Remembering Helen Roberts Thomas
by Pat Saunders, August 8, 2022.
Helen Thomas was one of the few people I already knew when I moved to the Lorelton Retirement and Assisted Living Community seven years ago. She, too, was a member of SsAM, and although I didn’t know her well, at 94, she was a sweet, charming and absolutely “sharp as a tack” force.
Through her efforts, we had a weekly class in Tai chi here, and she encouraged me to join and even gave me private lessons. She felt that Tai chi would help my cerebral palsy. Her enthusiasm gave me the willingness to try, but after some effort, I told Helen that Tai chi was not for me. I was one of Helen’s few failures, but if she held it against me, she never let it show.
Helen lived at the Lorelton for over 29 years. Before dying last Sunday, July 31, 2022 at the age of 101, she was our longest living resident here. Now there are only three residents who have lived here longer than I. She moved in with her husband, John, in 1993. John died in 2002, and Helen lived here another 20 years without him.
Helen was born in China to Episcopalian missionaries.
She lived there until the age of 17, when she traveled alone to the United States to finish high school and get a college degree. When she finished college, she returned to China and worked for the Red Cross during World War II. After, the war she returned to the United States and taught and worked for a Boston newspaper.
Marrying a duPont chemist, she moved to Delaware, where she worked tirelessly for women’s rights, co-founding the first chapter in Delaware of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1970. She returned to teaching at the Delaware Technical School. She was an accomplished artist and some of her works hang in the hallways of the Lorelton.
Helen wrote her memoirs — “In the Valley of the Yangtze” — at age 90, with her daughter, Katherine. You can find it for sale on Google if you are so inclined.
The pandemic was unkind to Helen and during the lockdown she lived with the fear of dying without seeing her children, another kind of COVID victim. May she Rest In Peace.
I will miss her quiet humor.
