Helen B. Knapp

is honored with a Brick from Robert and Barbara Knapp.

Some of you visitors to the Plaza of Heroines will see the brick inscribed "Helen B. Knapp" and remember her as the trim, stylish, and pretty woman who worked in the Transcript Office at W.S.U. from 1968 until her retirement in 1980. As the oldest of her four children, I would like to tell you more of her story.

Born Helen B. Watson in Ohio in 1914, she lost her mother at age eight, and with her three older siblings, was frequently relocated around the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions during her school years. She married Ralph Knapp in 1931, and, over the next two decades, bore a son and three daughters. As a mother, she practiced a more practical and warmer version of what we now call "tough love": She taught us kitchen, household, and laundry chores. Once we outgrew our childish resentments, we came to appreciate this gift of self-sufficiency. She was (and still is) a superb cook and pastry baker whose after-school snacks and Christmas pastries are especially etched in my memory. Add sewing skills to this list of talents, and a flair for interior decorating which anticipated national trends by at least two years.

Helen was widowed in 1960, at an age too young to be a widow, and with a second grader still in the home. Showing the strength of character and toughness which would see her through a string of serious illnesses in later years, she was mobilized by this tragedy. She brushed off long dormant clerical skills and, in 1962, moved to Kansas. For six years she worked in a physician's office, joining the Registrar's staff in 1968. Those of her grandchildren who grew up here remember fondly the Sunday rides, picnics at Cheney Lake, and family holiday gatherings with "Granny Helen" during the 1960s and 1970s. Five years after retiring from W. .U., Helen moved to Southern California to be near her daughters, staying there for eight years. In 1993, she joined daughter Jackie (the only W.S.U. grad among her children) in Georgia, where they share a house in the town of Powder Springs.

Helen has 11 grandchildren (three of them W.S.U. grads), and eight great-grandchildren. She is an avid reader and Atlanta Braves fan. Although she has curtailed some of her activities, she has retained her quick, agile, and insightful wit. Her children love her, and appreciate all the more as they enter senior citizenship, her lifetime of gifts to them.

Submitted by Robert K. Knapp, Ph.D

July 22, 1998