A dozen people, give or take, loom in my mind as people I really had the privilege to write about, and I include Agueda Jimenez in that group. Along with other small business owners, most of them Spanish-speaking merchants, Agueda anchored Union Street in the 1990s at a time when big formerly-prosperous retail stores stood empty and downtown’s theaters and bright lights were long gone.
I will never forget her telling me how she grew up in a family of undertakers but was excluded as a woman from becoming involved in the family business.
Agueda didn’t mope or give up her dreams. Like so many other people, she planted the seeds of hope and ambition in Lynn’s fertile soil and launched a Union Street business that included Jimenez Market, as well side businesses.
Always with a smile on her face and an outstretched hand, she seemed to have unlimited energy. She could hold a conversation with two people while ringing up a purchase on the market’s cash register and shouting over her shoulder at one of her relatives.
Agueda brought strength and determination to bear in her quest to make a dream come true and, in the process, helped stabilize Lynn’s downtown.
It’s interesting to dig into old Daily Evening Item archives in search of other women who shouldered similar roles. The Item actually had a “women’s editor” in 1964 — Hazel A. Anderson — who presided over a reader’s survey nominating local women for the newspaper’s Women of the Year awards.
The awards night recognized local women in different categories, including business, volunteer, gardening and education as well as religious denominations and sports.
Flash forward to 2003 and the 3rd annual North of Boston Business and Professional Women of the Year Expo and Awards luncheon where keynote speaker Mary Puma described her experiences starting a management job with General Electric in 1991.
“I was the first employee to balance pregnancy and a general manager level job. I later found out that (former GE CEO) Jack Welch had asked a corporate doctor to follow me around,” Puma said.
Welch later sent Puma a note congratulating her and describing her decision to accept her job as “‘a gutsy move.'”
Gutsy is a good word to describe my late grandmother, Sally, who hid a compassionate heart behind a hard-shell exterior. During the Depression, my father’s parents hit the road and drove from one town to another painting water towers. When they stopped for gas, my grandmother got on the pay phone and hustled up a painting job in the next town. Once they arrived at a job site, my grandfather rounded up a crew to paint the tower while my grandmother sat in the car reckoning the accounts and writing up the bill for the job.
I was moping around feeling sorry for myself during the summer I broke my right hip and Grandma Sally got in my face and told me, “I know you feel bad but straighten up and look around at everything that is good.”
I think Agueda Jimenez adopted that same attitude in the face of challenges and setbacks, and I’m sure the Russian combat engineer I interviewed took a similar outlook on life.
During the Russian offensive through Poland and into Germany, with Hitler’s depleted armies fighting for every inch of ground, the engineer and her comrades crawled along river banks and set explosives to clear away obstacles impeding the Russian advance. She told me her commanders repeatedly berated her for not wearing a helmet. But she said the few minutes she spent styling her hair was the sole luxury she enjoyed on the front line: She didn’t want to spoil it by wearing a helmet.
Her spirit probably mirrored the motivation Greater Lynn Business Woman of 1962 Eleanor L. Crocker drew on to launch an office and design business in her Hamilton Avenue home. Struck by polio when she was 3 years old, Crocker overcame disability limitations to graduate from English High School in 1932 and from Burdett College two years later.
“I graduated during the worst of the Depression when there were 100 applicants for every position … I bought my own second-hand mimeograph and typewriter and from that beginning (I) have increased gradually to my present business,” she told The Item.
Jump ahead to 1971 when Joyce Maffei was honored as Marblehead’s first selectwoman and for helping to found the Marblehead Community Counseling Center. Maffei was also a former president of the Marblehead League of Women Voters in a year when politics hit a high-water mark in America.
Look for the upcoming all-women issue of National Geographic.
