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Gladys Esther McKee Rigsby
Gladys Esther McKee Rigsby died Monday, May 12, 2014, in Washington, D.C., after
suffering from congestive heart failure. She was 94. Like thousands of her
generation, she had come to the D.C. area for a job and to be part of the
federal government during President Franklin Roosevelt's administration.
Born January 6, 1920, on the family farm outside of Kittanning. She was the
youngest of eight children in her family at the McKee Farm, Worthington, Pa., to
Raymond Lee and Margaret Florina (Henry) McKee. Her father, Raymond Lee McKee,
was a farmer, and her mother, Margaret Henry McKee, was a homemaker.
Her husband of 65 years, William James Rigsby, her parents and siblings all
predeceased Gladys. When Gladys was born in 1920, the farm had already been in
the family for a few decades and by the 1990s, the family and surrounding
community celebrated the farm's 100th birthday.
Now called the Century Farm, the farm is managed by one of her nephews. Their
working farm, with its large garden, had wheat fields and cornfields as well as
hay for feeding the livestock. They milked cows and sold the milk and also sold
an occasional horse. Every winter, western Pennsylvania received a great deal of
snow for several months, and Gladys loved sledding on many of the surrounding
hills with her siblings and the children from other farms. Until the sixth
grade, Gladys attended a rural school in West Franklin Township and then
transferred to a larger school, Worthington-West Franklin High School, in a
small town called Worthington.
Her high school was about one and a half miles from her home on the farm, and as
the saying goes, she and her siblings really did walk to school in the snow
every morning, sometimes crossing fields rather than using the roadway.
Sometimes she and her siblings took a school bus that was drawn by two horses.
In high school, Gladys played on the basketball team and acted in various school
plays. She graduated from Worthington-West Franklin High School in 1937 at age
17, and went to Pittsburgh, where one of her sisters lived, and attended Grace
Martin's Secretarial School, graduating in 1938.
Despite the Great Depression, she got a job working in an office at a mill in a
suburb of Pittsburgh. Because of the Depression, the federal government was in a
hiring frenzy, and Gladys explained that the federal government was pushed to
hire from all of the states. As she recalled, "They would be called OPM today,
and they set up Civil Service Examinations all over the country." While in
Pittsburgh, Gladys passed the Civil Service Exam, and very soon, she took a
train to Washington, D.C., to join the federal government. Another sister lived
in D.C., and they lived together.
It was 1940. It was still the Great Depression and the U.S. was about to enter
World War II. Like Gladys, an untold number of people flocked to D.C. to join
the growing workforce in the federal government and to be part of President
Roosevelt's recovery programs. During World War II, she volunteered at the USO.
In 1940, Gladys became a typist in the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which
became part of the Department of Commerce. Also in 1940, while working at
Commerce, Gladys met her future husband, William J. Rigsby.
William J. Rigsby and Gladys were married Oct. 14, 1941 (by Dr. Peter Marshall),
at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where she remained a member for the
rest of her life. Bill, as her husband was known, worked for the federal
government his entire career in personnel. They had a son, Mark Rigsby, and then
a daughter, Martha Rigsby. The Rigsby family lived nearly all their married
lives in a house in D.C. they bought in the late 1940s. Mr. Rigsby died in 2006,
and Mrs. Rigsby moved to Ingleside, a retirement community, in 2009.
Though Gladys started out as a typist at Commerce, she was soon promoted to
being a secretary and worked in the Office of the Under-Secretary of Commerce
and then as a secretary at the General Accounting Office (GAO) and retired from
GAO in 1981 at age 61. In the mid 1970s, Gladys joined the Daughters of the
American Revolution and for many years was active in its Mary Washington
Chapter.
After retirement, Gladys worked for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation,
located near the White House. Her boss at GAO had become the head of the
foundation, and he needed secretarial help. She worked there part-time for four
or five years. She served as a Deaconess at the New York Avenue Presbyterian
Church from 1981 to 1987.
In 2010, looking back at her childhood, she remembered many good times and some
of the hardships of the 1930s and said, "Being on a farm, we could eat pretty
freely. But with clothes, it was harder. We purchased fewer shoes or dresses
[during the Great Depression]. Our mother made a lot of our clothing. And a lot
of them were mail order from Sears Roebuck. And when the rural mail carrier
came, we ran down the way to get our packages. The mailbox was not right in
front of our house. It was in front of our grandparent's house, which was down
in the valley below us, and our house was up on a hill. And we would run down
there." She cherished seeing her grandparents all the time and recalled, "Having
grandparents nearby is something that a lot of children miss today. And our
grandparents had all the time in the world to listen to you talk or to talk to
you. Looking back on it, it was really enjoyable."
Gladys Rigsby is survived by her son, Mark McKee Rigsby; and her daughter,
Martha Rigsby; as well as by numerous nephews, nieces, grandnephews, grandnieces
and cousins.
She was preceded in death by her parents; two brothers, Wilbur H. and Thomas C.
McKee; five sisters, M. Gertrude Goodbread, Mildred McKee, Marguerite J. Schick
Trindal, Dorothy E. Brownlee and Beatrice Rose McKee Scott.
A memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m. Sunday, June 22, 2014, at the New
York Avenue Presbyterian Church, 1313 New York Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C.
20005.
At a later time to be arranged, Mrs. Rigsby will be buried next to her husband,
at Rock Springs Baptist Church Cemetery, outside of Tallassee, Ala., where her
husband grew up.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the New York Avenue Presbyterian
Church, or to the charity of your choice. |
