Cindy Ulshafer

Special to the Statesman Journal

She sweeps her street corner. And she swept me in with her story.

A reader named Becky Best had shared the tip of a woman who sweeps a certain street corner in south Salem. "I really have no idea how often she's out there," Becky wrote, "Or where she lives. Or who she is…"

With not much more than an intersection to guide me, I talked to several residents. They all knew immediately of whom I was asking, and one pointed me to her door. There I met a slender octogenarian named Dora Ella (Dee Dee) Reynolds. In her expansive vocabulary, she began to tell me why she sweeps and how she came to Oregon. She started with, "My mother used to sweep."

Dee Dee grew up in La Jolla, Calif., the daughter of a brilliant professor and author, Dr. George F. McEwen. He was in Stanford's first graduating class of three, and he researched at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Meteorology, which later became part of University of California-Berkeley. There he developed the formula of diffusion for the atomic bomb. "I missed half of third grade," Dee Dee said, when her father moved her family east to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. She witnessed the split of an atom, remembering it as "a streak of light in a dark room." As a child in California, she got to watch solar and lunar eclipses. Looking up at the clouds she said, "How fortunate I was."

I asked Dee Dee if I might photograph her sweeping, so she reached for her broom in the garage. "The street sweeper can't do curves very well so that's what got me started," she explained, bristles touching the concrete. "I've met more friendly neighbors, sweeping."

Raised during World War II, Dee Dee helped her mother, a farmer at heart, grow victory gardens on the campus and raise chickens and rabbits "like our neighbors did." She got to help scan the coastline for enemy ships in the La Jolla Cove "with huge bright carbon lights." Their home was "protected by guard dogs and machine gun nests." She learned to swim in the ocean; she saw her first swimming pool at age 16. She dove with one of Jacques Cousteau's divers, Connie Limbaugh, as he collected specimens for a new aquarium. Through the goggles he lent her, for the first time her vision in the salt water wasn't blurry "and I thought, oh my gosh, I could see the floor of the ocean and all the bright colors." It remains one of her favorite memories.

Dee Dee's broom had amassed a small pile of flower petals and yard debris on the street, and she exchanged waves with every neighbor who drove by. She said she's had up to 10 neighbor children helping her, and she gives each one a tool and a little job.

Dee Dee graduated from Stanford University, where "you work hard and play hard." She took a job as a secretary for the timber industry in California and worked her way up, first as a scaler, "measuring logs for merchantable timber," and later in sales administration, "the first woman telling loggers what to do." It was an entirely different environment from the "proper social etiquette" in which she'd grown up, yet the loggers treated her respectfully. During those years, she was also a firefighter and a fire tower observer. For awhile, she worked for the timber industry in Minnesota where her neighbors still had outhouses and used hand pumps to draw water. Using her archery skills, she bagged two deer in one day with her bow and arrow.

With the glow of any proud parent, Dee Dee told me of her son, "inventive and resourceful," and of her brilliant daughter who went to Harvard for landscape architecture; after Hurricane Sandy, she helped redesign the periphery of New York City. "Can you imagine?" she said.

Her hand measured the height of her daughter as a small child; her eyes reflected the wonder in her voice for whom the child had become.

California's "fields were always yellow and dry," and western Oregon's year-round green appealed to Dee Dee and her husband, John, so they moved north.

She attributes her good health to eating "real food" and staying active, which includes sweeping her street.

Only now her neighbors know she's much more than simply the woman who sweeps the street corner.

Cindy Ulshafer is a freelance writer covering events in South Salem. Contact her at c_ulshafer@yahoo.com to be considered for coverage.