Thelma Mae West, who celebrated her 100th birthday last month, just recently had to start wearing glasses to read, but she continues doing puzzles. She complains of mild numbness in one of her hands, but it hasn’t stopped her from regularly reconciling her bank statements. She uses a walker for balance, but she still likes to dance (as attendees at her recent birthday party could attest).
West is kind, a fact noted in her senior Crispus Attucks High School yearbook, which reads, “Thelma Mae Frances Youree — Very nice and friendly.”
But in West’s case, kind doesn’t mean soft; as she tells stories from years past, a spunky streak becomes apparent. She says she never imagined she’d live to be 100 — or that she’d outlive her two younger sisters and younger brother — so how did she do it?
“Doing what I want to do,” she said with a laugh. “Even when I go to the doctor I tell them, ‘Nuh-uh, I don’t want that medicine.’ They used to call me Dr. West.”
That spunk helped cement her place as a highly respected staff member at Attucks. After graduating in the school’s ninth graduating class (in January 1936), West returned as a staff member in the special education department, a role her sister Josephine, who worked in home economics, helped her land.
Throughout her decades-long career at Attucks, West held several positions. After her stint in special ed, she was made head of the bookstore. Then secretary to the department heads. Then secretary to the vice principal. At the time of her retirement, she was the school’s bookkeeper, even without any formal bookkeeping training.
“I was just appointed. For whatever reason, I don’t know.”
Students — “even some of the white kids” post-integration, she says — affectionately called her “Auntie,” and she managed to win the hearts of even those who might have seemed, to some, unreachable.
“Some of the meanest bad boys wouldn’t let no other one come in (the bookstore) and bother me,” West recalled with a smile. “‘That’s Mrs. West you’re talking to, boy.’ I didn’t have to stick up for myself at all.”
West said her presence in the hallways prompted students to immediately clean up their acts. That respect extended to adults in the school, too; West said she somehow became the principal’s informal enforcer.
“If some secretary or someone had done something wrong, he’d send them to me. I said, ‘For what?’” she said. “It seemed like everything I did, they looked up to me. I don’t know why.”
West says she bent the rules herself, secretly taking apart, fixing and reassembling broken office machines while her supervisors were out to lunch.
“They wouldn’t let me do it if they saw me. … There’s a lot of things I did that nobody knew about.”
Clandestine IT-operations aside, West said she’s got one goal that’s remained constant through her century-long life, and it’s a philosophy that’s served her well:
“Do what’s right. That’s all I know.”
Thelma Mae WestJEROME BREWSTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY
