PHOTO From the left: census enumerator Eileen Nolte, First Lady Bess Truman; President Harry S. Truman and their daughter Margaret Truman, on the Little White House lawn, April 1950.

Eileen Nolte counts Truman among her friends

BY MARK HOWELL

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Eileen Nolte celebrated her 98th birthday in January of this year. Sixty-four years ago, she spent time with President Truman and his family at the Little White House in Key West, serving as the local enumerator for the 1950 census.

It was a day she has never forgotten.

Konk Life spent time this month with Eileen at her   home of 23 years, an elegant, two-story house on Avenue A in Big Coppitt. (She calls it her “tree house”) to relive that special day.

She was 33 years old at the time, one of 12 locals hired as census workers in the Keys. On the very first day of the census interviews, a limousine arrived to pick her up at her home on the Navy base — her husband Irvin was a pipe-fitter on a Navy ship — and drove her, alone to, the Little White House on Whitehead Street.

There she was officially announced on the lawn where President Harry S Truman, his wife Bess and daughter Margaret sat together on a long seat: “Mrs. Eileen Nolte to see the President of the United States.”

“I felt 20 feet tall,” she recalls.

The first question she was told to ask of a primary householder was, “What is your occupation?’

There was much laughter at this but the First Lady became upset at the whole process because, as she insisted, the family’s primary residence was, in fact, back home in Missouri.

The President overcame this by insisting, “Oh, Bess, come on, we’ve got to set a good example.”

Nolte also recalls the generosity of the President’s daughter Margaret at the time (her name to later become the witty inspiration for a Laundromat located at the corner of Margaret and Truman in Key West), who was a neophyte opera singer and also a Navy wife like Eileen, who insisted on gifting the young census taker and her mother with two free tickets and a backstage pass to the theater where she was performing.

After her historic encounter with the First Family, Nolte continued to work as an enumerator for the local census, eventually sitting at the Senior Citizen’s Center to help residents fill out census forms.

As a side note: When Nolte served as a census enumerator in the Keys on both 1950 and 1960 counts, the U.S. population as a whole boomed but the population of Key West decreased, largely due to a drop in the Navy population.

Nolte’s husband died from ill health many years ago but she has several grandchildren, great grandchildren and great, great grand children. Her daughter is married to Billy Niles. She was born in 1917 London, England, during the early air raids of World War I. “I could hear the planes coming,” she recalls today, “My mother wrapped me in a blanket and we hid in the coal cellar.” Her father served two years in the British Navy in the South Pacific and returned with malaria. His daughter’s first memory of him was in the hospital when she was six months old.

Her dad died at the age of 52, her mom at 79.

When the Noltes immigrated to North America, they family moved to Seattle and then settled in Vancouver, British Columbia. Their ultimate move was to Key West, due to her father’s service in the U.S. Navy. “There were 20,000 Navy personnel here at that time,” Nolte recalls. “Duval Street was a sea of white.”

She retired in 1958 and began a life of long-distance travel. “And wherever I went, they’d heard of Key West!”

She acknowledges that she’s been particularly blessed by remarkably good health all her days. For her 90th birthday, she sailed round the world on the QE 2 — alone.

Eileen Nolte, census enumerator, most recently voted only weeks ago, at the very fire station in Big Coppitt where she has served, helping voters for the past five years.

 

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