Helen Gordon: The Woman Behind the Greensheet

by Rebecca Blakeley

Overview

In 1969, Helen Gordon moved to Houston with her new husband, Robert DeYoung. A no-nonsense, pragmatic mother of three with the heart of a musician and the soul of a painter, Helen was determined to be her own boss by owning and operating her own company.

It didn't take her long to find success. Helen started the Greensheet, a free advertising tabloid with classified ads and a list of business services, in 1970. Within eight years, she expanded it to five Texas cities without the help of bank loans. But she lived in a good ol' boy atmosphere, in which long lunches over dry martinis were the norm and women were generally absent from the boardroom.

Even so, Helen was undeterred. She was determined to build a company that would prosper, and prosper it did. By 2012, the Greensheet had grown to a circulation of 650,000 and appeared within four Texas cities. Today, her company is a household name and continues to be one of the most successful classified tabloids in the state.

Her irrepressible optimism, sense of humor, and vivacious personality served her well in her personal and professional life. As told by her daughter, Rebecca, Helen Gordon: The Woman Behind the Greensheet is Helen's inspiring true story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475987065
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/19/2013
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

Read an Excerpt

Helen Gordon: The Woman behind the Greensheet

A Daughter's Memoir of Helen Gordon, Founder of the Greensheet

---

By REBECCA BLAKELEY

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Rebecca Blakeley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-8706-5

---

CHAPTER 1

Nickels in a Jar

MY MOTHER, HELEN LOUISE GORDON, born December 19, 1928, spent her early childhood in the midst of the Great Depression. Her father had the foresight to move out to the country, where they could keep a garden, so her family was perhaps better off than many other families of that time. The garden kept most of the food on the table, as there were the vegetables and fruits my grandmother canned. Meat was a rarity they could only afford a few times a week. They used canned milk and had no condiments such as ketchup, mustard, or butter. My grandparents, William John and Rebecca Grace Gordon, both expected to work and were proud to do what they could. Grandfather worked as a master carpenter and my grandmother was a nurse.

Grandmother was named for her mother, Rebecca Jane; everyone called my grandmother Grace, as the name fit her so well. As a young woman, she defied cultural norms when she went to nursing school against her father's wishes. This was in 1918, shortly after the Spanish flu epidemic, which followed the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of people died from the Spanish flu, possibly because those people had lived through several years of a very restricted diet, due to the privations of the war. Too many people at that time had no resistance to the flu. The only things they knew to do against contagious illnesses was to quarantine infected people, in order to try prevent it from spreading, and drink wine or other alcohol four times a day. Alcohol was known to be a disinfectant, and the hope was that disease-causing agents would not be able to survive in a body that was well hydrated with the stuff.

Today some people prefer to drink milk that has not been pasteurized, as it contains proteins that are killed during the pasteurization process. People forget that milk fresh from the cow may also contain other elements and bacteria that can be harmful to us. In the early 1900s, most milk was not heat treated before it was sold, as few people thought it was necessary. My grandmother contracted a terrible infection, diphtheria, after drinking such milk. She was sick with this for weeks, and the illness left a scar on her face that forever embarrassed her, even after a surgeon had removed as much of it as he could when she was a young woman. Grace admired the doctor, who operated on her for what he was able to do, and she then decided she would like to study medicine, perhaps to become a doctor. She began by enrolling in nursing school. Her sister Mary, not to be outdone, decided she would go to nursing school as well. It would be a lot more fun than sitting at home, waiting for a suitor to sweep her off her feet. Besides, if the sisters went together, they could keep each other company and help each other over the tough places.

I can only imagine the arguments my great-grandfather Moses Fulton Douglass must have had with both his daughters for doing this scandalous thing. The girls could wind up being a disgrace to the entire family. My grandmother stood her ground, and her father finally relented and allowed them to go to nursing school.

In those days, nursing was not one of the most respectable professions for a woman to have. The work was dirty, and young women could be exposed to all sorts of crudities, not to mention illnesses. The world had not yet learned of antibiotics, so the known remedy was to quarantine to protect other people from the illnesses, which was often life threatening. Liquor was often used medicinally, as well as herbs and prayers, and sometimes those remedies worked. The administrators of those schools did everything they could to maintain propriety. The young women had to live at the school, dress modestly, keep a strict curfew, and avoid going out on dates.

