The Willow Glen Resident Helen Arbuckle WG mourns the passage of one of its leading ladies Helen Arbuckle dies just four months shy of her 91st birthday By Cecily Barnes Before she left this earth, Helen Arbuckle put in some time in her garden and a played a few final hands of double solitaire with her daughter Susan. She died on Dec. 16, from a stroke suffered in the driveway of her Willow Glen home. "For years and years, if we were in Toronto, North Dakota or here, we'd play a half-a-dozen hands of double solitaire," Susan Arbuckle recall tearfully. "We have our scores going back six years, and [my mom] would always tease me that she was practicing. When I was here in October, she'd always say, 'are we going to play a hand tonight?' And of course we did." Before her stroke, Arbuckle could be seen cruising around Willow Glen in her 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, hoeing her garden, attending Willow Glen Neighborhood Association meetings or chatting with her lady friends. Days after her death, Jim Arbuckle opened an invitation for his mother from her San Jose High School reunion class. Had she been alive, Arbuckle said, she likely would have attended. "They've been meeting for seventy years," he said. Helen Arbuckle also regularly attended her "Monday Club," an informal gathering of women who meet at different people's homes to discuss selected topics. While going through her mother's stuff, Susan Arbuckle described the old memorabilia she found, including a 1910 flier for the Willows Reading and Study Club. "In the 19th century, when women didn't have brains and they weren't allowed to do anything, these clubs formed for women who would get together for intellectual stimulation, and at each meeting some women would pick a subject on some matter," Susan Arbuckle explained. Helen Arbuckle had tactfully resisted the second-class status of women for much of her life. And in her final years, she pounded away at a book about the history of San Jose's women, an addendum of sorts to the official history of San Jose written by her late husband, Clyde Arbuckle who passed away in January. In an interview with The Willow Glen Resident in July, Helen Arbuckle explained how her book, which was never finished, would complete the picture her husband painted of San Jose's history. "Clyde wrote nothing about women at all in his book," she said matter-of-factly. "There's a lot of stuff he could have written." The Willow Glen Funeral Chapel filled to its maximum capacity Saturday, as friends and family turned out to pay their respects. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, December 23, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.