Profiles of Yakima: Rietje Keyes

By Laurel Krueger

Rietje Keyes is a refined lady whose well-mannered, well-spoken, well-postured  presence belies the chaos of her youth.  She is a member of “the greatest generation” who, because of life’s adversities and adventures, lives with intention and purpose.  Rietje has known the darker side of life yet chooses to live in gratitude – an attitude that infects all those fortunate enough to know her.

Born 75 years ago in Voorsehoten, Holland, Rietje’s life is a testimony to the value of hard work, adaptability, global perspective and humility.  As the youngest of ten children, Reitje learned order and discipline at a young age. “You did not come to the dinner table late, you sat up straight, and there was no speaking until after the soup was finished.”  Discipline proved an important survival tool when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.  A neighbor to Germany, Holland felt the effects of war from it’s earliest days.  Rietje was eight years old at the outset of WWII and well remembers food rationing, the forced conscription of Dutch men and women into labor camps or the German army and the general chaos of a country under siege.  Rietje’s father and four oldest brothers worked for the Dutch Resistance, living months or years at a time away from home.  Rietje remembers one nighttime raid in which seven young resistance fighters found refuge under the floorboards of their family home.

As the war progressed, conditions worsened.  For many, malnutrition turned to starvation.  Rietje’s brothers were eventually captured and placed into labor camps. The nighttime drone of first British, then American warplanes was relentless as Rietje tried to sleep in her top floor bedroom.  On 2/28/45, the Germans took over the family home forcing the family to flee in different directions.  Rietje remembers running hand-in-hand with her mother on a road dividing railroad and canal lines, while Allied bombs dropped all around.  The road was pock-marked with holes from exploded bombs, holes that would help them escape bullets and V1 and V2 bombs. They found refuge in a farmer’s home and the underground network eventually united all but one family member under this kind man’s roof.  Rietje’s brother, Jan, was executed in a concentration camp before the 1945 liberation of Northern Holland.

War-torn Holland eventually rebuilt and by the time socialism arrived in 1959, cities were a mass of concrete roads and high-rises.  Rietje was 24 in 1958 when she made a life-changing decision.  She and her fiancé had waited three years on an expected six to eight year waiting list for a small flat – the necessities for starting a marriage and family life.  The climate, overpopulation, crowding, socialism, and intense structure of Dutch society made Rietje think, “there must be something better elsewhere!”  Post WWII Canada, Australia and New Zealand were underpopulated and needed the manual labor that Europe could provide.  Rietje chose adventure over convention. She broke off her engagement, ended a career as a Physician Assistant and trained to be an esthitician, a trade then regarded as “laborer.”  This vocational shift into skin care provided the means by which to immigrate.

In 1958, getting on an immigrant ship was difficult, especially for single women.  Rietje’s brother, Walt, a New Zealand Air Force pilot, and his wife, agreed to host Rietje for three months while she looked for employment.  Rietje found both employment and love in New Zealand.  The New Zealand Air Force, in liaison with the American Air Force (and more than 70 countries), had been exploring the South Pole since 1956, in a cooperative scientific program aimed at studying the earth and its environment.  Jerry Keyes was a Navigator for the American Air Force, stationed in Christ Church, New Zealand.  Walt and Jerry soon found more than flying in common!  Rietje and Jerry dated for five weeks before his assignment in New Zealand ended, redirecting him back to the States.  They wrote every day for two months, Jerry proposed by letter to Rietje’s parents and two days after her arrival in America, they married.  What started as  “lust, intellect and friendship,” is now marked by 48 anniversaries.

Marriage to Jerry and the Air Force translated to 15 moves in 30 years.  Rietje welcomed each move as an opportunity to meet new people, exchange new ideas and update the languages of her youth: French, German, English and Dutch.  Rietje’s attitude about moving speaks to her adventuresome spirit.  “Good friends you keep; new friends you can make anywhere.”  Rietje approached moving as “a challenge in making a new place livable.  Once we lived in an army barrack.  When we first moved in, Jerry put the our two cots on either side of the barrack, the way he had lived as a bachelor.  I reminded him that we were married and moved the cots together.”  Two cots, two sons: Walt (1960) and Eric (1964).  Their sons are now grown, married and have blessed them with four, much-loved grandchildren.

Jerry’s retirement from the Air Force in 1979 brought Rietje and Jerry to Yakima.  Reitje has worked as an esthitician in Yakima since 1989.  While some may regard an ethitician’s work as frivolous, those who count themselves as either client or friend know her work is a ministry to both the body and spirit.  Her touch restores the body.  Her words nourish the soul.  She has known depravity and loss, joy and contentment.  She chooses to live with compassion and humbly dismisses the enriching effects of her spirit.  I, for one, sit much taller in her presence.  “I can’t remember hunger.  What I remember most is fear of airplanes, fear of bombs, the cold and darkness.  Now, on cold, damp, dark days, when I feel like shrinking up, I realize that if it doesn’t get any worse than this, I think I’m lucky, and then I go buy yellow flowers and play a lot of music.”