Grace wanted still to be a doctor. Until the day she got married, she had entertained hopes of somehow getting into medical school. However, medical schools were expensive. The competition was tough and exacting, and it was even harder for a woman. If being a nurse was stepping beyond the limits imposed upon the women of my grandmother's generation, entering medical school and studying to be a doctor would have been too horrifying for most good people to tolerate. It was expected that any job would end the day a woman got married. From there she would stay at home, working to maintain a sense of cultural enlightenment within her family and taking care of her children. Higher education was essentially wasted on a woman, or so many people said. It was considered the wife's job to bring art and music into the home, to subdue her husband's more violent character traits, and to keep morals within the household supremely high. Working as a nurse, a woman would get to see a man's naked body, and she might have to do things to it that were most unseemly. Studying to be a doctor would be even worse, as she would be expected to dissect cadavers with young men and jockey for position with them in the classroom.

By the time my grandmother was in her teens, the First World War had started. People then did not call it that, because nobody at that time wanted to believe that there could be another war as horrific. It was known as the Kaiser's war, or the war in Europe. The men went off to fight, leaving the women at home to take care of business. This meant that scores of women had to leave their kitchens in order to go to work. They needed practical clothes to do practical things, so skirts came up off the floor, and corsets, for the most part, disappeared. My grandmother and her sister Mary were part of a generation of strong women who entered the twentieth century with their eyes wide open and their hands ready to do whatever had to be done.

In 1923, Grace graduated from the Shadyside Hospital School of Nursing and began working there as a nurse. She never did go beyond nursing school; she was proud to work as a nurse, proud of the sense of independence this gave her before she was married, and very pleased with the respect she received from her colleagues. By the time she was twenty-five, she had saved enough money to buy herself a home. The home at that time was valued at $10,500, located in Brookline, Pennsylvania. This display of independence ultimately earned her father's respect. However, until she had established herself as a nurse and proven that she could take care of herself, Grace Douglass and her father were very much at odds.

Her sister Mary, while exceptionally intelligent, did not do as well in nursing school. She had to leave after a few months of study. She went back to her father's home and stayed there to take care of him until the day he died. She did find work in a drug store, but she was never truly able to support herself.

My grandmother was a petite woman, standing about five feet one. When I try to describe my grandmother, the words that come to mind are kind, forgiving, and soft spoken. The nurses she worked with called her Gentle Cousin. Grace was a devout Christian who believed everything in the Bible. However, unlike some fundamentalist Christians, she was not small minded. She understood that everyone sees the world based on their own experiences and that people from different places and cultures may have vastly different expectations concerning what the world holds for them.

The man who would be her husband, Bill Gordon, had been working since he was thirteen years old at a carpentry mill. My family says that he had to stand on a bench in order to reach his assigned tasks. He was one of those young men who learned early in life the meaning of work and being self-sufficient. My grandfather's father was also a strict disciplinarian, and my grandfather left home early because of the turmoil.

In 1910, when my grandfather turned seventeen, he enlisted in the navy just in time for World War I. He served for eight years and seven months in the navy, earning the rank of chief petty officer before his discharge. He had lied about his age in order to be admitted. At the time he enlisted he was perhaps looking for adventure. He did manage to travel all over the world and sadly contracted malaria, a disease that never really leaves its victims. By 1914, he was in the midst of fighting the Great War.

When he did return home, in 1920, he had no desire to make the armed forces his career. He believed he had served his time and that he had risked his life for his country as much as any man should be expected to. He settled down to marry a young woman by the name of Margaret Fricke. Margaret gave birth to one child, who died within a year, and then, in 1922, she herself died while attempting to give birth to a second child. William Gordon deeply mourned his wife's death. Still, he must have been at least a little willing to consider the possibility of marrying again, for his sister, Great Aunt Betty, who worked as a nurse with Grace, told Grace, "I'd like you to meet my brother." Gentle and strong minded, Grace Douglass appealed to Bill Gordon, for on September 25, 1926, William J. Gordon married my grandmother. For the first couple of years they lived together in the house she had bought. However, the Depression was affecting everyone. Jobs were scarce, and people who had jobs did not know how long they would be able to keep them. After living in the country a few years, they decided to move to be closer to the hospitals so that Grandmother could find work, so they moved to 555 Orchard Avenue in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. There, my mother, Helen Gordon, was born on December 19, 1928. Two years later my uncle Dan was born, on September 30, 1930.

We cannot know how the death of his first wife, Margaret, affected his relationship with his second wife and their two children. Who knows whether he cherished his children more because he had lost two other children or because he was inclined to hold his emotions back and not be as free with his affections as he might have, for fear of being hurt again. As an adult, our mother did not easily show affection and did not tolerate emotional displays from her children. Had she learned this from her father? Margaret Fricke always held a special place in my grandfather's heart, and he frequently spoke of her as being perfect in ways that no one could surpass. I don't believe my grandmother was ever jealous or upset over the way he spoke of his first wife. If she was, she quickly learned to take his reminiscing with a grain of salt. "After all," she told me years later, "Margaret is dead and Bill is with me."

