Ohio Woman's Life Spanned History of American Prayer Book
Episcopal News Service. November 8, 1989 [89235]
Mike Barwell
When Idah Beery Tait died on September 8, 1989, she took with her to the grave the memory of all four American Prayer Books.
Perhaps the oldest parishioner of the diocese of Southern Ohio, Mrs. Tait's 106 years spanned two centuries, all eight bishops of Southern Ohio, and all four editions of the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer.
Idah Katherine Beery was born on a family farm on August 14, 1883, in Westville, about five miles west of Urbana, where she spent most of her life.
She was baptized at the Church of the Epiphany, Urbana, in a rite from the 1789 Book of Common Prayer -- when the Rt. Rev. Thomas Jagger was in the middle of his episcopacy as the first bishop of Southern Ohio.
According to parish records, she was confirmed and married, on June 18, 1910, to Edgar Wendel Tait, by the Rev. Allen Percy Bissell. In both services the 1892 edition of the Prayer Book was used. The Rt. Rev. Boyd Vincent was bishop.
For most her life in the church -- as a wife, mother, and grandmother and as a leader in women's parish activities and as a delegate to the diocesan conventions -- she used the 1928 Prayer Book. Theodore Irving Reese, Henry Wise Hobson, Roger Wilson Blanchard, and John McGill Krumm were her bishops during those five decades. She was still active in the church when a new Prayer Book was approved in 1979, about the time William Black was elected the seventh bishop of Southern Ohio. And, although bedridden in later years, her life span included Herbert Thompson, Jr.'s election and consecration as diocesan bishop in 1988.
Tait used to sit on her back porch with John Logan, an 89-year-old former warden of Epiphany, and talk about the changes in their lives and in the church.
"She was a very old lady," Logan said in a recent telephone interview. "We used to have a very good time together on the back porch, shooting the breeze. We just laughed about being so old. It didn't bother us very much. It's just that you don't have any peers to talk to anymore."
Logan said that Tait was "quite interested in the church. She especially liked going to conventions with the other folks. It was nice until you had to pay your own way, and it became a little expensive. She was a very determined person; when she knew something she'd let you know it, too!"
Logan, a local historian and a long-time friend of Tait, added that she always enjoyed young people and had them visit her in her home in Urbana, in which she lived until a few years ago. She had fallen, Logan said, and eventually she went to a nursing home.
"She was just a person who lived life to its fullest," Logan said.
According to the Rev. Gilbert Dahlberg, rector of Epiphany, she did indeed live a full life. Dahlberg said that Tait had one daughter and subsequently raised one granddaughter, Sally Overs of Cleveland. Tait was 65 when she took a job at the Champaign County Home to support her granddaughter. She worked at the County Home for the next 18 years, retiring at age 83.
Dahlberg said that Tait was known "as a regular and staunch supporter of the church, and there was never any doubt about where she stood on anything."
When Dahlberg was notified of Tait's death, he said that "some of the old guard said she should be buried under the 1928 Book of Common Prayer." Dahlberg asked, "Why?" "That was her Prayer Book," they replied. But, Dalhberg responded, "She was already 45 when that Prayer Book came in." And, he added, her granddaughter thought the 1928 service was "dour and somber" and wanted "something more like Easter."
Tait's eyes had seen many changes. And she accepted change -- from rural life on a family farm in nineteenth-century Midwest America, to the wonders of the late twentieth century. She was not a stranger to either joy or grief.
Idah Katherine Beery Tait was buried on September 13, 1989, from the Church of the Epiphany, Urbana. The service was the Rite I Eucharist and burial service from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The opening lines of the service are:
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.
Idah Tait would have liked that.