Lebanon
It was 1973, and Granite State Electric Co. preferred that Wallace, New Hampshire’s first female meter reader, travel the 50 miles to the job site via car pool.
Wallace prevailed, eventually.
“She was who she was; she didn’t take no for an answer,” said Amy Cheevers, Wallace’s longtime neighbor in Lebanon.
When she took the job, Wallace relearned how to drive a manual transmission truck, requested that Granite State Electric tailor the men’s uniform they issued her, and became the first woman in the company’s union.
She accepted it all as a grand challenge.
“She was proud that was she was chosen (for the job) and I think she had to prove herself. You know, that ‘I can do this,’ ” her daughter Sue DeHavens, a resident of Arizona, said.
Wallace, a longtime Lebanon resident, passed away on July 7. She was 90.
Family and friends described Wallace as a woman who took life as it came, and all the while retained a deep sense of individuality and loyalty to those close to her.
She was a family woman who also took great pride in her career; a Lebanon resident of seven decades, who nonetheless managed to hold tight to her Southern roots.
Helen Marie Wallace was born in 1925, the middle of three children.
She grew up on a small farm in Mena, Ark., a rural community near the Oklahoma state line. Wallace and her two brothers helped tend the cows, chickens and gardens on their family farm.
They walked to school each day. Years later, Wallace would tell her children about the commute on foot as a reminder that life wasn’t as hard as they made it out to be.
She married at 19, soon after graduating from high school.
Wallace met her future husband on a blind date at a county fair, though the facts of the meeting are fuzzy; it’s a story that seems to shift, depending on its teller. She had gone to visit her brother at an Army Air Force base in Texas, where he served during World War II. He introduced her to his friend Richard Wallace at a San Antonio fair.
After a brief courtship, the two married in October 1944.
The Wallaces lived on various U.S. military bases — Richard Wallace was never deployed — until World War II concluded.
The couple relocated to Lebanon, Richard Wallace’s hometown, soon after.
For a young woman from Arkansas, the move was a challenge.
She was newly married with a child on the way, unfamiliar with New England culture, far from family, and unaccustomed to the harsh winter.
“Back then, people said, ‘Oh my gosh, where did she come from?’ ” Deena Lewis, who now lives in Maryland, said, of her mother’s unfamiliar customs and speech.
Helen Wallace retained a tinge of a Southern accent for the rest of her life, according to those who knew her.
Even decades later, she always extended to others the Southern hospitality that she had seen offered while growing up and continued to insist on wearing gloves to church.
By the time she was 23, she had three children — Dottie, Debbie and Deena.
Early on, Richard Wallace took a job in Windsor Locks, Conn., and left his wife at home with three young girls and no car. She made do, taking a taxi home from the grocery store, and getting babysitting help from her in-laws.
“She was a very strong, independent person,” Lewis said. “She handled finances in the house. She took care of everything; she was always there for us.”
Later, Wallace took jobs around town, working first as a switchboard operator at the Hanover Inn and later keeping the books for the First National Bank in Lebanon. She helped out on occasion with the finances of her husband’s flooring store in Lebanon.
She had her fourth and fifth children, Sue and Rich, in her 30s.
Meanwhile, she built a home centered around family.
The Wallaces bought the family home on Bank Street in Lebanon, formerly owned by Richard Wallace’s great-grandmother.
She welcomed neighborhood kids into their house and held regular family barbecues. She enjoyed holidays, especially Thanksgiving, when she could offer hospitality and an overflowing table of food to a full house of guests.
When the oldest girls moved to Washington, D.C., the family would drive down once a month, to do repairs in the apartment and help out.
When her son Rich, now the advertising director of the Valley News, was in college and brought home friends without warning, his father would step over the sleeping bodies and grumble. Helen Wallace would make them all breakfast.
Up until the end of her life, she called her siblings and family down South nearly every week.
“Mom was pretty much always taking care of her family,” Lewis said.
Wallace took the job with Granite Electric in 1973. She had landed an office job with the company, but the position was about to be cut. When the meter reader job opened up, she applied.
“I think she was bored of the office and wanted to do it if she could do something different,” her daughter Sue DeHavens said.
Wallace got the job and uncomplainingly went door to door, braving snow drifts and dogs and dank basements to check on customers’ electric meters.
By all accounts, Wallace was proud of the distinction she earned as the first woman in the position. But she did not romanticize her role.
“I feel that there are so many things a woman can do,” Wallace was quoted as saying in an undated article on her position. “But to be a mother you have to be a woman first, and I think women should take their place in life.”
She enjoyed the job, the exercise it provided — she walked between houses — and the time outside.
The work never diminished her focus on her family; she regularly attended her grandchildren’s sports games and religiously maintained contact with her brothers and children.
“She was able to do what all women are looking for — that balance,” said neighbor Amy Cheevers, of Wallace’s ability to maintain an equilibrium between her family and work.
Wallace retired in 1987. She walked two miles every day, rain or shine, and took up watching NASCAR. When Richard Wallace’s health deteriorated, she cared for him until he passed away on July 7, 2004 — 12 years to the day before Helen Wallace died.
She maintained her friendships. She would call the Cheeverses almost every day, noticing the attic light was on, or asking whether the family was OK.
“She kept an eye on us; she was a great neighbor,” Amy Cheevers said with a laugh.
Especially after her husband died, Wallace was a devoted attendee of the First Congregational Church in Lebanon.
The Rev. Steve Silver remembered Wallace’s bright smile. “There was something about the way she carried herself,” he said. She was “a Southern lady … in all the best ways you can imagine.”
As she aged and became immobile, she felt guilty she couldn’t attend church every Sunday.
“Part of that was because of her deep faith,” Silver said. “And some of that was a result of her independence.
“She was a very strong woman,” he added.
Katie Jickling can be reached at katiejickling@gmail.com.