Woman Missed 1 Vote in 78 Years

VENTURA — Edna Wirt Woods has failed to vote only once in 78 years, but said she can’t forgive herself for missing her last chance to cast a ballot against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“It’s the one time I didn’t vote,” the 99-year-old Ventura woman said Monday. “And I’m still very disgusted with myself.”

The year was 1944 and FDR was running for his fourth and final presidential term. Wirt Woods, a staunch Republican, blamed Roosevelt for getting America into World War II and opposed his populist social policies.

“I call him the Great Destroyer,” said Wirt Woods, who is among Ventura County’s oldest living voters, many whom will cast ballots today.

The day Roosevelt defeated Thomas E. Dewey, Wirt Woods was busy giving hearing tests to schoolchildren out of town and did not send in an absentee ballot.

Wirt Woods, who recalls firsthand the struggles of the suffragettes, still carries a sense of guilt for missing that election. For the past two decades, since she has had trouble walking, she has mailed in her ballot.

In 1920, Wirt Woods participated in the first presidential election held after women were given the right to vote. Since marking the ballot in favor of Republican Warren G. Harding that year, she said she has only crossed the party line once.

That was during a local election in the 1930s, when she voted for her next-door neighbor on Poli Street, James McBride, who became state senator.

“I also admired Harry Truman,” she said, “but I didn’t vote for him.”

Born Edna Wirt on Aug. 21, 1899, Edna kept using her maiden name even after she married John Woods, an engineer 10 years her senior, in 1925. After graduating from Northwestern University with bachelor’s degrees in both botany and Latin, she taught elementary school in Winnetka, Ill.

She stopped working briefly when the couple moved to Ventura in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. Suddenly, her husband’s real estate business went from making $1,000 to $100 a month, Wirt Woods recalled. With a new baby boy to feed, John Jr., Wirt Woods went back to work.

Until she retired in 1969, she drove a 40-foot bus to schools across Ventura County giving students hearing tests. “We determined if there was a hearing problem. If there was, we rectified it. In those days, people thought these children were dumb, when it was that they couldn’t hear.”

When her husband died in 1946, Wirt Woods became a single, working mother and never married again.

“Someone had to keep the home fires burning and raise my son,” Wirt Woods said, adding that working with children was no chore. “I loved my work, just loved my work.”

Although she may have been ahead of her time, Wirt Woods bristles at being described as a pioneer feminist.

“I never went for burning bras,” Wirt Woods said. “I thought that was just stupid. I go for a far more respectable way of expression. Who cares, anyway, if they wear one or not?”

Yet she wondered why there has yet to be a woman president.

“I had a friend who would have made a good one,” she said of Julian Hathaway, who helped establish the hearing conservation for local schools.

Besides devoting her life to hearing-impaired children, Wirt Woods was active in the local and state branches of the Soroptimist Club, among other organizations. “I’ve been president of every club I’ve joined,” she said.

She approaches voting with the same sense of dedication.

“I was very elated, very proud the first time I voted,” she said. “We didn’t talk about being liberated. We were just glad you got to do it. I still think it’s a privilege.”