Dates

• Existence: 1892 - 1995

Biography

Edna Kendig Hidlebaugh, teacher and clubwoman, was born in 1892 in Muscatine, Iowa, to Jacob and Emma Baldwin Kendig. She graduated from Muscatine High School, attended Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and completed a Bachelor of Didactics degree at Grandview College in Des Moines in 1916. Her first position was teaching domestic science at the Bayard High School. While teaching there in the early 1920s, she happened to go into a barbershop to have her hair washed and the Bayard school board called a special meeting to consider if that were grounds for dismissal.

Because state law prohibited married women from teaching, she dated the owner of the Bayard general store Guy Hidlebaugh for three years before they married in the early 1920s. Edna Hidlebaugh raised two children, Norma Hidlebaugh and a son Lee Hidlebaugh, rarely assisting in the store or holding other jobs. Her husband remarked that he was pleased his wife never looked "all worn out" like farm wives. She was active in the Methodist Church, the Adelphian Society,the Bayard Women's Club, the American Legion Auxiliary, and the Order of the Eastern Star. In the 1930s, she was a key figure in the Bayard Women's Club project to found a public library. In the 1960s and 1970s, she traveled in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She lived until the age of 102 and died October 13, 1995. Her daughter Norma Hidlebaugh married Max Naylor and raised three daughters in nearby Jefferson, Iowa. Her son Lee Hidlebaugh lived and worked in San Francisco. [Information for this biographical sketch is drawn from conversations with Norma Hidlebaugh Naylor in 1998.]

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