Gloria Hopkins, second from the right with green scarf, speaks during the party Dec. 31 in the Twin Rivers Unit of Monroe Correctional Complex.
Photo by Michael Whitney.
MONROE — Gloria Hopkins knew a small celebration would happen for her retirement, but was wowed by how big a deal it would become.
At age 91, she was the state’s oldest classified employee, verified by the state’s human resources division within its Office of Financial Management.
On Dec. 31, Hopkins clocked out for the last time, concluding 27 years of working in accounting at the Monroe Correctional Complex for the state Department of Corrections (DOC).
Her blue eyes widened to see colleagues and family members filling a small conference room in the Twin Rivers Unit of the prison.
“The Legend Has Retired,” a sign declared.
This was her second wind. Before this, Hopkins co-founded and ran a nonprofit recreation center for teens in downtown Monroe for 25 years. She was also the bookkeeper of her husband’s landscaping and excavation business.
The DOC hired her at age 63 in 1997. The job was meant to tide her over before she became eligible for Medicare at age 65, she said.
But the commute was just a mile or so, and the camaraderie couldn’t be beat.
Like all her close friends, her coworkers know her as “G.,” as in gee. They watch out for her, daughter Debra Kolrud said.
Manager Marks Khalmuratov said the tight-knit business office has 15 people. The conference room overflowed with more than 40.
“It’s not a retirement I wanted to do. I love these people, but the body said it was time,” Hopkins said.
All three of her surviving four children came, as did her younger brother Paul, 75, who she goes to lunch with frequently.
“It’s been fun for me and you guys gave me a paycheck besides,” Hopkins told DOC Secretary Cheryl Strange and the DOC deputy secretary in a brief phone call. She was impressed they’d called.
The state gave her a thank-you letter signed by the governor and a plaque.
“She was not one to sit around,” son Mark Hopkins said.
In 1972, Gloria Hopkins co-founded the Monroe Youth Club, a drop-in afterschool center for teens who didn’t fit in.
It was at 212 E. Main St., in the building Pacific Power Batteries uses today. The place had pool tables, foosball, couches and a television. Maybe most importantly, it charged no fee to enter.
In an average year, 700 area teens would sign their names to enter.
The Police Department helped establish it, Hopkins said. Officers would visit to hang with the teens, and for many years the department brought in an annual Thanksgiving dinner.
“The kids I was dealing with were a different clientele” than typical youth centers, she said. Some were working through issues such as teen pregnancy and strained family relations, she said.
Critics falsely thought the Monroe Youth Center was a den of troublemakers, Hopkins said. It was a dirty misperception.
“I was real strict with the kids - they obey the rules or they’re out” on suspensions, Hopkins said.
The club funded itself through community support, for instance with bingo fundraisers three days a week at the former Oddfellows Hall.
The local economy softened in the mid-1990s and it zapped people’s extra spending money. This loss of income at the bingo fundraisers was the Monroe Youth Club’s undoing, Gloria Hopkins said. The center closed in 1997 after a 25-year run.
“To this day, I miss it, I love those kids,” she said.
In her spare time, Hopkins volunteered in the local League of Women Voters and the Lions Club, and had a stint on the city planning commission.
Mark Hopkins said his childhood included his mom taking them to Paine Field’s runway in Everett to watch the jets taking off and landing, eating a packed lunch while sitting on the tailgate of the Ford Country Squire station wagon.
Or, they’d go off in their ex-military Willys M38 jeep with her tooling around in the wilderness areas near Sultan and Startup, or take road trips. (Decades later, Mark Hopkins conducted a three-year, frame-up restoration of the same jeep.)
Born in Redmond, and one of five siblings, Gloria Hopkins married and started a family. They spent a winter or two in Fairbanks, Alaska before moving back to the Seattle area.
The family came to Monroe in 1967, Kolrud said.
When they arrived, Main and Lewis streets had the town’s only stoplight, Hopkins said.
“I knew I was the oldest and oldest in DOC” but not the state, Hopkins said at her party.
She wasn’t wanting a big party. It seems it just happened that way. A boss of hers set it up.
The DOC has only one other employee over 80 years old among its more than 9,000 employees, DOC spokesman Chris Wright said.
