Silvis, IL– A very happy 100th birthday to Rufina Sandoval Guerrero!
We have enjoyed our times with her during the Hero Street documentary film production, and the amazing memories and stories she shared with us. We wish her a wonderful day celebrating the beautiful lady she is. Thanks for everything, Rufina! We are so blessed to know you. ~Tammy & Kelly Rundle, Fourth Wall Films.
Rufina is featured in the award-winning documentaries Riding the Rails to Hero Street and “A Bridge Too Far From Hero Street”. A clip from Rufina and her brother Ruben’s interview in Riding the Rails to Hero Street is featured in the Putnam Museum’s new Common Ground: Our Voice, Our Stories exhibit.
Born in 1924, Rufina’s young years were spent surviving the great depression in Silvis, Illinois. Her family lived in a boxcar while her father worked for the Rock Island Railroad. When the railroad drifted into bankruptcy in 1933, she and her brother William (Willie) joined their parents and young siblings in the sugar beet and onion fields of Iowa and Minnesota where they sometimes slept in horse stalls in a barn. Rufina said that $900 saved from two seasons of migrant farm work made it possible for their father Joseph to buy a small four-room house for the family of eleven on 2nd Street, now known as Hero Street, in Silvis.
“It was a four-room house. Two Bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen, a front room but we didn’t have nothing to put in the front room, but us,” Rufina shared during her interview with Fourth Wall Films. “You could see through the boards of the house! Birds would fly through. We had to patch it up. But it was cold! We didn’t have any furnaces either. All there was was a little coal stove. You’d have to have a lot of money to get a furnace. My bed was a trunk. You know everybody had trunks in those days and they put all their stuff in it. That was my bed when we lived there.”
When her mother Carmen passed away, Rufina stepped in to cook for and take care of her siblings in their modest home on 2nd Street. “She had twins. They died and she died two days later. That’s when I had to quit school, and take care of everybody. I was 14. I had to run a lot of things by myself you know,” Rufina said during her interview.
“I had to cook and at that time we had to make tortillas every day. The more I made, the more they ate. I thought, well I’ll make a little more and save some… (rolls eyes)… we had a lot of beans and potatoes and eggs. My dad couldn’t afford no meat. We had coffee because my dad couldn’t afford milk. When I went to school, I had to go to the nurses office. They had to give me milk because I was 13 pounds under weight.”
“You were just trying to keep a livin’, that’s all there was,” Rufina’s brother Ruben said.
It was the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 that motivated Willie and many others to enlist in the military. At age 20, Willie completed his training and was assigned to Co. F, 504 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. He survived several battles over the next two years including Salerno and Anzio.
“I always thought he was handsome,” said Rufina. “I got letters that he wrote from Africa and all those places he was at.”
Willie wrote to Rufina, “You will never know, sis, how happy I will be when I step onto the doorstep and say, “I’m home, Dad.” That will be the happiest day of my life.” He was killed at age 21 in October 1944 following his involvement in the largest air assault in history–Operation Market Garden.
Willie was one of eight sons of Mexican immigrants from the block-and-a-half long 2nd Street in Silvis, Illinois were killed in combat in World War II and Korea–more lost than any other street in America. The street was renamed Hero Street in 1968.
Hero Street is just a part of her story. Rufina has seen and experienced so much in her 100 years of life–working, marrying, raising a family, watching her grandchildren grow up and thrive, and add great grandchildren, and great great grandchildren to the family tree. She is loved and admired by her loved ones, her friends and neighbors, and the Hero Street community. We all join together in wishing her the best of birthdays and we thank her for all she has accomplished in her life. For being the strong, compassionate, quick-witted, and devoted woman she has always been. We celebrate Rufina and the incredible legacy she has shared with all of us. What an inspiration you are to each of us, Rufina. God bless you.
Courtesy of Hero Street: A Historical Documentary Film Series
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