SEWING REMOTELY

Seniors come together — while working apart — to construct more than 1,000 cloth face masks

It started out with a request for 100 cloth face masks from a local doctor. The shortage of masks was real, and even non-medical grade masks began to be seen as better than no mask at all.

That’s when 87-year-old Oildale resident Leta Rhodes got busy sewing. She enlisted help from one friend, then another. Then more joined.

“We started getting requests for more masks,” Rhodes said.

Before they knew it they were making masks for delivery to Kaiser Permanente, Dignity Health and other medical facilities.

“We have heard from business people, contractors who wanted to provide masks for some of their workers, and individual families,” she said.

Even a surgeon in San Diego was the beneficiary of their labor.

“Many of us have been quilters,” she said. “So we have this nice cotton fabric.”

Pretty soon the remote sewing circle — each one working alone at their respective homes — had grown to include Emma Osteen and Karen Kuster, Linda Williams and Linda Stevens Hablitzel, Lea Anderson and Kim Barton, and possibly some volunteers Rhodes doesn’t know.

“I just felt it was my Christian duty,” said Osteen, who at 87 is the same age as Rhodes.

“I had a lot of fabric scraps,” she said. “Why not use the fabric to help others?”

Although they work separated physically by city blocks and possibly even some country miles, they feel a camaraderie, a shared sense of purpose. It’s a labor of love and considered a civic duty by the women.

Both Rhodes and Osteen estimate the group has made well over 1,000 masks.

“Having enough elastic has sometimes held us back, but it has been amazing how people have helped us with elastic,” Rhodes said.

The women share a drive, a passion to act, especially when their community is in crisis.

“I’m 87,” Rhodes said, “old enough to remember the Great Depression, old enough to remember World War II and watching my brothers go off to war.”

And so they work. Using scraps of cloth they create something useful for the war effort, only this time the enemy is unseen. It is smaller than a speck of dust, yet much more dangerous.

“We’re concerned about contributing what we can contribute,” Rhodes said.

It’s a patriotic sentiment that harkens back to a time when Americans endured rationing and shortages and global war, yet worked together toward victory.

“To live with purpose, to help others,” Rhodes said, “that’s where we should be living.”

PHOTOS BY ALEX HORVATH / THE CALIFORNIAN Leta Rhodes, 87, concentrates as she sews cloth face masks in her sewing room at her home in Oildale. For this batch, she needed to fill an order of 50, but one of her friends was making 25 of them to help complete the order. No one is paid, but Rhodes has been joined by a half-dozen or more local women.

Rhodes irons the crease into one of hundreds of cloth masks she and a group of friends have been making over the past several weeks.