|
|
Our Families - Our Lives. Write-Link Project
Brittani H.
June 20, 2005 Thora K.
Rosie the Riveter - No, Thora Keen. An 88 year old Ypsilanti resident,
and Wyoming native, worked in the Willow Run Bomber Plant for 89 days
making teeny steel bits to hold the wings together. They fired her because
they didn't want to put her on the payroll.
Thora has lived in the same high-rise for 27 years now, and doesn't
plan on moving away any time soon.
Being one of eight children, she grew up in Gillette, Wyoming. She
went to a small country school with no running water and a bathroom
outside. All the students who went there were either cousins, or neighbors.
All the classes were in one room and she had to walk four miles just
to get there.
She recalls one morning she and her little brother got lost. They walked
around for hours, and by the time they got to the school house, their
hands and feet were nearly frozen. They washed them in cold water in
order to try to re-establish blood flow, even though modern medical
knowledge says that you should use warm water.
Thora met her first husband on a night out dancing in Wyoming. After
that they were always on the move. She says, "He wasn't ever happy.
He always had to be moving around." She stayed with him for 17
years, until they got divorced. He left her for another woman, and she
had to raise the children all by herself. She never got any child-support,
they didn't even enforce it back then.
A few years later she got remarried. Her second husband, unfortunately,
died in 1979 of cancer in the pancreas and prostate.
She moved to Michigan in 1980 and started living in the same high rise
that she lives in now. When she moved here she brought a table, two
chairs, two children, and a bed. She started volunteering at the Senior
Center that year, and has since.
She graduated in 1981. Ypsilanti High School came to her apartment
building and taught her there.
To this day Thora Keen loves baseball, and is rooting for the Tigers.
She says that her favorite thing was Wyoming because, "they had
the most beautiful skies of blue. The weather changed from freezing
in the winter and hot in the summer, but that's okay because you get
used to it."
Her favorite childhood memory was when everyone in her family was together.
She loved dancing as a teenager, and never missed a dance if she could
help it. She loved The Ink Spots, and Louis Armstrong. Her curfew was
10:00 p.m., and if she wasn't in by then she got grounded for six weeks!
To this day her son comes to visit every Sunday, and after she goes
to church. She goes to church every Tuesday, and Wednesday.
|
American Family
 The
SeriesHealth
Resources Community
Partners Latinos
and HispanicsEthnic
Prejudice and Anti-Immigrant Policies En
EspañolThe New Americans
|
|||