They were down to their last two biscuits for dinner. That was it. The proverbial cupboard was bare.
It was just the two of them back then living in a one-room apartment at the Strand Hotel near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Helen Jean Hazlewood, a senior at Belmont High, and her mother, Susie.
It was 1942 and there was a war going on. The country needed everyone to pull together. If you needed help, you pulled for yourself.
Helen got a Saturday job at a local dime store making $8 a day. That was their food budget for the week until she graduated and went to work at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, riveting bolts on the wings of P-28 Lightning fighter planes.
She made herself a promise. Her children would never face the poverty she faced.
And now, it’s 2024, and Helen Jean Smith, nee Hazlewood, is turning 100 years old today — joining an exclusive club of Americans.
There are only an estimated 101,000 members in a country of 245 million, according to the Pew Research Center.
Helen’s turning 100 in the same Mission Hills home she’s lived in for 71 years.
“My sisters and I were the luckiest kids on the block,” says her daughter and caregiver Carol Callan. “We grew up in the house all the kids in the neighborhood wanted to play at.”
Helen and George Smith’s three girls — Carol, Janice, and Teri — never saw a day of poverty.
The birthday girl was in the den watching a rerun of the old TV western “Wagon Train” when Carol and I talked by phone.
Her mom still reads four or five books a month, stays up on current affairs, and is looking forward to voting in November.
I chose not to talk to her because I wanted this column to be a surprise birthday present.
“She was a stay-at-home mom,” Carol says. “We always knew when we came home from school she’d be waiting for us.”
She might have appeared to be June Cleaver from “Leave it to Beaver,” but behind that apron beat the heart of Rosie the Riveter — one of the Greatest Generation’s brightest stars.
She married another star, Sgt. George Leo Smith, an Army-Air Force test flight engineer in World War II. While she was riveting, he was fighting.
They met after the war. Helen was living up in Big Bear with her best friend Betty from Lockheed — finding work as a photographer taking pictures of tourists on the lake and in the dining room of the Lagonita Lodge.
Betty invited her cousin to come up and visit. He brought along two of his friends.
“When they got off the bus, my mom turned to Betty and said, ‘I’ll take the tall one.’ That was my dad,” Carol says. “He always said he loved her because she was a Rosie the Riveter type.”
His type. Roll up your sleeves and get the job done. And, no complaining.
Helen and George Smith on their 50th anniversary. They went back to Rose Chapel in Pasadena to take pictures. (Family courtesy photo)
They were married on Christmas Day 1946 in the Chapel of the Roses in Pasadena. The marriage only lasted 70 years. George, a grocery store produce manager, made it to 93 before the odds finally caught up with him.
Sorry, men, but 78% of centenarians are women. We’re the long shots.
“My dad was a renaissance man,” Carol says. “He did everything; masonry, carpenter, mechanic. He raised three girls, no boys. He taught us how to fish, shoot bow and arrows, and do all the unconventional things most girls never learned back then.”
And all that time, standing by Sgt. George Smith’s side was Rosie the Riveter — posing as June Cleaver. Making sure her home was the one every kid on the block wanted to play at.
Her girls never had biscuits for dinner.
Happy 100th, Helen. You make us proud.
Dennis McCarthy can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
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