It’s March 31 – the last day of Women’s History Month. Over the previous weeks, women from across the country have been honored for their contributions to or participation in historic events.
In acknowledgement of her long, varied, interesting, exciting and sometimes dangerous life, we visited with a centenarian who bicycled across France during World War Two…and just kept traveling.
In reflecting back on her century of life, Erica Sullivan says the time that remains most vivid is the year she spent in France trying to escape Hitler’s expansion across Europe.
“Everyone went down in France and we went up,” recalls Erica. “We wanted to get to England. But every port had been mined. So we spent from May 10 to….sometime in February in France.”
Riding a tandem bicycle, Erica and her husband, followed the Tour de France route to the Pyrenees, were sidetracked in Marseilles…then to the French coast. Before long, she was on her way to New York City…via Martinique.
“We were on an empty freighter,” Erica explains.”A small empty freighter. And that was repatriating Martinique soldiers home. They had a group of German writers who The Pen Club got to New York. And that was the first time I became a feminist. My first question was…’Where are the female writers? There weren’t any.”
That was 1940. By the following year, Erica was in New York City working as a secretary and bookkeeper. In the years to come, she’d work with Hollywood stars, live in Hawaii and Las Vegas before settling down in the Black Hills where she leads a very active life.
And though it’s been quite a while since Erica Sullivan rode tandem through France, the lesson she learned during that time…live in the present, not in the past…remains a part of her.
Related stories:
http://listen.sdpb.org/post/centenarian-shares-story-alps-through-wwii-hollywood