Why Mama chose Thursday, though Grandma on a nearby farm always washed on Mondays, I could never understand. I thought the weather should be the main consideration but not my mom or grandma. Rain or shine, the wash must go on. They might have to wait a day or more before hanging them on the lines to dry, but at least they would be washed.

Mama started the day by removing every sheet and pillow case from the beds, seeing that each member of the family had every garment sparkling clean and piling all dirty clothes in a big sheet. A vivid memory … she with the large bundle thrown over her shoulder, like a hobo with a pack on his back, walking toward the “separator room” where the washing was to be done.

The chore was done outside the house, unless the weather was cold or raining, when it was done inside. The first job, which was often done by my father, was filling the large black iron wash pot with water. It was kept upright with several short iron legs on the bottom.

Then a fire would be built under the wash pot. The first water would be placed in a large tub to rub the clothes clean in. The pot would then be filled a second time to bring to a boil the clothes which had been rubbed through two tubs of water with lye soap on a washboard.

I started rubbing clothes when I was so small I had to stand on a box to reach the washboard. The clothes were always sorted first. The whitest, cleanest clothes had to be washed first, then the next group and finally the work clothes and dark socks and stockings.

Mama always rubbed all through two waters, boiled all, then rinsed through two tubs of clean water. The last water had bluing put in. In the earliest days she used “bagged bluing,” which came six bags in each box. In later years she used a liquid from a bottle. The bluing was used to keep the white clothes from looking dingy.

The only woman in Erath County who had whiter clothes than Mama was Grandma Hamilton. Mama did not use Clorox – she used arm and back power, lye soap and boiling hot water. Was it any wonder it took her all day to wash once a week? … She had what today we would call “a thing” about cleanliness.

One time Mama’s sensitive nose and taste became disturbed. For several days she tried to decide why the butter tasted and smelled like gasoline. One day when she started to iron the clothes, she discovered the reason … The gasoline iron was kept in the bottom compartment of the “safe,” and the gasoline fumes had penetrated the butter.

The safe usually held the glassware and the dishes at our house. The lower part, other foods such as jam, mustard, pickles, catsup or other things would be placed there for storage. The country kitchen of that day did not have built-in cabinets. Those who could afford the “Hoover” cabinets had them. But they usually had a “safe” cabinet too. We had a cabinet that had a flat top, two pull-out dough boards, two three-or-four-inch-deep drawers and on the bottom, two drawers, one divided, where flour, cornmeal and sugar were stored.

I mentioned the gasoline iron above. Most of the country women in our area ironed with the “smoothing iron.” There were two kinds: one with attached handles and the other kind had detachable wooden handles. They generally used three irons but only one handle. Mama and Grandma Hamilton had the attached-handle type, but my Grandmother Carter used the detachable wooden handle with the separate irons.

These irons would be heated on the wood stove until hot enough to iron the wrinkles from the “sprinkled” clothes or other garments to be ironed. Sometimes an iron skillet would be placed over the irons to help heat them and keep them heated.

Papa bought Mama a more modern iron, one that heated with gasoline. There were times when it might be frightening, when the flames flew up from an overflow of gasoline, but Mama learned to control that.

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors Magazine

Lou Allie was born into a farm family on Nov. 6, 1910, in Erath County, Texas. She taught home economics for 26 years and raised two children in the Bay Area with her husband, Drum, a teacher and building contractor.

When she was 65 and newly retired, Lou Allie caught the genealogy bug from her daughter Mary. She started wishing she knew more about her grandparents and great-grandparents, and decided to leave a record of her own

Lou Allie, four in 1914, standing by the family dog, Buster, outside the backyard gate to the home she was born in.

history for future generations.

Typing was a challenge, since a fall into hot ashes as a toddler left her right hand scarred and one finger permanently bent. But that didn’t stop her. Using her own personal hunt-and-peck typing style, she started writing – a lot some days, a little on others. Some days she didn’t write at all. But she kept at it for 25 years, until 488 pages had piled up.

Mostly she wrote from memory, saving recollections of scrubbing laundry on a washboard beside her mother, and of stirring the soap they made together. She remembers flames shooting out of the gas iron, and the tedious daily duty of making the beds – mattresses stuffed with cotton balls.

“I remember doing all those chores better than I remember what happened yesterday,” says Lou Allie, who moved to Murphys in 1996, along with both daughters. Some facts she collected from other family members. And the parts about farming?

“My late husband, Drum, wrote those,” she says.  “I was writing them, but Drum kept telling me what to say, so I finally handed him the paper and said, ‘Here, you write it.’ ”

In 2001, after struggling for years with macular degeneration, she sat down to write about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When she realized she couldn’t see well enough to continue, she stopped, leaving someone else to turn that corner of history.

Now, 10 years later, daughters Mary and Vivian are the keepers of the pages of her life, all 12 pounds of them. Woven into those pages are Lou Allie’s memories of her travels to 100 countries, and the honors and awards she received for decades of community involvement. She is pleased that people are interested in what she wrote, but there’s a trace of regret.

“I just wish Drum could know,” she says.

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors Magazine

Me, too. If we did, we’d have lots of money to leave our children. But if we never took time to capture our stories, money or no money, our children would still be left the poorer.

Lou Allie Heath, 101, spent decades chronicling her 'ordinary country girl's life.'

“Those stories are so precious,” says Kelly Williams, who recently helped his mother, Bertha Walsh of Angels Camp, complete her memoir. In “Fruit Tramps,” Walsh, 93, details her family’s journey into and across California in the 1930s.

“When I read the stories Mom wrote, I can hear her talking and it always makes me smile,” Williams says from his home in Tennessee, where he is public relations manager for country music singer Mark Chesnutt. “Mom’s still around, and the grandkids can go to Granny’s and get a cookie and hear her stories. But that won’t always be the case. Now, by reading her memoir, kids for generations to come will have the chance to know my mother, to know us all.”

Family and individual histories also help future generations better know themselves, says Deanna Dechaine-Maurer of Sonora, personal historian and executive director of the Central Sierra Arts Council.

“Children who know stories about relatives who came before them show higher levels of emotional well-being,” says Dechaine-Maurer, citing research from Emory University.

It works likes this: When you’re 13 or so, you believe no one understands you – especially your parents. These are the same people whose stories you will treasure 40 years down the road, but for now, you feel you must have been switched at birth.

Then you hear the stories. Maybe you learn your great-grandfather played saxophone for a military band during World War II, and wonder if that’s where you got your love of music. Your great-grandmother was fascinated with trains. Could that be where you got your wanderlust?

“Family stories provide a sense of identity and help children understand who they are in the world,” Dechaine-Maurer says.

What’s more, storytelling is good for the storyteller.

