Moses Lake woman remembers Woodrow Wilson

Twenty-eighth president had 'so much on the ball'

MOSES LAKE — Moses Lake resident Daisy Bendickson recently found new admiration for one of America's presidents.

"I pick up books all the time, and I found this about Woodrow Wilson," she said, referring to a 1964 Reader's Digest Condensed Books edition containing an excerpt from Gene Smith's 1964 Wilson biography, "When the Cheering Stopped."

Bendickson, 87, found herself taken with Wilson's spirit and his wife, Edith.

"How well she supported him," she said. "Like women these days don't support their men anymore. But to read how supportive she was, and yet, some people might have called it dictatorial. They called her the first woman president of the United States. But I think she was only supporting her man."

Bendickson said Wilson had "so much on the ball."

"The thing that amazed me was, in spite of all of his adversities, he still kept on top," she explained. "He lost his first wife, and there was the two little girls he had to have care for. So our little Edith dropped in and took care of it all. So I don't know whether I was enamored with her, or with him."

Bendickson's interest in Wilson is a new one, which surfaced when she picked up the edition with some other books and read the article. She doesn't remember if her family voted for Wilson, she said but being born in 1919, she existed within the Wilson administration, from 1913 to 1921, although she was too young to know what was going on.

"I thought, Presidents Day," she said. "They only mention the current ones, they always mention Lincoln and Washington, but all these others in between. That hasn't been that long ago he was alive, you know? So why people don't … same as I, I guess, you have so many other things, you don't go into all of this."

Wilson died Feb. 3, 1924.

Bendickson theorizes today's society tends to forget about the past.

"We have forgotten all of our people," she said. "We are so involved in the current we forget we've had people that were really inspiring. When we were kids, we knew there were things to inspire and keep you that way. But we don't have that any more, and I feel sorry for today's child."

Bendickson first arrived in Moses Lake in 1959. She was born in Florida, and left in the 1940s to enter the Navy while working as a secretary in a shipyard.

"I'd keep hearing all these ads, 'Join the Navy and see the world,' or 'Join the Navy and release a man to fight so we won't have it on our soil,'" she remembered.

Women weren't going overseas in those days, she said.

She did a little bit of everything during her "two years, six months, 22 days, six hours and five minutes" in the Navy working as a secretary.

After she was released from the service, she returned to Florida. But she loved Seattle, even though she spent the majority of her time in the Navy in New York.

"When I was introduced to Seattle, I thought it was the greatest place in the whole world," she said. So she attended the University of Washington.

"Of course it was interrupted by the man I finally married," she remembered with a chuckle.

Husband Marvin died 11 years ago; the couple moved to Moses Lake for his dentistry practice.

"He was such a jocular individual," she said with a laugh. "He says when he asked me to marry him, I said, 'What? Marry you and make you unhappy when I can keep so many others happy?' He never let me live that one down."

They have four children.

Despite her interest in Wilson, Bendickson said her favorite president is probably Ronald Reagan.

"He walked the middle, he wasn't a leftie or a rightie, in my view," she said.