Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll meet a 102-year-old woman who was a welder in World War II — and was fired when she complained that women were paid less than men. We’ll also get details on traffic as world leaders arrive for the United Nations General Assembly.
Michelle Cohen, above in yellow, loved a job she was fired from long ago, as a welder.
She says she was good at it. She talks about how steady her hands were and how easily — how artfully — she could fuse pieces of metal together for gun mounts. So why was she fired? She says it was because she led a rebellion in her corner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The issue was equal pay for women.
That was during World War II. She was let go some 80 years ago. She had two more careers after that. She is 102 now.
Who did what was different then, and the world collectively remembered women who were hired at wartime defense plants and had catchy names like “Rosie the Riveter.” Cohen came up with her own rhyming nickname: Zelda the Welder.
Sept. 22 is National Centenarian’s Day, a tribute to people who have reached the three-digit milestone. There are roughly 5,800 in New York, according to a state-by-state breakdown from 2019. Cohen is being celebrated by Welder Underground, which runs an apprentice program in Brooklyn for would-be welders and fabricators. One of Welder Underground’s co-executive directors discovered Cohen a couple of years ago in an online video that showed her working out in a gym, doing bench presses and other exercises with a trainer.
The boss says, ‘It’s time to go’
Cohen said that she had taken shop courses in high school — “not dainty things” — and loved everything at the Navy Yard except the pay scale. She and the other women took home a bit more than half what the men were paid. With the women’s backing, she went to the boss to complain.
“He told me to leave — he said, It’s time to go,” she said, “and then I was shipped to a different navy yard, in Jersey. Two weeks went by, and they fired me altogether.”
She trained as a nurse and later taught elementary school, and said that she had handled welding equipment only a couple of times since she lost her job. One time was not long after the war, when she was walking down the street on the Lower East Side, where she lived.
“I see two gas lines leading down into the cellar. I followed the lines and I tapped the guy on the shoulder and I said, ‘Let me weld something.’” And he did.
The other times were last year and this year at Welder Underground. It usually partners with artists to teach welding by making large-scale pieces of art, like an 18-foot statue of Rappin’ Max Robot, which was installed outside the Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx last year.
“People say it’s like riding a bike, you never forget how,” said Marc Levin, a co-executive director of Welder Underground. “With welding, it’s not like that at all. Most people who don’t do it for just a couple of years are rusty. Their welds are terrible. She’s welding again for the first time, and her welds are really good.”
She answers the question that everybody asks
What does she say when people ask what it’s like to be 102?
“I say, damn it, why did I have to get a hernia at this stage in my life?” she said.
“An abdominal hernia. I have to be specific because abdominal hernias, they can operate on, but they don’t hold. The muscles in the abdomen are not strong enough. I would have gone for the surgery because I’m vain. I always had a flat stomach. An abdominal hernia, it makes me look like I have a belly.”
Weather
Today will be a mostly sunny day, clouds rolling in with temperatures in the low 70s. For tonight, cloudy with temperatures in the mid-60s and winds at seven to 10 miles per hour.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday and Wednesday (for Rosh Hashana).
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It’s U.N. General Assembly week
The United Nations will shift into high gear, as it always does in late September. The streets in much of Midtown Manhattan will shift into slow gear, as they always do when world leaders arrive for the General Assembly.
They have limousines and entourages that will form hundreds of motorcades, the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, warned at a briefing last week. There will be intermittent street closings as diplomats come and go.
For everyone else, the city’s Department of Transportation says, public transit and “nondriving modes” are the way to go. Some streets will be closed, period: First Avenue from 42nd to 48th Street, and 44th to 48th Street from First to Second Avenue. A map published by the police showed that 41st and 43rd Streets between Tudor City Place and Second Avenue would be closed, with 42nd Street shut down between Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and Second Avenue.
The city is also stepping up its police presence on the streets and in the subways. The police will also keep watch with drones and helicopters, as will the United States Secret Service. Tisch said that the police would be operating in “a heightened threat environment” but that there had been no specific credible threats involving the General Assembly.
METROPOLITAN diary
6/26/94
Dear Diary:
After unloading my meager belongings into a small storage space in Chelsea and returning the moving truck that had brought me 1,000 miles to the city, I rushed to Central Park.
It was Sunday, June 26, 1994 — my first full day living as a New Yorker and a day of celebrations commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. It felt like an auspicious beginning.
I had missed the parade but was determined to experience some of the festivities. A few hours later, as revelers began to trickle out of the park, I decided to do the same and explore more of the city.
Stopping to wait for a light on Central Park West, I stood next to an older woman with a cane. As we waited, we started to chat.
I told her I had just moved to the city the night before, and she was delighted to hear it. She told me proudly that she had been living in Manhattan for 60 years after moving from Pennsylvania in her 20s.
When the light changed, I offered to help her across the street, and she graciously accepted. As we got to the other side of the street, she asked what I had been doing in the park.
I told her that I had been at a Pride event there, and that it meant so much to me as a gay man.
She looked at me sharply, as if startled. I suddenly wondered if I hadn’t made a miscalculation in telling her that.
I needn’t have worried.
“What are you wasting your time there for?” she said. “You need to get yourself down to the Village. That’s where all the real action is!”
— Anthony Alioto
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Ama Sarpomaa, Marek Smolinski and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post At 102, ‘Zelda the Welder’ Is Still Good at the Job appeared first on New York Times.