“It exercises the memory and provides time to reflect on questions your subject might not have thought about before,” says Dechaine-Maurer.

Even when we can’t remember what we did yesterday, our brains can produce amazing details from our long-ago past, informing and inspiring others. Indeed, the rewards of writing or recording our personal or family history are many. So why don’t more of us take these projects on?

“For a lot of people, it’s hard to know where to start,” says Dechaine-Maurer. “It can seem like such a daunting task, to sit down and write the story of your life.”

That’s true, so let’s break it down into manageable bits. By capturing your story step by step, it can be quite easy, like dropping coins in a jar.

Where to begin?

Start with what you already have: Boxes of old family photos. Pages of genealogical research. A mind full of memories.

To build a family or personal history, you need this raw material – photos, memories, stories. You’ll also need a few good sources, another reason not to delay: If you wait too long to get started, many of those sources may have already died.

I had been saying for decades that I would write our family history, ever since I spent four weeks living with my then-92-year-old grandfather in San Leandro right after I graduated from college. Grampa had all his faculties intact, but he needed someone to help cook and keep an eye on him for a month while my aunt and uncle were away.

Stewing prunes and watching Lawrence Welk with Gramps was not high on my list of post-college plans, but as it turned out, I learned more history in those four weeks than in four years at college. I heard firsthand accounts of World War I (Grampa fought with the Canadian forces) and I realized what it was like to witness the miracle of flight (Grampa was a young man when the first plane flew.) As he talked, I took notes on paper place mats from the Hickory Pit, where we often ate because Grampa liked the coffee.

When my stint was over, I had a wad of place mats and a new perspective on history and the world. I swore I would go back and tape-record Grampa telling his stories, but I never did. He died four years later.

Fast-forward 30 years. My children were grown and my father had passed away. I had helped a half-dozen people write their own personal histories, yet never found time to sit down and write my own. It’s now or never, I said, and I dug around in my closet to find what would become the seed of my own family history: Those Hickory Pit place mats.

Basic equipment

A pen and a notebook are a fine place to start, or even finish. But you can also buy a cassette or digital voice recorder for less than $40 and tell your stories to it. Blending the two mediums – written and audio – is often a good idea. Example: Some 10 years ago, Bertha Walsh began chronicling her memories in a notebook.

“Sometimes I’d remember a story just as I was drifting off to sleep, and I’d get up and jot it down,” she says. “I wanted to be sure I captured those stories before they left me.”

Last year, as son Kelly Williams gathered those stories, he wanted a few more details. He asked follow-up questions, both in letters and on the phone, and suggested that his mom record her answers.

“She did it all herself,” Williams says. “She would put in the cassette, press record and off she would go.”

Williams and Walsh learned a few things – like don’t hold the microphone too close when you talk or the words get garbled. But for the most part, it worked like a dream.

Pen and paper worked fine for retired sales executive Ron Cole, 80, of Twain Harte. He wrote his personal history longhand in six months in 2002 while he and his wife, Ethel, sailed around Washington’s San Juan Islands, Victoria, B.C. and beyond. And as Ron wrote his memories – four or five pages a day – Ethel transcribed them on her laptop computer and printed them for Ron to proofread.

“It wasn’t always easy to decipher what he had written; maybe he should have been a doctor,” she says with a laugh.

Other handy tools

A computer and printer can be useful in compiling a history. Internet access is invaluable for researching genealogy and other details, but if you don’t own a computer, don’t let that dissuade you.

Also useful: a scanner, to create digital images of photos and documents. You can buy one for under $100, or buy a printer with a built-in scanner. After my dad died 21 years ago, I inherited many family photos. When I tackled my family history, the first thing I did (after unearthing those place mats) was scan in the photos and documents.

It took weeks, but was worthwhile for two reasons: It protected them from further wear and tear, and now everyone in the family can have their own copies. Scanning precious photos and documents also can ensure they are preserved, even if the originals are lost.

Once photos and documents are scanned into digital images, you can use a computer program like Picasa and Photoshop to improve the quality of the images (no, I didn’t remove wrinkles nor make teeth whiter) and you can

Lou Allie, 1930, on Mississippi River

use the photos for other projects. I made a slideshow for my mother’s 80^th birthday celebration, for example, and designed photo calendars for gifts.

‘Write like you talk’

So there you are with your interview notes, your photos, or even just your own memories. How do you start writing?

My advice: “Write like you talk.” You don’t have to assume a different voice just because you’re sitting at a keyboard. You’re telling a story, probably a story you’ve told (or heard) many times before. So relax and enjoy the telling.

Structure will help. Most people write their tales in chronological order. Williams, for example, found that approach helpful when he compiled his mother’s stories, many first told in random order.

“She would start most of them with ‘Mama was pregnant with …’ or ‘So-and-so was two…’ and since my mother had so many siblings, born every two years, it was easy to go back and add a date,” Williams says. “So that’s how we structured it – each chapter was its own year.”

Adding photos

Photos help. As you relate a story, try to include a photo of the person or event being described. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the adage goes, and photos keep your story moving and break up blocks of text.

Speaking of text: Don’t get bogged down by including every detail. Excess minutiae can weigh a story down. Some details, of course, can make it come alive: The name of the family dog, or that your childhood home was painted bright blue. Details like those can pull readers into the scene, but once you have them there they want to know, “What happened next?” Go ahead and tell them.

When interviewing a family member, you may wonder whether to paraphrase or write down the speaker’s comments verbatim. Either way is fine. Oral historians transcribe interviews word for word. I prefer to paraphrase in places and also include direct quotes, because it keeps the narrative arc more interesting. It allows me to focus on the most telling details and, by including quotes, readers can still hear the rhythm and voice of the speaker.

Is there danger of slipping into opinion when you paraphrase? Certainly, but I (like you) try to be a trustworthy narrator. Having your sources proofread their stories before printing allows them to catch any elements that don’t ring true.

Which secrets to air?

Every family has its secrets. Which do you include?

I recommend handling this on a case-by-case basis, using this question as a guiding light: Is it your secret to share? If it is your secret, and you wish to include it, please do. It’s your story, and no one knows it better than you. Is it your father’s secret or your grandmother’s secret, one that greatly influenced the trajectory of your own life? That gets a little trickier, especially if some of the people involved are still alive.

Whatever you choose to do, the process of deciding can be cathartic in itself, as you talk to siblings or others who might have different memories or opinions. “An unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said, and writing your own story or a full family history certainly gives you the opportunity for examination.

Remember, as you start, you’re not writing in indelible ink. I am a big fan of first drafts (and second drafts, and third drafts). Go ahead and include anything that comes to mind, knowing you can always go back and add, subtract and alter. My first draft of my family history was more than 300 pages. In the end, it was 160, and a much better read.

