HELENA VAN VLIET 1898-1978
On December 11, 1978, one week before her 80th birthday, Helena died at her home on the farm on which she was born. She was active, alert, and enthusiastic until her death. Independent, self sufficient, and broadly knowledgeable were characteristics immediately apparent to those who met her. The fragility of life is never so clear as when the robust among us succumbs. Helena was robust. She came from families who resided in that area of Clinton from the 1750's. She was connected to all the initial settlers of the Pleasant Plains area. Marriages in the 18th and 19th centuries between the Van Vliets, Garrisons, Leroys, Sleights, Travers, and Trempers connected her to all of the early history of Clinton. And it was her knowledge and interest in the history of Clinton through which most of us knew her best. But Helena was a much broader person than her retiring personal style ever let on. By the age of 36 she had completed a career as a missionary which few of us knew about. After graduating from Rhinebeck High School in 1916, she obtained her nurses cap at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in 1919. Four years later she left the operating room at Brooklyn Methodist to serve her first of three periods in China at University Hospital at Nanking. The overwhelming need for competent surgical nurses drew her to serve her fellow man in a place far from her Pleasant Plains childhood. Not only did she beome fluent in Chinese in order to teach the Chinese nurses at University Hospital in Nanking, but she also became a qualified electrical maintenance engineer recognized as such by a Lloyd's of London subsidiary. Recognizing the need to have electrical power in the surgical emergency room after 9 P.M. when all the power in Nanking was shut off, Helena made it her business to learn to operate the hospital's electrical generating plant to provide emergency service to patients. She returned to Brooklyn Methodist in 1935 following a trip around the world She had lived through that period in China when there were two wars in progress simultaneously - one with the Japanese and the other an internal struggle with the Communists. 25
