This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demetow.

Heres was no less of a leap, no less of a journey into the unknown.

She and her husband were both from Arkansas, high school sweethearts who got hitched right before

he shipped out. And when Oscar Lee Oliver set out to see in the belly of a submarine, Betty

Lew Oliver left home for the first time too. She would await his return in New York,

which was unheard of for folks in her town. But this was 1944, when the world had seen to

shutter and uprooted lives and scattered them to places on the globe that people never imagined

they would be. Had husbands in metal tubes pushing blindly through the black depths of the Pacific.

And so she came to Manhattan at 19 years old, small town girl in the big city, the lights,

the crowds, the cabs, the subways, the usual. One of those experiences that is entirely

cliched, unless you are the one inside it. And where should Betty Lew Oliver of Fort Smith,

Arkansas, fresh off the bus, suitcase in hand, pink hat box under arm, looking up,

awestruck, fine work, why the Empire State Building.

She became an elevator operator. Though at the time in that skyscraper, with all of its state

of the art gleam and shine worthy of the world's tallest building, the job was almost vestigial.

Her odys elevator barely needed an operator. It had automatic doors. It stopped precisely at

each floor, didn't require artful speed control or finessing it just so that the floor of the car

aligned perfectly with the threshold as with earlier models. It didn't even need someone to

push the buttons. Betty Lew's ran as an express elevator from the ground to the 66 floor,

and then became a local, stopping at each of the next floors in succession until the

idiot, where she would then and only then push a lever and head back down. She made 35 bucks a

week, which felt like a bundle for the daughter of a coal miner, working in tight spaces apparently

...