First person or third?

Should you write in first person or third person? Again, do what feels right. Kelly Williams wrote his mother’s book in first person, compiling it all in her voice. He added a few details of his own – updates on where folks are living now, etc. ­– but he kept it all in first-person from his mother’s perspective. Cole also wrote his book in first person.

I took an unconventional approach. I wrote most of my family history in third person, tracing my grandparents’ journeys from England, Canada, Denmark and Nebraska to Oakland, where my parents met, and then telling of my parents’ lives which, of course, included me.

In other words, I occasionally wrote about myself in the third person. But when I reached the part in the story where my father died and I had to say good-bye, my memories of that awful moment are so visceral that I switched to first person. It felt right.

Editing is your friend

Editing is important. Have someone proofread your story for typos and accuracy.

The Internet can also help as you edit, because it allows you to confirm various details such as where people worked. When telling me about her jobs during the 1940s, my mom used company names that weren’t familiar to me, but rather than get stuck on it during our interview, I later researched it online and found the right names, which she then verified for me.

Online research also helps add context to your narrative, providing historical details your sources don’t always have at their fingertips.

Putting it all together

You now have taken the raw material – stories, photos, a family tree, perhaps, and other documents – and shaped them into a draft history. What next?

You can keep it easy and inexpensive by designing it yourself with a simple word-processing program, then putting it all in a loose-leaf binder. One advantage of this non-bound approach is that you and others can continue to add pages with ease.

Another easy, albeit more expensive, approach is to hire a company to produce your book. Many firms regionally and nationally can design, edit and print it. Cost depends on many factors, including length, type of paper and binding, number of copies, whether you go with laser or offset printing, color photos, etc. Be prepared to spend a few thousand dollars.

I produced our family history using a third option: An online printing company such as Shutterfly.com or Blurb.com. Some are better suited for photos than text, but I found Blurb.com met my needs. It has a variety of templates that allow you to blend photos with text into nice-looking bound volumes. I paid about $1,000 for a dozen 160-page premium books.

It’s nice to leave empty pages in back where people can write new stories, or make additions, subtractions and alterations. Also, I glued a large envelope in the back of each book where people can add photos and other fodder for the next historian.

Long-term rewards

Writing your memoir or compiling your family history isn’t easy. It will take time, effort and a little money. But the truth is, it’s not nearly as hard or expensive as you might have thought. And the investment will pay dividends long after you’re gone.

Cole is happy he took the time to write his life story, which spans his 1930s Tennessee childhood, family joys and crises, love, career, civic involvement and Twain Harte retirement.

Journalist Diane Nelson (at right) with her mom Dee, and their book of family history.

“I did it for my kids,” Cole says. “I think it’s good to share your stories, to let them know you had your hard times as well as your successes. Maybe it can provide inspiration – or guidance, even – somewhere down the line.”

Ask these questions and more

Whether your family history will be in book form or preserved in audio or video recordings, prepare a few questions in advance. Sample questions can be useful even as you sit down to write your own story ­– to interview yourself, if you will. They can help you collect your thoughts.

If the person you’re interviewing has hearing loss or other disability, or lives far away, send questions in advance. You can even conduct interviews by letter or email. Be sure to leave plenty of time and room for stories to unfold. When interviewing, let curiosity be your guide.

Some sample questions:

• What is your full name? Why were you named that? Do you have a nickname? If so, when did you get it and how?
• When and where were you born? Why was your family living there? What did your parents do for a living? Did your siblings or other relatives live in the area?
• What do you remember most about your childhood? Did you have a pet? What type of games did you play? What was your favorite food? Did you have special family traditions?

• Where did you go to school? Was there a subject you especially liked or disliked?
• Why did you choose your profession? If you could have chosen another one, what would it have been?
• How did you meet your spouse? When and where did you get married? What are standout memories from your wedding day? What is the key to a successful marriage?
• When were your children born? What are their full names? What do they do? Where do they live?
• What accomplishments are you most proud of? What do you most want people to remember about you? At this time in your life, what do you value most?

During the actual interview, save energy for tangents. Sometimes, the most poignant stories need time to develop.

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors Magazine

What could be a typical day for any number of retirees becomes extraordinary when Bill reveals his age: 103.

Though the source of Bill’s energy is a mystery, he’s happy to put it to use. This past year he bought his first computer, an iPad, and has learned how to use the Internet. He regularly emails friends, flips through YouTube videos with ease, and recently signed up for Facebook.

How has this centenarian mastered a technology that baffles people decades younger?

“Nothing’s too complicated if you’re willing to learn,” Bill explains, deftly opening an iPad program with a tap of his finger.

This attitude is in keeping with Bill’s life philosophy, a relaxed creed that guides his decisions. He actively avoids stress, claims to have never held a grudge, and advocates living in the moment.

“I’ve been easygoing all my life,” he muses. “Very seldom have I ever planned ahead for anything.”

He credits his longevity to this low-pressure way of life, so it stands to reason that his closest brush with death in 103 years was at the tender age of three months – before he had any chance to implement it.

His mother was cooking in the kitchen while three-month-old Bill napped on the living room couch of his childhood home in Washington, D.C. A fire broke out between the two rooms, and Bill’s mother, blocked by fire and hindered by her prosthetic leg, was forced to flee the house without her son. Luckily, a stranger on the street saw the flames and rushed in to save the baby’s life.

Since then, Bill has kept himself in good health, with a few small exceptions: He had all his teeth replaced on the advice of a dentist in 1938, and he suffered a bout with pneumonia last year. “My doctor is always disappointed he can’t find anything wrong with me,” he jokes.

He wears a brace to support a weak foot that developed a few years back when he fell on rocks while hiking to a fishing hole. He now uses a cane outdoors to avoid any more falls.

The only crash he’s had since learning to drive in a Model T 85 years ago was a no-fault collision with a u-turning driver in 2008, he says. His license is good until 2015.

He rarely drinks, and says he has never been drunk. Though he smoked occasionally for some years, he quit cold turkey in 1960. “One day I asked myself, ‘What am I smoking for?’ and I never smoked again,” he explains.

He still makes most of his meals, usually combining steamed vegetables with precooked meats, and avoids “junk,” though on rare occasions he’ll have pizza or a hamburger.

And his exercise routine?  “I’ve never exercised, never needed to lose weight,” Bill says. “I’ve always worked.”

Even in his retirement, Bill trained himself as a television repairman, and set to fixing the sets of his friends and family. He kept doing it until people switched away from tube TVs, and then only because he didn’t want to buy a host of new equipment.

From childhood, Bill experienced a century of remarkable social and technological change.

He left school after eighth grade to help support his family, and got a job at the Bell Telephone Company for $7 a week. His family didn’t even have a phone at that point.

In 1926 Bill joined the Army and moved to Fort Bliss, Texas, to serve with his brother, Frank. In doing so, he became one of the last soldiers in the pre-mechanized cavalry. As part of the 7^th Cavalry Regiment, he helped man the mobile radio station they carried, transmitting messages through Morse code. When he wasn’t interpreting code, he sometimes had to hand-crank a generator by hand to power up the radio.

Though he had never ridden a horse before, animal care soon became a huge part of his life. For the next three years Bill rode maneuvers across Texas, slept in pup tents, and took care of his horse. Despite a life dedicated to a single animal, Bill never saw fit to give it a name, though he still recalls its brand: E-213.

“It was just a horse,” he explains, then pauses in contemplation. “A good horse.”

Bill moved directly from one of the oldest forms of transportation in the Army to one of the most cutting edge. He was released from service in 1929, just a month after Black Tuesday’s stock market crash. After three weeks traveling the rails and witnessing the early impact of the Great Depression, he reenlisted, this time in the Army Air Corps.

He moved to Kelly Field, outside San Antonio, and worked as a plane mechanic for the 77^th Pursuit Squadron. While he was never officially taught to fly, the cadets often took him up in their PT-13 trainers, canvas planes on steel frames. When the cadets got tired or needed a smoke break, they would wiggle the joystick, and Bill knew it was his turn to take over.

In this way he learned to fly, though never to take off or land. These are the most difficult moves in flying, made more complicated – and jarring – by rabbit and gopher holes in an era that predated paved runways.

After a year, he was offered the chance to transfer to Sacramento’s Mather Field, and he took it gladly. Though released from duty in 1933, he decided to stay in California, and worked at the Bercut-Richards Cannery until he found his way back into the Army in the 1940s as a civilian mechanic.

The draw of California, besides the sun, was the girls – specifically, Luana Jones. The two married in January 1934 and bought a home in North Sacramento. By November, they had their first and only child, Sharolyn, who is now 76 and lives in Arizona.

Bill’s greatest regret after 103 years is a lonely childhood. Born on March 26, 1908, he was the fourth of five boys, though the older two were separated by eight years and rarely associated with the younger. His father, a carpenter, was away working most of the time.

“It wasn’t like a family should be,” laments Bill, whose mother died of gallstones when he was just 16. “We were never together.”

When Bill and his first wife divorced in 1949, he worried how it would affect his daughter, but his worry was short-lived, as Sharolyn soon married. After six years of bachelorhood in Sacramento, Bill met Gertrude Driver, whose grandfather had settled a vast tract of farmland north of the city. A month later the two were married. They moved to 45 acres in Calaveras County and developed a tree farm there after Bill’s retirement in 1969, happily tending their land and traveling widely until her death in 2001.

Today, Bill shares the property with his stepson, and visits often with great-niece Lorena Newsom and her husband, Jim, who live in nearby Murphys and attend the local Mormon church, which Bill joined last year.

It was Jim who helped set Bill up with his iPad, the latest technology he’s become enamored with. He uses it to read the Bible, check Facebook, and keep up-to-date with the world outside his secluded foothills home.

Most folks might find Bill’s computer savvy remarkable, but the changes in technology he has witnessed only become more pronounced as he recounts vivid childhood memories: construction of the Lincoln Memorial, the planting of Japanese cherry trees in D.C.’s Tidal Basin (where he also learned to swim) and the inaugural procession of Woodrow Wilson, the last U.S. president to travel in a horse-drawn carriage.

Bill lived through World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, though his memories of both are limited. “I was just a kid, I didn’t pay any attention to that stuff,” he explains. To him, the war existed only in his parents’ conversation, and in movie star Douglas Fairbanks coming to town to sell war bonds.

All these memories come to Bill without a pause. In several hours of conversation with a writer 80 years his junior, the only thing he fails to remember is the capital of Portugal (Lisbon). This lapse irks him, though it comes amid perfect recollection of a long string of small cities and towns he passed through in a three-month European tour in the 1970s.

What’s his secret?

“It’s no secret what God can do,” is Bill’s rote response, but if pressed, he figures it could have something to do with attitude. “I was always happy with whatever I was given, with whatever I did.”

While it’s unclear whether this secret will get you to 103, it may just help you with something just as elusive: how to be happy while you’re here.

And Bill’s plans for the future?

“Keep living,” he smiles. “Tomorrow never comes, you know.”

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors

Eva Savateer, a new centenarian

Sonora native Eva Savateer’s parents, Angelo and Elena, emigrated from Italy separately near the turn of the century. They met at Giussi’s Boarding House, where Elena worked,

Eva as a young woman

and married at St. Patrick’s Church in Sonora in 1903. They homesteaded land in the Lyons-Bald Mountain Road area, where Angelo mined and raised vegetables and livestock, and lived there for the rest of their lives.

The Bonavias had 12 children, losing one at birth and the other in World War II. Eva was the fourth child, born Jan. 24, 1911 in the family home. She began working at a young age and in 1929 graduated from Sonora High School.

In the early 1940s she married Leland “Shirley” Savateer, who after military service worked for PG&E for many years. With her husband and nieces and nephews, she shared her love of the outdoors, hiking and camping in backcountry sites. For many years, Eva worked at Mundorf’s Hardware in downtown Sonora.

Despite health challenges, “I enjoy my life right now,” she said recently from her favorite chair, warmed by afternoon sun streaming through her living room window. “As long as I can get around on my two feet, I feel young yet.”

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors

Erma Giussi

“Overalls! Oh my Lord,” says Erma  Giussi. “You had to wash every day or you’d never keep up.”

From her cozy Sonora living room, Erminia Paradisa Girardi Giussi is looking back to 1926 where she can still see herself washing the family clothes on the back porch of her childhood home behind the old Tuolumne General Hospital.

“Lots of boys, lots of overalls,” she recalls. “You hung them on the line, or if it rained, behind the stove or on the porch.”

It’s been 85 years, but her mind’s eye is sharp. At the age of 101, she can still see the five washtubs flanking her younger self as she scrubbed overalls, sheets and towels on a washboard with strong brown soap.

It was the spring of 1926, Erma was 16 and already out of school. Just a month earlier it would have been her mother, Adelaide Girardi, scrubbing and singing on the back porch, but her mother died of pneumonia that March, at age 46.

It was up to Erma to care for the family. How did she cope? “I just went right along,” she says. “I knew what I had to do and I did it.”

But Erma had been a tomboy, and there was a lot she didn’t know about running a household. The neighbors taught her how to wash, iron and cook.

Grief had visited the family before. Her parents had lost four children, three before Erma was born. Erma was the second Erma in the family, and sister Mary was the second Mary. There had also been two Dominics. One died in Michigan, where Erma was born. The second died in Sonora at age 3 of quinsy, a throat infection.

Mother was the heart of the young Girardi family, and she took good care of her husband, Benjamin, and their six children. Neighbors stopped to listen when she sang “Santa Lucia” over the washtubs in the back.

“She was full of joy,” Erma says. “She loved to laugh. She enjoyed us kids, and every night she heard our prayers.”

It was her mother who arranged for the neighbor children to play outside Erma’s window while she waited out a diphtheria quarantine, and who gave her the freedom to live a full rich childhood.

“I was a rowdy girl,” says Erma, who roamed all over Sonora and got into trouble wherever she could find it. Back home from school, “I was out of that dress and into overalls.”

She was 6 when the family moved from Michigan, a climate change aimed at easing her father’s arthritis. Here he worked as a logger and laborer. They first lived in a rental near Lyons Street and “China Town,” a series of huts at Lyons and Stewart streets.

“I had never seen a Chinese or an Indian in my life, and I was curious,” Erma recalls. “I would stand across the street where the little post office is now, and stare and stare and stare. They would come out and say, ‘Little girl, go home.’ I wanted to see China Mary, and I wouldn’t go home. China Mary had such tiny little feet, and when she would come out she would go tap, tap, tap.  She wore bright red robes with big flowers on them. I had never seen anything like it.”

“There were Indians, too,” continues Erma.  “When something was going on in town they would come down off Big Hill and down from Hope Lane.”

The Sonora depot was located where the main post office is today. Erma played there as a child.

The family moved to a house behind the old Tuolumne General Hospital, and Erma proceeded to explore. She was a favorite around town. Just down the street at the Chinese-style train depot (where the main Sonora post office is now) they let her play on the telegraph machine. Across the street was Standard Lumber and the Hales and Symons feed store. Down the road was the big U.S. Lime factory where her father sometimes worked.

“My father always wanted our cow to have fresh grass, and I had to pick a sack full every day,” Erma says. “Behind Hales and Symons they grew some kind of grass, alfalfa maybe, for their delivery horses. My neighbor worked there, and he would stand and watch so I wouldn’t get caught … Sometimes I would come and they would have a sack of grass already picked for me.”

Erma could never let a dare pass by. One day kids dared her to climb a cherry tree and pick cherries from a teacher’s yard. Next day, they got her to do it again. “I was up in the tree and the door of the house opened and there stood the teacher,” she recalls. “She had a bucket in her hand and she said, ‘Pick some for me too, will you Erma?’”

By age 12, Erma was working. She was a “mother’s helper” who got the high school art teacher’s two babies ready for the day. Erma also washed fancy dishes at another house. While still in grade school, she cleaned the town library, hauling ashes from the stove, dusting and polishing.

Erma’s first “real” job, at age 17, was at the telephone company, where Yosemite Title is today. She was still doing all the housework for her family and raising sister Virginia, who went to a neighbor while Erma worked. Erma was much younger than the other women at the phone company and they mothered her, even picking out her yellow wedding dress, “lacy as heck.”

Erma married Guido Giussi in 1928.  She was 19. The Depression was coming on but Erma’s family always managed. They had a garden and a cow, chickens and rabbits. Her husband worked for Hale and Symons in those years. But there were others in town who were homeless and hungry.

“The government would send a truck with food and park it in the area where the high school is now,” Erma recalls. “One time there would be cheese and rice and sugar and potatoes.  The next time it would have something else, but our family never had to use that.”

By 1944, Erma’s marriage was over. She had 4 children, Pete, 13, Leroy, 12, Lorraine, 11 and Arthur, 8. Once again, Erma didn’t shrink from what she had to do. She got a job.

“I didn’t even know how to ask,” says Erma. “Instead, I stood and cried in Mallard’s Grocery store, but Mrs. Mallard offered me a job anyway.”

How did she know Erma needed one? “Everyone knew,” says Erma.  “It was a small town.”

For five years she worked at Mallard’s (on Washington Street where Sonora Music is today), waiting on customers and stocking shelves. Mrs. Mallard loaned her a truck to drive between home and the grocery store. Later, Erma worked at J.C. Penney and in the kitchen of Tuolumne General Hospital. She got so fed up with cooking at work and at home that at night she’d tell her kids, “I feel like going outside to just yell and yell.” So she quit the kitchen job, but later resumed working for the county, cleaning the courthouse and other buildings until retiring at age 63.

Why did she never marry again?

“Whatever makes you think I’d have done that?” she says. “Who wants to go through that again?”

Back then, alone with four kids, neighborliness once again surrounded and supported Erma through those years.

“Just like my neighbor helped me get grass for the cow, and my neighbors taught me to wash and cook and iron. Just like the women at the phone company babied me, now everyone helped me raise my kids,” she recalls. “My father and brothers took care of my house, kept up my yard. My neighbors took my kids to the mountains in the summer. When I had to go to work early, my daughter would go to the neighbor who would do her hair. My kids were never alone. I’ve had a lot of people around me all my life and everyone always liked me and helped me.”

Family now includes nine grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. Her sister, Virginia, 89, still visits from Sacramento; her other siblings have died. Sons Pete and Leroy have passed away, but daughter Lorraine lives in Sonora and son Arthur keeps in close touch from Washington State.

Good friend Sandy Hargrove, who has helped Erma for the past 11 years, is in and out most days. She’s almost family. They’re as close as friends can be.

Today at 101, Erma has slowed down some, though not her mind and not her wit.

“My family says I’m spoiled,” she says.  “And I say, ‘You keep it up, too.’ ”

© 2010 Friends and Neighbors

Holly Rice/Photo by Ben Hicks

Don’t ask Holly Rice how it feels to be a leader in the ranks of the very old. Although he’s planning to celebrate his 101st birthday on Christmas Eve, as far as experiencing what it’s like to be very, very old, he’ll tell you he doesn’t know much about that yet.

“I see those old guys with their canes and their walkers,” he says, “and I say to myself, ‘I’m not there yet.’ ”

“I can’t explain it,” the Sonora man says, thinking about all the years piling up behind him. “I never thought much about getting older and I never tried to take real good care of myself. I smoked for 40 years. No filters, either. And I drank that Prohibition rotgut we had back then. I was in a couple of car wrecks too, but I never got hurt.”

Today at 100, he continues to be just as lucky. His driver’s license won’t expire until he’s 105. And he’s pretty healthy, though recently his daughter thought he should see a cardiologist.

“So I did,” he says, “and they hooked me up to some kind of machinery.”

The result? “He’ll outlive this machine,” the doctor said.

