Flora Berbee

Madison - Flora Mathilda Berbee, age 96, passed away on November 2, 2020. She was born in Erie, PA on April 3, 1924, grew up in a German Baptist tradition in Chicago during the Great Depression, fell in love with plants, went to college during the Second World War, raised a family during the post-war baby boom and died almost a century later in Madison WI, Nov 2, 2020. Flora always liked stories, poems and songs, and so in her memory, we tell her stories of migration and long lost times, starting hundreds of years before her birth.

Flora's maternal, German Baptist ancestors migrated to Volhynia Ukraine, invited by a 1763 manifesto from Catherine the Great promising free land, fertile soil, religious freedom, and exemption from taxes and military service. Exemptions ended in the 1870's, economic conditions deteriorated, and in 1894, a group of German Baptists including Mathilda Vetter, Flora's infant mother left the Ukraine, following their pastor to Alberta, Canada.

An immigrant train took the Baptist group west across Canada. Flora related to us that men knew better but women had been told that the train was taking them to an established town with a church and a school. The train stopped and the women saw only unbroken prairie without houses, school or church, and they refused to get out of the train. After conferring, the train crew told the women that they could return to the east, but that they would have to get out of the train so that it could be turned around. And predictably, after the women got out, the train vanished.

The Vetter family build a soddy for shelter, by making 'bricks' from the dense sod of the grasslands. Flora's grandfather Gottlieb Vetter came to agree with the initial opinion of the women. Alberta is cold in winter, summer is short and hot, peaches and grapes do not grow there, and the family migrated to Benton Harbor, Michigan in 1904.

Flora's father Reinhold Kubsch arrived in the USA in 1909 from Lodz, Russia. Opportunity for the education that he greatly desired came through the University of Rochester German Department's German Theological Seminary. Reinhold married Mathilda Vetter and served as a minister in Erie PA, where Flora was born. However, unhappy with splits in his congregation, Reinhold left his ministry and the family moved west to Chicago.

Flora grew up in a Chicago apartment at 1211 1/2 N. State Street. The '1/2' indicated that the apartment was in back of the brownstones facing State Street. In the 1930's, horse-drawn carriages did the home deliveries in Chicago. Flora loved the horses. Horses pulled ice trucks, milk trucks and rag and old iron trucks through the alleys. For ice, houses had signs with movable arrows hung on the back door that you could use every 2-3 days to point to whether you wanted 10, 15 or 20 pounds of ice. Ice boxes were smelly. Made of wood, they absorbed and accumulated the odors. Plastic wrap had yet to be invented so containers of food in the ice box were more or less open to give off whatever smells they had in them.

The Kubsch home was three blocks from Lake Michigan. Movies were cheap and wonderful, with three big theaters walking distance from the Kubsch home. For a dime, a child could go to a movie and stay in the theater for as many movies as he or she could sit through. Flora was a Tarzan fan. When they could escape bible school, Kubsch children spent many hours at the Lincoln Park aquarium and zoo. They swam at the Oak Street Beach. Trash management at the time was casual and by the end of a sunny summer Sunday, floating litter covered the shallow water to 15 feet off shore. However, by the next day, the litter usually vanished and beaches were beautiful once more.

The Kubsch parents had long dreamed of owning their own farm. Over the summers, during the depression years, family lived in southern Michigan and helped work relatives' farms, in return for fresh fruit and vegetables. They saved and bought a substantial farm in 1941, the year of the attack on Pearl harbor; good timing for fruit prices were high. Flora spent her last year of high school on the farm and graduated from St Joseph High School in Michigan.

Flora went to the Western State Teachers College in Kalamazoo MI and studied botany at the Michigan Biological Field Station at Douglas Lake. The Second World War hollowed out the college's cadre of young males as a result, from her second year onwards, Flora was a biology lab instructor. She loved the job and added collecting and maintenance of cultures to her teaching and cleanup duties. She returned to the farm for summers. She did not enjoy picking peaches but it did give her fashionably tan legs during the war years when nylons were unavailable.

After graduation, Flora went to Yale where she was a research and teaching assistant, meeting John Berbee over departmental coffee. They married soon afterwards, and travelled to the University of Wisconsin at Madison where John started his PhD. John finished his thesis in 1954 and accepted a job with Canadian Forest Service. He moved with Flora to start the new job in Fredericton NB Canada. Flora applied for a job as a bryologist but was disqualified quickly. The letter went “As you know, Mrs. Berbee is a woman, and she is pregnant…” Daughter Mary Berbee was born in Dec. 1955 after ruining her mother’s academic career.

In 1957, John accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Flora’s sons Peter Adrian was born in 1959 and James Gerard was born in 1963. Flora did serious ‘Mom’ duty through the years when children were small. She shared coffee with similarly bright and interested neighbors. She was competitive. She never needed the newest fridge or shoe style, but she wanted her pots to be shiny and her Christmas cookies to be most beautiful and delicious. (The cookies were delicious.)

The family moved to Nigeria, in West Africa for three years when John joined the United States Agency for International Development's cooperative program with his home department. Not a happy time for Flora, who found herself isolated and missed her friends, the seasons, and the gardens of home. She was glad to return home.

As children left home, Flora started working again, as a volunteer technician with John, and then as a research assistant in John Andrews lab, in the Dept. of Plant Pathology at the Univ. of Wisconsin. She took pride in supporting the research students and contributing to family income, allowing John to retire early. Flora and John had a great retirement. They travelled over much of the United States in a Volkswagen camper van, visiting Civil War sites and national parks, fishing and backpacking and identifying flowers of the desert.

Flora’s last years were a series of losses large and small, balanced by good humor and a twinkle in her eye. Her husband John died in 2016. She started to fall far too frequently and was rescued once in a pool of blood in the bathroom by neighbors Tony, Mary Ann and a paramedic team. She fell again getting the mail at the base of the driveway and was rescued when Bella the dog started barking, and Bella’s owners, Renee and Jean came to the rescue. In 2018, she had a stroke. She wisely collapsed at the feet of son and EM physician Jim Berbee and thus, she recovered substantially but had to move from home to Attic Angels Health Center.

Through most of her time in Attic Angels, she took competitive pleasure in being one of the few who could still walk to meals. Flora, who once knew all the weeds by Latin and English names, started to forget the words for common house plants. She made real friends with staff over the years before death, less so with other residents who tended to be beyond the reach of friendship. Those of us who love her miss the power she had, almost to the end, to tease us all or to share her pleasure over a song, a poem, or a fresh garden tomato.

Flora's survivors include daughter Mary Berbee (David Carmean), son Peter (Valerie Stromquist); and son James (Karen Walsh). She is further survived by grandson, Brian Carmean. She was preceded in death by her husband John, her brother Robert, and sister Louise.

In recognition of the pleasure it provided her over many years, donations to the Middleton Public Library would be a fitting memorial for Flora Berbee.

Cress Funeral & Cremation Services

3610 Speedway Road

(608) 238-3434