Jerry Pipes

Tillie Zimmerman Jerry Pipes

Publisher Marketing: Tillie Zimmerman and her parents left their native Germany for The United States just as the stock market crash of 1929 threw thousands of people out of work. Free farmland in Oklahoma was available to hardy souls who would homestead the land. They scraped the grass off of the prairie and built a sod house and labored to till the soil without much more than a plow, a mule and seed financed by the local bank. By 1935 they and thousands of "Okies" abandoned their farms as howling winds blew away in the great dust storms of the "Dirty Thirties." The Okies headed for California and were turned away at the border by citizens, sheriffs and militia guards. Tillie's family worked their way up the west coast as farm laborers and finally settled in Washington State where the start of World War II broke the back of the Great Depression. Tillie hired on at Boeing and riveted B-17 and B-29 skins on aircraft that helped win the peace. Eventually she retired and built her own cabin in her 40 acres of forest on Stuart Island Washington. There on a cold wintery night she fought against all odds to save the life of a young Chinese woman named Jia Hui whose owner won her in a poker game. Jia Hui was attracted to job opportunities in the Western United States and Canada with promises of good wages and benefits. She hoped to find work in childcare or as a domestic servant. Her recruiter in Shanghai told her of other women who earned a good living in Vancouver, British Columbia and Seattle. Some had gone to college and became executives, business owners, social workers. Other opportunities in industry included work in the fashion industry. Each male and female who signed up for the program would travel to the United States or Canada and enjoy a great range of opportunities, the recruiters spun stories of a new life in the exciting life in the beautiful Northwest. Jia Hui and all of her fellow recruits dared to dream of the unattainable.