Holly Rice was born Dec. 24, 1909 into a railroad family in Nevada, Missouri, second son to Clara and Frank Rice. Because he was born on Christmas Eve, they called him Holly after Uncle Hol. Older brother Eddie was just 2.

Holly remembers his family as warm and loving, although his parents divorced when he was 6. After that, he only saw his father occasionally, but within several years gained a stepfather, Joe, whom he liked.

School was a mixed experience for Holly. The social part he enjoyed – baseball and dancing and roller skating – and math was tolerable, but the rest of the academics, not so much. He quit high school in his junior year.

After two fruitless years looking for work, Holly went back to school at a girlfriend’s urging and got his diploma. “But things weren’t any different after I graduated,” he says. It was 1929. The Depression was coming on, and “that piece of paper didn’t do me any good at all except to make my mother happy.”

As the Depression dragged on, Holly spent most of his time looking for work. For four years he worked with a handyman. “He didn’t have much work either,” Holly recalls, “but I did cement work with him or digging. Maybe I worked something like five days a month.”

There were other small jobs.

“I washed dishes, and in my early 20s I got some work with the WPA (Works Progress Administration) that Roosevelt started. We cut weeds, worked on the roads or cleaned out the rivers. Each of us would get just a little work, a few days at a time, and then someone else would get the work.  Can’t even remember how much they paid us. Just some kind of money.”

Still looking for work in 1932, Holly rode the rails to California, “hoboing,” as he calls it. “I told my mother we were thumbin’ it,” he says. It was dangerous. His grandfather was a railroad conductor, in fact, who had been hit by a train and killed. But Holly had watched hobos jumping on and off the trains and figured he could do the same.

“Just remember when you’re gonna jump off a moving train,” he explains, “the inside foot goes down first. Then the other one will come along.” He demonstrates. “Do it the other way, and you’re likely to lose your leg, or worse.”

His personal economy took a turn for the better when Montgomery Ward hired him as a clerk. He worked for Ward’s for several years, at several locations. In Lexington, Missouri he met Mary Catherine Stewart. He returned to California and parked cars in downtown Los Angeles for two years – starting pay, 28 cents an hour – while corresponding with Mary. They married in 1939 and settled in L.A.

Holly always wanted to work for the railroad and in 1940 got a job with Southern Pacific as an electrical crane operator, working high above the steam engines. The nation’s railroads were critical to the war effort, and his work won him seven draft deferments. It also left him partially deaf from the constant noise, and exposed him to asbestos.

“Down below, they would be lining the tops of the boilers with sheets of asbestos, pounding it in with heavy eight-inch hammers. Flakes came off, and floated right up to where I was sitting,” Holly says. “My work was very precise, so I would be leaning out so I could see better, and I breathed it all in. In those days, nobody thought nothin’ about that kind of danger.”

They bought a $4,000 house in El Monte, where they raised their two children, Eddie and Kathy. In 1952, Mary went to work at Lockheed’s Burbank factory. By 1964, respiratory problems forced Holly out of his rail job, and he began selling real estate. It was a prosperous time. “It’s hard to believe,” he says, “but CDs were paying 13 to 14 percent back then.”

Though he sold real estate for 20 years in Los Angeles and later on into his 80s in Las Vegas, Holly is modest when he reflects on the success he and his wife enjoyed. “It was all because of her hard work at Lockheed,” he says.

In 2003, Holly and Mary moved to Sonora to be near their children, and in 2007 Mary passed away.

In Holly’s home near Sonora, photos celebrating four generations cover his walls: of their children and grandchildren; of Holly himself, impressive as the Exalted Ruler of Sunland Elks Lodge, in Los Angeles County; having fun in Vegas, arm around a showgirl and posing with a million bucks; and happy shots taken on cruises over the years with his wife and children.

Holly expects he’ll continue to travel a bit, but these days his daily life is centered on housework, family and friends. He walks every day for exercise and likes to play shuffleboard or cards with friends, sometimes at the nearby senior center on Greenley Road. He enjoys excursions to Black Oak Casino and, less frequently, to Vegas. He’s always enjoyed pro wrestling and sometimes catches a match on TV.

Holly is still active in Sons in Retirement and the Sonora Geezers, a community service group with the motto, “We Give a Hoot.” He rode in this year’s Mother Lode Roundup Parade next to the Geezers’ mascot owl and a sign reading, “Holly Rice, Centenarian.”

What comes next?

“I know it can’t go on much longer,” Holly says, “but I don’t think much about it. Life’s been good to me.”

Maybe it was Lady Luck that gave him such a happy ride. Maybe it was his Christmas birth. But today he has no worries. He learned early on how to get off a moving train and has no doubt now that when it’s time to jump, he’ll get it right.

Copyright © 2010, Friends and Neighbors Magazine

Mickey Nichols/Photo by Stephanie Eaton

“I was a happy-go-lucky girl.”

Mickey Nichols is relaxing into the story of her 98 years. Orioles are visiting the feeder outside her living room, and she’s comfortable in an easy chair. Her memory is excellent, so there’s a lot to tell. It’s a surprise that the stories she chooses are not always happy and not all lucky.

She was born Camille Barbara McLaughlin on September 9, 1911 – a bit early, and far from home. Her parents were on a trip to Salt Lake City, buying woolens for the family’s Denver tailor shop. When she was 4, her Irish-born father, Arthur, died of complications from injuries he received in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

“He used to bring me chocolate and put it under my pillow where I would find it when I woke up in the morning,” she recalls. “That’s about all I remember about him.”

Camille was the middle child of three, between older brother Arthur and younger brother John. In 1917, the family watched the Denver funeral procession of Wild West showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, whose casket rested on a buckboard pulled by a mule team. It left an indelible impression.

“Buffalo Bill’s horse had no rider and walked behind the caisson. Buffalo Bill’s boots hung backward from the stirrups,” she recalls. “His wife and family followed behind in a carriage.”

The following winter, Arthur died in the flu pandemic. Camille herself became so desperately ill that, 94 years later, nightmarish images from the delirium remain clear in her mind. After surviving the raging fevers, she had another close call on a fishing trip with family friends. When the wind blew her hat off, she reached for it and fell from the riverbank.

“I remember the silty water of the Platte River rolling over my head like I was tumbling, over and over, but Mr. Ellis hooked my dress with his fish hook and reeled me in,” she says. “My mother  held me in her arms all night.”

Camille’s mother, Martha Ernestine Hoffmaster, married a second time, to Lewis Granville Burgess. The family moved to Sonora, where a relative lived, in the summer of 1918 after Arthur’s death. Over the next 10 years, five brothers and sisters joined Mickey and Johnnie: Evelyn, Albert, Lewis Jr., Elmer and Martha. Everyone worked, tending cows, chickens and a large garden at their home on Sonora’s north side.

