Did Vel Phillips fudge her age by a year?
I interviewed the great Vel Phillips four years ago when she turned 90.
Or so I thought at the time.
Now it appears she really had 91 candles to blow out back then. And she was 95 — not 94, as everyone is reporting — at her death on Tuesday.
That one year isn’t a big deal, but it’s a curious footnote in the life of Milwaukee’s civil rights giant who broke so many racial and gender barriers.
Just about everywhere you look shows Phillips’ birth date as Feb. 18, 1924. That includes decades of articles and candidate profiles in the Journal Sentinel archives, Wisconsin Historical Society records, the Wisconsin Blue Book, City of Milwaukee employment records and other sources. Oddly, Wikipedia is the exception; it says 1923.
And there’s this: Vel Phillips’ official State of Wisconsin birth record says Feb. 18, 1923.
Someone sent a copy of that certificate to the Journal Sentinel Wednesday, to reporter Mary Spicuzza who was working on Phillips’ obituary. On deadline and faced with the mountain of evidence that Phillips was born in 1924, the obituary went ahead and stated she died at 94.
But the birth record looks legit. John La Vave, Milwaukee County’s register of deeds, has a copy on file in his office and it indeed shows the 1923 birth year.
Leander J. Foley, the doctor who delivered Velva-
lea Rodgers (Phillips’ birth name), signed the record and swore he could “hereby certify” that the blessed event occurred Feb. 18, 1923.
“I would say that her birth is really 1923 because it is listed in our index in chronological order and does not appear to be added later,” La Fave said.
On Friday, I looked at the relevant volume of that index, which showed births of babies whose last names begin with Ro. Velvalea is tucked very convincingly among the other births from February 1923.
Records show Milwaukee Maternity and General Hospital on 9th and Michigan streets filed her birth with the state on Feb. 26, 1923, and the register of deeds in Milwaukee County recorded that birth on March 15, 1923.
The earliest mention of Vel Phillips that I could find in The Milwaukee Journal was on July 23, 1941. It was about a speech contest she had won. The article refers to “Miss Rodgers, who is 18 years old and a senior at North Division High School.” That would indicate a 1923 birth date.
By exactly 10 years later, a year had been shaved off. A Journal article on Aug. 3, 1951, called her 27. That would mean 1924 as the birth year.
Phillips graduated from high school in 1942. It now appears she was 19 at the time. Perhaps she felt there was a stigma attached to taking an extra year to finish school — even though she went on to college and law school — and that’s why she began to list her birth as 1924.
I asked her son, Mike Phillips, about all this. He said my theory was plausible, but she never mentioned anything like that to him.
“My mom told me for years that she had been born in 1924, but that the difficulty was that the nurse at the hospital where she was born had misrecorded the year of her birth. And then that birth certificate followed her for years,” he said.
It’s possible Phillips heard this story from her mother, her son said.
He worries about years that don’t match up. Even the Social Security Administration lists his mom’s birth year as 1923, he said.
“I want her death record and her birth record to mirror each other, or that’s going to cause all manner of difficulty, I think,” said Phillips, who is 59 and a lawyer like his parents were.
In my experience, I’ve found that people fudge their age downward a bit as they age, and then brag about how old they are when they get past about 80. Movie stars are known for knocking off a few years from their age, or sometimes adding years if it will help land a role.
Phillips doesn’t think vanity played any part in his mother’s claim of a later birth year.
“There was no reason for her to maintain a fiction,” he said.
He told me he was glad I was looking into this. His mother, after all, dedicated her life to searching for the truth. All 95 years of it.
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl