What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [128]
As heartbreaking as the deaths of so many important men in her life were, according to her sons, they also released Betty into yet another new stage of growth. She became even more confident, self-directed, and independent. “She had always deferred to men. She was articulate, but she wasn’t confident. She didn’t have her own constituency,” her son Bob told me. “Now, she seemed a force in her own right.” As if to put an exclamation mark on that, the California Women’s Legislative Caucus named her the 1995 “Woman of the Year” for her work fostering the redevelopment of South Berkeley. Betty, reflecting with characteristic modesty on the recognition, says only, “I follow what’s in front of me to be done and I do it. I’m often doing things I don’t know how to do. I just find a hole and I fill it.”
Wisdom, of course, has long been considered the primary virtue of old age, surely one that Betty possessed in amplitude by her late seventies. Which is why Dion Aroner, a state assemblywoman, hired her at seventy-eight, in 1999, to work as her outreach representative in west Contra Costa County. Such jobs are generally reserved for twenty-somethings who exchange energy and passion for political experience and mentoring. When Betty assumed the role, she instantly became the oldest legislative aide in California. “Betty and my relationship wasn’t like that,” Aroner laughed. “Betty wasn’t learning from me, I was learning from Betty.” She had impeccable intuition that was grounded in formidable knowledge, Aroner added. “Her eyes were critical to our success.”
Left to find her own way in Richmond, San Pablo, El Cerrito, and other cities in the assembly district, Betty got involved with the Rosie the Riveter/World War II National Home Front Historic Park in 2000 after President Clinton signed legislation giving the national park the go-ahead. Its goal was to honor the six million women who labored in the shipyards and in industrial jobs across the United States, challenged traditional notions of women’s capabilities, and ensured American wartime productivity during World War II. As Betty listened to planning specialists bat around their visions of the park, she became perturbed. “The whole thing was preposterous. If they tried to tell the story as designated, they were going to tell a white story in an overwhelmingly minority city,” she said. “If they wanted to make this entire city into a park, they damn well couldn’t do it that way. They had to allow for the multiple stories.”
The project manager for the Rosie the Riveter Memorial, cultural historian Donna Graves, was also hoping to create a more inclusive history. She asked Betty to give an oral history as a “Rosie the Riveter” for one of eight bay trail markers—eighteen-foot-tall metal stanchions meant to suggest the prow of a ship—that contain old photos and quotations from people who worked in the wartime shipyards. Once she became convinced that she would not be seen as a “Rosie” (“That’s a white woman’s story”), Betty obliged. “The war shed light on America’s promise,” her quote says in part, on a marker with the theme Divided We Live.
As Betty drove me around Richmond, she pointed out the churches, movie theaters, union halls, and housing from which blacks and other minorities were excluded during World War II. More problematic was showing where minorities had lived, worked, and enjoyed themselves. Those homes and buildings were demolished in just weeks after the war ended in a failed attempt to get African-Americans to return to the southern states from which they had come. Richmond today has a population that is 44 percent black. With another 12 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, Betty believed passionately that the national park there needed to have a wider palette of voices than originally seemed likely.
Because 75 percent of the shipyard workforce during