Superheroine Renea Fechter
By Mary Fechter

Renea Fechter has been a field hand, a soldier, a bartender, a cancer survivor, and a single mother.

Renea was born a twin during the Great Depression, the second youngest of eleven children. Her mother was a teacher, her father a Wisconsin farmer, and all the children grew up working on the farm. School, even for a teacher's child, was a luxury in those hard times, and she stopped going as soon as she was a teenager.

She left home a few years later, anxious to leave that life behind, and moved to Texas. Along the way, she worked odd jobs and ended up in the Army in the 1960s. She worked in Records at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio during the Vietnam War, and she tells stories of the wounded soldiers she saw brought back to the States, stories of boys burned beyond recognition, stories of helicopters flying in hour after hour until the orderlies and doctors were run ragged. This woman, who is five-foot-nothing and has probably never weighed a hundred pounds, would help carry the soldiers into the hospital from the helicopters.

During this time she found herself pregnant, though she'd been told she could never have children. Surprise! Determined to keep her child in a time when a stigma was attached to single mothers, she kept her pregnancy a secret until she could hide it no longer. She was discharged from the service and struggled to find a job that could support her and her son.

When Fred was just a baby, Renea was diagnosed with cancer. Certain she would die, she made a will dictating who would care for her child and prepared for the worst. But she hadn't gotten that far without being a fighter, and she overcame the cancer. She doesn't talk much about that time, but she was grateful she was able to raise her son, the son everyone thought she was unable to have. He became the center of her world.

She faced more hardship, however. Women didn't have a lot of choices in the sixties, and Renea didn't have a high school diploma. She worked two jobs while her son was small. Both were minimum-wage jobs when minimum wage was hardly more than a dollar an hour. She was fortunate to find a wonderful babysitter in Mrs. Lopez, who took Fred in at all hours. Renea didn't have to worry about him while she was at her job. She managed to get her GED and wanted to take advantage of the GI Bill to get into college, but by the time she could lift her head to take a breath, the opportunity had passed her by.

When her father died, he left the farm, now worth a great deal of money, to his sons. The girls got cash, but nothing near the worth of the boys' inheritance. He left Renea enough money to buy a car, her first new one. She was so proud of that Cutlass. But what she wanted more than anything was a house of her own in a good school district, and a yard for her son. It took creative financing and more scrimping and saving, but she found a little two-bedroom house in the school district she wanted, and they moved in when Fred was 13. For a while she worked three jobs, but she had the house paid off in half the time allowed by her mortgage.

Shortly after Fred married, Renea was closing the neighborhood bar where she worked when a man came in to rob the place. He beat her up and left her crumpled on the floor. He was arrested and sentenced, but released a short time later. Renea, fifty at the time, took months to recover.

Still, she managed to come back and decided life would be good if she only worked one job for awhile. After all, now she had a grandson to spend time with. She found a job with more security and worked there ten years before retiring.

Now she lives in her house, not five minutes from her son and his family. She can still pinch a penny till it bleeds - she recently spent $20 on 20 items at Wal-Mart. Her health has had its ups and downs, but she's a fighter. Her son and his family are still the center of her world.
 

To read last month's SuperHeroine article, click here

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