My friend Rebecca Shaw prefers fruity colors, such as chartreuse and peach. Perhaps that's because she spent her childhood in the South. She remembers playing in her maternal grandfather's citrus grove in Florida. And of course, Georgia, her birthplace, is famous for its peaches.
Rebecca Gibson Daniel was born Oct. 25, 1910, in Tifton, Ga., the younger of two daughters. Sister Harriet had 18 months on her. (Harriet lived a long life, dying less than two years ago.)
Rebecca's father was an obstetrician; her mother, a housewife. They divorced when Rebecca was in fourth grade, and she moved with Harriet and their mother to Clearwater, Fla., on the Gulf Coast, to live in a combination office/apartment building her grandfather had built.
"I was confined there," she says in her patrician voice, husky with age. "There was no yard." She found freedom in the citrus grove: she'd climb a tree, pluck a piece of fruit, and eat it on the spot, legs dangling from a branch. Years later, her mother ran her own orange grove just eight miles away.
In 1928, about the time "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue" was a popular song, Rebecca went off to college. First she attended St. Genevieve of the Pines in Asheville, N.C., a college run by French nuns. Then she transferred to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she majored in economics.
By her final year of college, the country was deep in the Depression, and she had to leave before graduation because her family could no longer afford it. Also, that year her beloved grandfather died.
He made a huge impression on her life. He'd built the first brick road in Clearwater; previously all the roads had been sand. Grandfather didn't talk about it, but his actions showed a determination to carry on after calamities or setbacks.
Rebecca remembers one calamity well. An autumn hurricane demolished her grandfather's fruit-packing house, which had stood near a railroad line, and left it a sorry pile of lumber on the other side of the tracks. From then on, he had other companies pack his fruit.
Because it was the Depression, Rebecca was unable to find employment at home in Florida. Eventually, in the mid-'30s, an uncle found her a job in New York City at a store called Florida Products.
A customer fancied their praline candies and kept coming back for more; that was his excuse, anyway. His name was Franklin Woodbury Shaw. He was 18 years older than Rebecca. In 1939, the two were married.
"Frank was a radio pioneer," Rebecca says proudly. "He worked for RCA Communications for 45 years." He started off as a radio operator, then was promoted to office manager, then a traveling troubleshooter. "He was handicapped. He had a badly crossed eye that surgery failed to correct." But he was exceptionally dextrous despite his poor eyesight.
World War II was just over the horizon, and among its side-effects was that many jobs previously done only by men were opened to women. Rebecca got one at NBC as a receptionist and production assistant.
Following the war, in 1947, the couple welcomed their only child. "The day Becky was born was the best day of my life," Rebecca says, "especially because I had been told I couldn't have children."
By 1958 the family was living in Rumson, N.J. Frank fell ill with arterial sclerosis and was hospitalized. He died within the week. Rebecca still misses him terribly, calling him "my Frank." She never remarried.
After her husband's death, Rebecca had to support herself and her young daughter. Over the years, she had "puttered" in different fields. Besides her job at NBC, she had been a secretary as well. "I had one job where I had to make 15 carbon copies of everything I typed," she recalls. "I had a manual typewriter, of course - this was in the days before electric ones - so I had to strike the keys hard to make the 15th copy legible." That was a job she wasn't about to take up again.
The country's schools needed teachers, including her daughter's school in Rumson. Rebecca substituted there and found she liked it. The principal arranged for her to attend nearby Rutgers University to get a teaching degree. But her studies were interrupted by a severe allergy to ragweed.
A doctor told her that a high altitude might alleviate her condition, so she and Becky moved to Boulder, Colo. There Rebecca attended the University of Colorado and earned degrees in both education and speech. She studied speech not only to integrate it into her teaching but to eliminate her Southern accent. She was 55 years old.
Shortly after graduation, Rebecca visited friends in Bellevue. She liked the area, so decided to move here.
She saw an ad in the paper for a large house with a view on Queen Anne. She bought it in 1966, turning it into a triplex and living in one unit herself. Rebecca taught fourth grade at Ivanhoe Elementary School in Bellevue for 12 years until she retired.
In 1969 the brick house next door became available. Rebecca bought it and moved in. She continued to own and run the triplex until 1984, but still lives in the same brick house with one of her two grandchildren (now in their 30s), her grandson Paul. Either Paul or Becky takes her out to lunch almost every day. She also gets Meals on Wheels.
Bills and other papers are strewn atop her heavy, antique diningroom table, but she is in the process of turning one bedroom into a study, hoping to be neater and more organized. Her bed is canopied, its mattress high; she has to climb three steps to get into it. She leaves it unmade most of the time, preferring to let it "air out."
Her tiny kitchen is lined with bottles of tap water, which she lets sit to allow the toxins to settle. It's a good thing her kitchen is tiny - she doesn't have far to walk back and forth as she mixes her occasional martini. In the summer she might mix herself a mint julep instead, hearkening back to her Southern roots.
Rebecca's lifelong hobby has been gardening, as evidenced by her yard full of blooming flowers in spring and plum trees. She keeps her grass mowed and green. There's an arched opening in her photinia shrub so she can get to the faucet for her hose.
Her other hobby is reading, especially biographies, especially exhaustive ones. Currently she is reading "Khrushchev" by William Taubman, a tome so heavy she has dropped it, denting the cover. She likes learning about "the other side" - Russian politics.
She thinks Bush was right going into Iraq, to eradicate Saddam Hussein. Reflecting on all the wars fought in her lifetime, she muses, "The outcome of leading the country into war is a hard thing to know."
Spiritually, Rebecca is a "back-sliding" Episcopalian. "There is an ignorance in religion," she says, "but people don't recognize it." The example she cites has to do not with theology but with a prac-ticality. "From the time I was young, I knew I should exercise, because of my health. But my family's religion prohibited it. They said it wasn't ladylike," she scoffs.
When she was in third grade (she measures her youth in grades, not ages), a doctor told her she didn't have long to live because her blood wouldn't coagulate. But that condition was cured, and she has proved him wrong (having low blood pressure all her life may have helped). She's gratified by that, and proud to be living as long as Winston Churchill, someone she greatly admires.
Rebecca hypothesizes another factor contributing to her longevity: because her health was bad in youth, she learned early to take good care of herself, not to go to extremes, to do everything in moderation. "I had friends who did more exciting things," she says. "But they are dead.
"That's the best thing about being old: I can look back and see the irony in so many things."
She regrets that she hasn't traveled as much as she would have liked. "If I had been a man," she says, "I would have wanted to be an explorer." What prevented her from traveling as a woman? "Money. If I had been a man, I would have had more money."
Rebecca is thrilled with the feminist advances she's seen in her lifetime. She also marvels at the medical advances of the past century - as well as elevators and escalators, which she finds "incredible."
She thinks people are much more tolerant now than when she was young. "They gauge others by their character, talents and accomplishments," she says, "not by their station at birth."
How does she think about the future? Her answer is not personal. She says simply, "The future will follow the past."
Freelance writer Teru Lundsten lives four doors away from Rebecca Shaw on Queen Anne.
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