Eminent Homemaker
County: Aurora
Selma Woods, 57, for whom Extension work has been a way of life, was honored in 1973 as Eminent Homemaker by the South Dakota Board of Regents and South Dakota State University.
The activities of both Woods and her husband, Monroe, are curtailed now because of illness, but both are still sought out for advice in Extension and mental health work in the Storla and Letcher areas where they live.
Cooperative Extension work and this quiet lady were made for each other. On the one hand is the most unique adult educational organization in the world and on the other is a woman without much formal education but with a passion for learning and for passing this learning on to others.
Woods has been a volunteer leader on the Cooperative Extension 4-H program for 30 years and Extension club member for 20. She initiated a program to entertain girls in the state training school and was the chairman of the mental health program conducted by Extension homemakers clubs in Aurora County. She retired after 15 years of service on the Aurora County Extension Board.
When other adults were too busy, she could be counted on to take Aurora County 4-H’ers to club camps, state fairs, judging schools and special events contests. Not that she had any more time than other farm women—she shared in her husband’s harvest work and the haying and farrowing operations. She also took an equal role with her husband in the farm decision making.
Woods determined that her three children would have the education she couldn’t have. All three attended college. They are daughter LeNora (Dave) Busk, Faulkton, and sons Tracy, Moline, Illinois, and James, St. Louis, Missouri.