“I had a lot of friends at school,” Mickey recalls, “but at home I worked. ‘We need butter,’ my mother would say, and I would get the cream and the churn. I had small hands that could fit in the canning jars, and I washed a lot of them. I also changed a lot of diapers.”

Soon after moving here, 7-year-old Mickey started second-grade at Sonora Elementary School’s Dome campus, a 10-minute walk from home. Completed in 1909, the Barretta Street school “looked like a palace to me” compared to the two-room school she’d attended in Colorado.

Her mother had named her Camille after a heroine in a book. At the Dome, she was renamed by older students who loved to play house at recess, with Camille as the baby. “Mickey was the baby’s name, and it just stuck.”

She graduated from Sonora High in 1929 and lived with her grandmother while earning  a two-year degree from the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. She credits her mother, who lived to age 98, for shaping her life’s direction.

“My mother taught me not to run around with my head in the air not seeing anything,” she says. “When she told me that, I looked down, and I saw a tiny blue flower – a Baby Blue Eyes. I always remember what she said. ‘There are many beautiful things all around you. You need to look for them.’”

She returned to Sonora, married, and waited tables at a popular Sonora cafe, The Lunchette. She met Gary Cooper and other stars and production workers on many of the movies filmed in Tuolumne County. Spotted by a Paramount Studio executive, she took a turn in Hollywood with bit parts like “girl at the train station,” or in crowd scenes.

It was exciting, a lark that paid about $700 a month. She hung out with a group of actors that included Cary Grant and William Powell. She knows some funny stories about them, but declines to share them for print. She’ll only say, “That William Powell, he was a clown!”

The studio offered her a contract, she says, but her husband refused to sign it. “He could have sued the studio, citing alienation of affection,” she says. “Like a nut, I came home.”

Back in Sonora after her Hollywood adventure, Mickey worked for five years as a salesclerk for Sonora’s Ben Franklin store, then moved to San Francisco to work as a gift department buyer in the Butler Brothers store.

After the war, she opened Sierra Studios gift shop on Washington Street, later adding a flower shop, Sonora Florist , and a Merle Norman cosmetics franchise.

“Sometimes I had three weddings on a Saturday, one at noon, one at 2 pm and one at 7 pm,” she recalls. “For high school proms I did everyone’s flowers different. I just enjoyed creating things.”

The downside to those busy years: two not-so-happy marriages. She had no children from either marriage, but raised her second husband’s son, Robert, as her own after the marriage ended.

Her third husband, physical education teacher Orville Nichols, was the charm: kind, appreciative, funny. In 1955 the couple moved to Hollister, where they raised his children, Steven and Karen, and Leonard, a foster child. Mickey earned a bachelor’s degree in art from San Jose State University, then taught in Hollister schools for 10 years.

Through those busy career years and beyond, she found time for community service. It came naturally. “I hardly ever met anyone I didn’t like,” she says.

In Hollister, she was a hospital volunteer and, with the Hollister Women’s Club, organized a show featuring 900 works of art by elementary school students.

She is a Sonora Soroptomist past president, and in the mid-1950s played the leads in Gay Nineties fundraisers for cancer research. She is a 25-year member and past president of the Aronos (Sonora, spelled backwards) Research Women’s Club. She’s older, in fact, than the club itself, which was founded in 1915.

Mickey Nichols still makes floral decorations and looks forward to doing more –whatever is needed.  “I care about people, so it’s important to me to work in my community,” she says. “It’s satisfying to know that you’re helping.”

She gets tired once in awhile, but a half-hour nap usually restores her. She still drives to club meetings and the grocery store.

“The biggest change in the county is traffic,” she says. “It’s very heavy, and there are so many new housing developments. Sonora has become more like a senior community. I’d just as soon be back 50 years, but I love the library and its programs, and the college is wonderful.”

As she looks ahead, this happy-go-lucky girl who survived childhood tragedy and embraced hard work and service in adulthood, is ready for whatever’s next.

“I look forward to it,” she says, “as the end of a busy life. I’m not afraid. I’m a Christian. I know that I’ll go on.”

© 2010 Friends and Neighbors Magazine

Emmalou with her sister, Winifred

“Mother didn’t fool around when it came to having her children,” says Emmalou Olson, recounting the story of her dramatic and premature arrival in 1910.

She was expected to appear in April, but instead chose the pre-dawn hours of February 1 – in the middle of a family vacation. Hailing from the cold of Colorado, her parents, Winifred and Howard McBroom, planned to have a balmy week on the Texas shore before taking on parenthood. They had only reached Waco when it became apparent Emmalou had other plans.

Delivered by a hastily summoned doctor, she was tiny, weighing in at less than three pounds by the hotel’s kitchen scale. She spent the first week of her life swaddled and tucked in a hotel dresser drawer.

They called her Pauline, after her mother’s brother, until Paul saw the red, wrinkled preemie and said: “That’s the ugliest baby I ever saw.” Her irate mother promptly renamed her. It never caused problems until a few years back when Emmalou tried to get a passport for a trip to Ireland. The doctor had died, the hotel had burned, no records remained: passport denied.

Emmalou and her sisters, Bobbie and Winifred, grew up on a ranch owned by their Irish-born grandfather, who came to the U.S. amid the Irish potato famine. Their father had grown up there, between Colorado Springs and Denver, and later became something of a scientist devoted to improving strains of barley and potatoes.

“I have lived through so many ages,” says Emmalou as she nears the century mark.

Her memories begin with the horse and buggy days and continue through 10 decades spanning two world wars, the Great Depression and remarkable societal and technological changes. In her lifetime, women gained the right to vote. Space travel. Civil rights. Computerization. More wars. An ever-more complex world compared to childhood days when 4-year-old Emmalou went to town with her grandmother on a shopping trip, “and with a fast-stepping horse we would go 25 miles each way in one afternoon.”

By the time she was 9, she was driving her own pony and cart, sometimes driving her sisters to the woods to play. When Emmalou started dating, Bobbie and Winnie would hide in the back of the car. As the car got rolling, stifled giggles would erupt from the backseat, to Emmalou’s great embarrassment.

Their mother had a college degree, rare for that time, and had taught kindergarten. From the ranch, she worked with the U.S. Extension Service to bring practical classes to the women of the community, and kept her daughters active in 4-H. The value she placed on education left its mark on the girls, who were schooled in one- and two-room schoolhouses. For Emmalou’s senior year, her mother sent Bobbie and Emmalou to high school in the nearest town, 15 miles away, for a better education.

At Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Emmalou majored in Greek and Latin, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. By age 20, she was teaching high school Latin and English. She taught for a year, then earned a master’s degree in education. All three McBroom girls graduated from college, a triumph in the middle of the Depression.

