Today
I received a picture in the mail of a lady and her three young girls. I was
astounded at how beautiful they all were. When I knew them, the mother was in
her mid-sixties and the girls were probably in their forties. I was in college at
the time and I didn’t think much about their ages. I just knew that they were
all much older and wiser than I was. The mother’s name was Nettie. Nettie had
suffered a stroke in her early forties, leaving her whole right side paralyzed.
At some point after that they had decided to have college girls stay with her
to help her with chores in return for room and board. I arrived in the fall of
1962 as a junior in college. I lived with Nettie for the last two years of
college as well as the summer after I graduated in June of 1964.
As a result, I got to know two of the daughters quite
well. Doris lived near her mother and taught in a local elementary school, and
Opal lived in a town about twenty-five miles away and taught at a community
college. The third daughter, Ardith, lived in Florida. Although I met her, I
really never got to know her.
Nettie (whom I always called Mrs. Lee) was an amazing
woman. Although she had no use of her right hand and had to wear a brace on her
right leg in order to stand and walk, she cooked lunch for her daughter, her
son-in-law, and me every day of the week. She always cooked enough so that she
and I would have left-overs for dinner. I learned a lot about being frugal from
her meal-planning, but it was later that I realized how much effort it must
have taken for her to cook all those meals. Mrs. Lee died just a few months
before my older daughter was born, and I always regretted that she did not get
to see my first child.
Recently I learned something about Nettie and her
three daughters that I had never known before. They all went to Detroit,
Michigan, during World War II and worked in an airplane factory. According to
the oldest daughter, Opal, it was her youngest sister Doris, who is now
deceased, who decided that she wanted to go to Michigan and work.
Along with thousands of other women, they learned that
women could work in many fields that they would never have thought of before
the war. Also, like most other women, they seldom spoke of those years. I would
have thought that during the many conversations I had with Doris, she might
have mentioned her work in the airplane factory at some time, but she didn’t.
She was a wonderful first grade teacher for many years. Several years after I
graduated, she became Dean of Women at the college where I had attended. I always admired her. Now that I know more of
her story, I admire her even more.
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