Aunt Ceil and the Twenty Missing Years

How one woman erased twenty years and what it says about age discrimination at work

Aunt Celia had my complete attention, as my father held my sister, Alison

If you think finding work as a slightly older woman is hard now, let me tell you about my father’s aunt, Celia Wachstetter.

Celia was born in the Bronx in March 1897, the daughter of Austrian immigrants who had married the year before. Her father was listed as a “Button Hole Maker,” one of the thousands of skilled workers feeding New York’s garment trade. Buttonholes were often piecework, paid by the dozen, and a good buttonhole maker’s speed was his living. Celia grew up in a household where German was spoken at the dinner table and English in the street, and that double fluency would shape her working life.

As a child, I’d been told that Aunt Ceil “lied about her age to get work,” but I had no idea what that meant. Years later, a genealogy book suggested I start with the 1900 United States Federal Census. Brilliant advice. There she was: born March 1897. I followed her forward, decade by decade, census by census, until I reached 1940. And there it was. Aunt Ceil had taken exactly twenty years off her age.

Celia as a young woman, before she discovered that age was apparently negotiable.

Twenty years. Not a fib, a reinvention. Census takers wrote down whatever the person at the door told them, so somewhere in the Bronx in 1940, a 43-year-old woman looked a census taker in the eye and said she was in her early twenties. It sounds outrageous until you remember what the job market looked like. Help-wanted ads of the era routinely asked for “girls” under 25 or 30. A stenographer over forty was, in the eyes of many employers, past her usefulness. Celia understood the rules and quietly wrote her own.

She never married. My parents and the records call her a secretary, but that’s underselling it. Celia was a bilingual stenographer, able to take shorthand in both English and German, which meant mastering two entirely different shorthand systems, symbols dashing across a steno pad as fast as a man could dictate. Before World War II, my aunt Janice Victor remembers, she worked for Hamburg-American Line, now Hapag-Lloyd. In those years, the German lines kept busy offices in New York, booking passengers and freight between Hamburg, Bremen, and the Hudson piers. A woman who could handle correspondence in both languages would have been valuable. But during the Depression, age discrimination in office work was open and widespread. Job ads for stenographers and secretaries often named an upper age limit, sometimes as low as 25 or 30, and women over 35 struggled to find or keep office jobs.

Then the war came, and German shipping to America stopped. Whatever job she had there would not have survived. After the war, Celia started again, this time working for a stockbroker. Having lived through the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, she never trusted any one institution with her money. When it came time to settle her affairs, my father had to track down account after account, scattered across bank after bank.

For a while, when her mother became unwell, Celia lived with her sister, Nellie, my grandmother. Later she lived alone. When she could no longer care for herself, my parents drove my sister and me to her cockroach-infested apartment, packed up a few things, and moved her to an assisted living facility in State College, Pennsylvania. She’d come over to our house sometimes, like in the picture at the top. I kept visiting her until I was sixteen, bringing drawings I’d made in a class I was taking at Penn State.

When Celia died, she was laid to rest beside her sister Nellie, my grandmother, the same sister who had taken her in years before. Nellie Stern died young of asthma in 1948, and the two share a plot in Linden Hill Jewish Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, purchased by my grandfather, Irving Dan Stern, son of Helene Ilona Roth. Linden Hill is one of the city’s oldest Jewish burial grounds, founded around 1850 by Congregation Ahavath Chesed, now known as Central Synagogue. The woman who spent her life quietly managing her own affairs, her own age, and her scattered bank accounts ended up, in the end, back beside the sister who had once given her a home.

I wish I’d known then what I know now: that the slightly odd old woman looking at my sketches had once outmaneuvered an entire job market with a single sentence at her front door.