A single mother during a much different time

She doesn’t do it often, but when Alice Rhoads looks back at the twists and turns her life has taken in 84 years, she is pragmatic:

You do what you have to do.

After graduating from Bellingham High School, and attending Western Washington College of Education for one year, Rhoads married at age 20.

Two baby boys came along fast. The marriage wasn’t a good one, and ended shortly before the birth of her third son.

That wasn’t the way she had planned her life to go. She had expected to be just another housewife, busy with children and married to a good provider.

Faced with having to support her family, Rhoads went to work while her mother cared for the boys.

Her first job, as for so many women during World War II, was at the Boeing plant in Bellingham. Working the night shift, Rhoads made good money – $1.50 an hour – and things were stable.

But that all changed dramatically the day the war ended.

“I watched the sailors come out of the tavern celebrating,” Rhoads said. “And then we were told that our jobs were over.”

The men were coming home.

Rhoads found another job, this one at a children’s clothing factory, but for only half the pay.

“All I could get was 75 cents an hour,” she said. “That was hard times.”

As a single mother at a time when anything other than the two-parent family was an anomaly, Rhoads worked long hours, often for low pay. She learned to make do. She bartered both skills and time with friends and family.

When a niece needed a job and a place to live, Rhoads took her in: “She took care of the boys for me, and I paid her what I could.”

Rhoads found a little house across the street from the elementary school and approached the owner.

“I told her my circumstance, and she let me have it for $25 a month,” she said. “We stayed there for years.”

Determined that she wouldn’t go on public assistance – “I’d seen the way the children in other families who got assistance were treated” – Rhoads got help from her family.

“My folks in Bellingham had a cow, a garden, chickens and eggs,” she said. “But there was no support outside of family.”

She worried that her boys were missing the benefit of a male role model, so Rhoads worked out a deal with a friend of the family.

“My father told me to get the boys interested in fishing and that would keep them out of trouble, out of the taverns,” she said. “I tried to take them, but it was hard. I had the baby and needed to be home doing things.”

She found a friend to help her.

“A man who had been a friend of my husband’s, who had two daughters, took my boys fishing.” she said. “He said he liked having someone to talk to.”

Rhodes provided her own service to the man’s family.

“I could sew, so I made dresses for his little girls, “she said.

In search of a better life, Rhoads took a job at a pulp mill. For the first time, money wasn’t a problem.

She worked the swing shift, making $2.80 an hour grinding cardboard into a fine, powdery dust called “flock.” The flock poured down long chutes and into large paper bags that were then sewn shut.

For a while, life was a little easier.

The family moved to Eugene, Ore., and Rhoads took a job at the Elks Club. After 20 years of being alone, she met and married Warren Quade. The couple returned to Spokane, Quade’s hometown.

Quade liked old automobiles and started restoring a 1915 Model T. He joined a car club and made friends of other enthusiasts.

“My husband was always looking for parts for his car, so I got interested in other things,” Rhoads said. “I liked old, interesting things.”

When he brought home an antique baby’s high chair and an elaborate brass light fixture he had found in a barn, she was hooked. She started collecting, too.

After two years, when Rhoads’ youngest son was a senior in high school, Quade was offered a job in Atlanta, and the family moved.

“For the first time in my life I didn’t have to work,” Rhoads said. “I didn’t have responsibilities, and I didn’t have to worry about money.”

But the habits of a lifetime were hard to break. She was a worker, and her husband traveled with his job. So she looked around for something to do.

“I had a friend who worked for Reliance Electric, and she brought home some of the tools,” Rhoads said. “She showed me how to use them.”

The next day, Rhoads interviewed for a job as an electrician.

“When I picked up the tools and showed the man I knew how to use them, he said, ‘Can you start tomorrow?’ ” And she did.

For 17 years, Rhoads wired nuclear power plants across the Southeast.

“I loved it. I really did,” she said. “I didn’t have to work.

“I did it so I could travel and could buy what I wanted.”

What Rhoads wanted was furniture. She had fallen in love with the heavy, golden oak furniture that had been so popular when she was a child.

With a little disposable income, and her husband at her side, she scoured flea markets, antique shops and auctions across the South and rescued pieces. She refinished everything herself.

“See, my husband could fix anything,” she said. “I could bring home a table that was missing a leg, and he could repair it so well you would never know.”

Looking forward to one day returning to Spokane, the couple bought furniture, fixtures, architectural elements like old heart-pine doors and a tall fireplace mantel, and began to design a home to hold it all.

Quade built kitchen cabinets and created stained-glass windows for the rooms and the wide front door. His daughter in Spokane found the perfect lot off Indian Trail, and he and Rhoads looked forward to moving back to build their dream home after his retirement.

But Quade had heart disease and had a valve replaced. It weighed heavily on his mind.

“He used to say to me, ‘If anything happens to me, I want you to go ahead with the house,’ ” Rhoads said. “There is so much of me in it.”

In 1983, Quade died of a heart attack. Still grieving, Rhoads did as her husband had requested and built the house they had designed together.

In June 1984, the antiques and unique items the couple had collected, along with the cabinets Quade had built for the new house, were loaded into three trucks and moved to Spokane.

That September, lonely and looking for a way to get out of the house for a while, Rhoads went to the Spokane Interstate Fair. She ran into Stan Rhoads, one of her late husband’s antique car buddies. He invited her on a day trip with more of Quade’s friends, and she accepted.

The pair married the next year, and Stan Rhoads’ great-grandmother’s bedroom suite joined the other antiques in the house. They’ve spent the past 21 years in the house Rhoads planned with her late husband.

They’ve built a fine life together.

“We’ve traveled all over,” Stan Rhoads said. “We even took dance lessons.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by the cabinets built by her late husband, photos of their children and grandchildren and the beautiful antiques they discovered and restored, Alice Rhoads looked at Stan and smiled.

“When you’re just starting out in life, you think it will all be easy and wonderful,” she said. “But that isn’t always how it works.”

He nodded and shrugged his shoulders.

“But, you know, it all worked out. I raised three fine boys who are all good men,” she said. “If everything I had to go through before paid for what I’ve got now, it was worth it.”