.
Photo credits: 1910 photo from Henke, Patricia: Sights and Sounds of the Valley: A History of Fall Creek (1978); Eau Claire (WI) Leader-Telegram, 16 April 1953.