In 1932 Emmalou was a high school Latin teacher in Monument when she met her future husband, Mel. She was sitting on a box of fruit in the general store when someone slapped her on the back. “How are you today?” a male voice inquired. “I am very fine,” Emmalou responded a little frostily, then walked out. “I certainly didn’t know anyone who would slap me on the back,” she says. But get to know him she did. Though the Depression slowed the union, 10 years later they were married.

The newlyweds bought a little ranch near Colorado Springs and built a log house with beamed ceilings and a huge stone fireplace. Mel was a lumber man and bred Arabian horses. Emmalou taught high school until she was asked to fill in for a sixth-grade teacher. It became her favorite class, and geology and science, her favorite subjects.

Though Emmalou taught more than 1,200 children over the years, she had no children of her own. It was her sister Winnie who furnished a family for her: sons Mike and Pat, and a daughter, also named Emmalou. Their aunt was the “summer mom” for one or more of the children for years, time spent riding horses at the Colorado ranch.

“It all just flowed,” Emmalou says, reflecting on the past century, “and it was all wonderful.”

Yes, there were hard times. In the Depression, her parents lost their ranch – but at  the same time, set a vivid example on coping with adversity. “When Daddy came home from the bank with the news of the foreclosure,” she recalls, “Mother put on her new orange dress and we had a party. ‘It’s a new life,’ Mother said.  She was always determined to be happy, and she always came out on top.”

Sister Bobbie died in 1941. After Mel passed away in 1983, Emmalou moved to Jamestown. Today, the sisters live in connecting houses on Winifred’s Jamestown area ranch, and enjoy time with Winifred’s son, Pat, and his wife, Juliana, who live next door, and Pat’s sister Emmalou, who lives in Oakdale.

The elder Emmalou enjoys the sitting room Pat built for her. As she talks, her original Teddy Roosevelt teddy bear sits in a rocking chair at her side, her impressive pottery collection nearby. The sisters eat together and read together and enjoy their favorite television shows side by side.

Her sister, who became Winifred Stone in 1935, is a lifelong teacher who retired from Curtis Creek School after 25 years. She has 11 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren, and Emmalou loves them all dearly. “The love of all my family, that’s what has kept me alive,” she says.

Her thoughts of the future? Veteran English teacher that she is, she quotes Tennyson: “Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, when I put out to sea.”

© 2009, Friends and Neighbors Magazine

That’s the secret to her happiness, says retired schoolteacher Lurline Bird, who turns 100 years old in October and has been happy for every one of them.

“It’s the work you do to help others that’s important,” she says. “When I retired, I started to volunteer, and I kept on volunteering right into my nineties.”

Lurline is the volunteer who managed Sonora Community Hospital’s Lifeline program from its start in 1983 until 2000, when her husband’s failing health kept her closer to home. The fee-based program’s electronic devices can summon emergency aid, thus helping people live independently and in their own homes.

“If we had a patient who needed a Lifeline device, Lurline was the one we called,” says Cathie Peacock, the hospital’s volunteer coordinator at the time. “It was a big job.  Lurline was responsible for the paperwork, for making the home assessment, and for training users.”

Lurline also volunteered on the hospital’s nursing units.  “One Sunday morning after church I had to stop off at the hospital on Lifeline business,” she recalls. “They didn’t have a Pink Lady, and so I stayed to help. From then on I volunteered on Sunday mornings. I figured the Lord needed me at the hospital more than he needed me at church.”

Lurline was born in Oakland on Oct. 1, 1909, the daughter of Pearl and Antoine Miguel.  Her father was Hawaiian, a seafaring man, and her mother was from Kansas and worked in a mill. Lurline had four brothers and remembers their childhood as both idyllic and adventurous. Back then, Oakland was a place of “wildflowers and meadowlarks,” with an ocean shore so covered with shells Lurline would fill up her bloomers to carry as many home as she could.

She remembers a sea voyage to Hawaii when she was 8, not on a fancy tourist ship, but a ship her father was working on. She’ll never forget her fright “when one of the crew picked up my brother Art, who was 4, held him over the railing and acted like he was going to drop him in the ocean.”

In Honolulu in 1917, she and her brothers watched the funeral procession of Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii. “There were balconies above the shops, just like in Sonora,” she recalls. “Father’s friend lived in an apartment above a store and he let us watch from the balcony. I remember it like yesterday, the men in loincloths leading the long funeral procession and the women following them in black dresses that covered them from head to foot.”

In 1937 Lurline married Ted Bird, whom she met six years earlier at San Francisco State Teachers College (now San Francisco State University). Years of violin lessons had earned her a place in the orchestra where Ted, an Angels Camp native, played trumpet.

“We met one night after rehearsal when Ted picked up my violin and started to walk out the door with it. I stopped him and said, Where are you going with my violin? This was during the Depression. He said, I thought I could get a buck for it.

“After that,” Lurline reflects, “we were always together and finally we were married.”

Theirs was a college romance that developed into a lifelong partnership devoted to community service. She began her teaching career in a two-room schoolhouse in Copperopolis and Ted began his in Altaville, now part of Angels Camp. When their sons, David, now a retired Sonora police officer, and Phillip, an artist, were school age, Lurline returned to teaching. For 10 years she taught the children of Columbia, where she started a kindergarten, then taught for 10 years at Sonora Elementary School.

Ted held teaching and supervisory roles in Calaveras County schools from 1933 to 1946, when they moved to Sonora. Ted led Sonora Elementary for 23 years, first as principal and later as district superintendent.

Lurline and Ted retired from the school system in 1969, but their influence as outstanding citizens continued strong for the rest of the century. In addition to Lurline’s hospital work, they remained active in the Elks, Eagles and Moose lodges, E Clampus Vitus, county Historical Society, Red Cross and American Teachers Association. The Theodore Bird Independent Study High School is named for Ted.

Though she continues to grieve Ted’s passing a year ago – in 2007, they celebrated their 70^th anniversary – Lurline has retained her lifelong hold on happiness. Her physical health is excellent and her mind is sharp. She still lives in the house Ted built in 1947 that perches high up a spidery street above downtown Sonora. At 99, she drives her own car and does her own shopping. She has no problem parking in the garage below the house and maneuvering groceries up the 14 steps into her kitchen.

“My doctor brags about me,” she’ll tell you. You can see why.

As she nears 100, Lurline says she has no worries. She is grateful to have so many happy memories and a wealth of friends and family in close touch.

“These days I spend a lot of my time reminiscing,” she says. “I play it all over in my mind, all the good times we had and oh, how I enjoy it. I lie in my bed, think about Ted and enjoy all of it all over again.”

© 2009, Friends and Neighbors Magazine