Helen Faith Kahn was born on November 11, 1901, in the Lower East Side, Manhattan to Polish Jewish immigrants.
She experienced anti-Semitism in Ithaca as a Cornell student and had to change her name from Kahn to Keane due to Collegetown realtors refusing to rent an apartment to a Jewish woman.
[3] According to her caretaker Olive Villaluna, Reichert worked in the cafeteria because "she was ashamed of asking her parents for money to buy cigarettes.
[3] In 1947, Reichert began her thirty-year-long teaching career at The Graduate School of Retailing at New York University, where she taught "Fashion Co-ordination" and a self-created course called "Costume History.
Reichert along with the production staff would construct a show around popular topics sent in by viewers; each episode featured experts in the relevant field.
Examples of topics covered by the daily program were cooking, housekeeping advice, how to play piano, narcotics, and talking to one's doctor about breast cancer.
Because the show was designed to benefit the community, it performed a great deal of public outreach, including promoting the League of Women Voters and garnering donations for the Volunteers of America.
McCall's is the only magazine with a national circulation which has ever paid tribute to the public service record of any group in radio and television.
"[8] One of the judges, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, stated "The material was inspiring evidence of what women can do, and are doing, for our country and our people.
[10] Because Helen Reichert and her siblings were all centenarians (her younger sister, Leonore Kahn Reichart, who was born May 25, 1903,[15] died on February 18, 2005,[16] at the age of 101, researchers have been studying them to see if longevity is correlated to genetics.
He asked the pool about the details of their living habits: nutrition, alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, sleep, education, status, and spirituality.