I still have a set of bone china that Margaret painted by hand. Very neatly and carefully, she painted a border of green leaves entwined with yellow and pink roses around each cup and plate and serving dish. There must have been at least sixty pieces in the set originally. My grandmother and my mother both cherished this china, before passing it on to me.

Bill Gordon really did love Grace. She was always a little bit overweight, but Bill used to say, "I like a woman with a little meat on her bones." My grandmother would blush and say, "Oh, Bill."

Their children, Helen and Dan, both felt protected by their parents. Years later, my mother told me that when she was growing up she felt that if her father had been elected president, he could have solved all the world's problems. At any rate, Bill said he knew everything, and when my mother was a child, she believed him. He was strict with his children. He established the rules, which my mother and her brother knew they must follow. Grandfather had come out of an era that had much less patience with children than we do now. His children were only to be seen, never to be heard. That was also a phrase that we were taught by when we were in the company of adults. Being respectful to their father meant keeping their conversations away from him, as well as being clean and dutiful at all times.

My mother modified his rules when I was growing up. She believed that children should be permitted, even encouraged, to speak their minds, but that they must do so with respect for their elders. I must have been about eight or nine years old when I asked her, "But how do you know when I'm not respectful?"

"Because I know you."

And later, when I was upset about something that had gone wrong, she said, "You can't get into any kind of trouble that I haven't already." If I had been a little older when she said this, I might have asked her what sort of trouble she had got into when she was growing up, as I would have treasured those stories. Mother wasn't the sort of person to volunteer that sort of information. She strongly believed that we need to live in the present and work for the future. The past is gone and done, and nothing can change it.

My grandmother was an intelligent and hard-working woman who was frugal in ways that most people would not even consider. For example, she used to patch her shoes when the soles wore through. This is something most of us would not know how to do. She taught my mother how to knit and sew, not because she thought they were nice things to do but because she thought them necessary. Money might not always be available, so one must know how to clothe one's family. Doing for yourself, making what you needed, and making do with what you had were ideals that became second nature to many people who lived through the Great Depression.

Even with all her frugal homemaker skills, my grandmother did not derive pleasure from cooking. As long as she put enough nourishing food in front of the family, she felt she could be done with it. Every morning before school, she would serve her children a platter of buckwheat pancakes. My mother hated them. Oatmeal? Scrambled eggs? Fruit in season? All these things would have been a welcome change. However, it was unfailingly buckwheat pancakes with syrup for breakfast.

Mother did make pancakes for us when I was growing up, but never buckwheat. After she left her parents' home, she decided she liked Cream of Wheat cereal. I hate to think of those bowls of hot Cream of Wheat I sat in front of, desultorily pushing the spoon through the lumps as the cereal slowly cooled. I used to add as much sugar as I could to the stuff just to make it taste like something. However, my older sister Kathy loved to eat it, encouraging our mother to keep on fixing it for our breakfast.

When my sister, brother, and I were little, we were expected to dress in clean, neat clothes before we sat down to eat our dinner. My mother also insisted that paper plates were not meant for indoor use, so even when we had friends over and we knew there would be a lot of dishes to wash, we did not use paper plates.

Ideas about the duties women should have and the roles they should play were changing, both at home and in the workplace. In 1918, women over the age of thirty were conceded the right to vote, because the men were fighting the Great War in Europe. By 1920, women from the age of eighteen and up could vote, just as men did. Grace saw how women had to fight for their rights and believed the right to value and control her own life was perhaps the best thing she could teach her daughter. Helen and her brother Dan grew up expecting that women could and should be independent and know how to carry responsibility just as well as men could.

As long as the school was within a mile to a mile and a half of where the children lived, they were expected to walk to and from school every day. Most of these children walked home for lunch in the middle of the day and then walked back to school for the afternoon session. For some children it meant hiking to and from school at least four miles every day.

In the afternoon, my mother and my uncle Dan would walk home for lunch. Often, Dan would stop at the store on the way home to pick up some cold cuts so they could have sandwiches for their lunch. Grace worked at the hospital at night and slept when her children were at school, but she was always up in the middle of the day when her children came home for lunch, with stories about what had been going on at the hospital where she worked. Her stories were nearly always touching and often funny, and they may have been more important to her children than the sandwiches she served them for their noon meal.
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Helen Gordon: The Woman behind the Greensheet by REBECCA BLAKELEY. Copyright © 2013 Rebecca Blakeley. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................     xi     

Nickels in a Jar....................     1     

Move to the Country....................     17     

Retreads or Hearing....................     31     

Breaking the Glass Ceiling....................     45     

Road Trip....................     59     

Read a Greensheet to Buy....................     67     

Money Brings Freedom....................     79     

Stirring the Pot....................     119     

Mr. Green....................     133     

Retiring Is Like Losing Your Watch....................     147     

Epilogue....................     159