Yesterday's Children

Text by Ron McCoyra Photographs by Fred Griffin Not long ago, I sat in a Tucson home, holding an artifact, a wafer-thin slice of history created in 1910 when a camera's shutter opened for an instant. The photo's subject was haunting: a beautiful young woman, a Chicago Art Institute model swathed in an American flag, posed regally as heroic Columbia atop a prohibitionist float in a parade that snaked along Chicago's Michigan Avenue and around the Loop on a spring day. Returning the snapshot to its place in a wellthumbed album, I gazed across the room into my host's face, indelibly marked by age, nature's unerring sculptor. Now 101 years old, Katherine Breckenridge is one of Arizona's 250 persons who have lived a century or more. I'd met my first centenarians a couple of years before at the Pioneers' Home in Prescott while working as an oral historian for Arizona State University's Department of Archives and Manuscripts. John Langham seemed embarrassed with the attention he received that day two years ago on his 103rd birthday. Ola Canion, who has since died, talked of her experience as an 18 year old walking beside her family's covered wagon, from Texas to the mines at Bisbee in 1905. Long active in the Daughters of the Confederacy - she helped pave the way for erecting the organization's monument in Wesley Bolin Plaza near the state capitol - Ola spoke of an uncle killed while fighting for the gray at the Battle of Picacho Pass in 1862, one of Arizona's two Civil War engagements. She had recently led the Governor's Cup walk in Phoenix, wearing her mother's dress and bonnet.

Who are they, these centenarians?

Four out of five are women. Nearly all have been married. A quarter live independently. Nearly all were - and some still are - active in various endeavors, such as assisting church and charitable groups, teaching, or nursing. The overwhelming majority grew up on farms, most in the Midwest and South - this was a rural nation until 1920-though a few participated in the great tidal wave of immigration that swept into the country around the turn of the century. Hardly any drank or smoked much in their younger days, though one gentleman remembered waking up with a bad taste in his mouth one morning in 1925 and deciding to kick his three-pack-a-day cigarette and quart-a-day bourbon habits.

The only centenarian qualification is a birthdate in 1890 or earlier. In those 19th Century days, Arizonans were just starting to talk about whether the territory should become a state. There were no electric washing machines, no automobiles, airplanes, televisions, radios, computers, fax machines, or pocket calculators. Forget electricity and atomic reactors; steam and sweat were the chief energy sources. "There's hardly anything you touch today that was in use in my younger days," observes Katherine Breckenridge.

The centenarians, like the population at large, are a diverse lot. And each is unique, a thread in the intriguing weave done on history's loom.

Because Ullena Beal was a sickly child, her family moved from Silverton, Colorado, to Chicago. Today, Ullena, who is 103 years old, lives in the rambling adobe home her husband built in Tucson in 1928. "I suffered from a chronic cough," she explains. "My doctor said I needed a drier climate, so in 1928 my husband, our three adopted children, and I started driving south. The farther we went, the better I felt. When I finally breathed Arizona's warm air, I knew this was the right place for me. Tucson was a very neighborly place. If I met a person on the street and smiled, they always smiled back."

Lizzie Davis, born in Arkansas, was two when she rode in a covered wagon to Texas in 1890. "That's the way people moved around then," she says. Lizzie, whose grandfather was shot by bushwhackers in Arkansas during the Civil War, moved to Yuma three years ago and still pieces quilts. The nail of the index finger on her left hand is worn away at the edge from constant contact with sewing needles. The stitching on her quilts is fine, like machine work. "My mother taught me about quilting when I was six," Lizzie says with a Texas twang. "I guess you kind of get the hang of it after 94 years."

World War I veteran William Van Hooser, who is 102 years old, spent part of his life as a tobacco farmer in Kentucky and has been married since 1917. Asked for the secret to his longevity, Van (as he's known to friends) smiles. "I jest kept goin'." His greatest accomplishment? "Stayin' out of jail." Three years ago, Van's sister-in-law sold his ladder. "He was always climbing up to repair the roof or prune the grapefruit tree," she explains. "I thought when he turned 99 that was enough." Van still mows the lawn outside his home near Yuma, though, and joins pals for games of pool. "Life's a dance," Van says philosophically, take it one step at a time and keep listening for the music."

Hedvig Johansson Peterson undertook the oftentimes dangerous Atlantic voyage,

leaving her native Sweden at the age of 13 in 1902. "I did it to get an education and make my life a little better," she says with a slight accent. Like many immigrants, Hedvig went where she had relatives, in her case, Lindsborg, Kansas, still a Scandinavian haven on the plains. In 1929, the year the Great Depression began, a doctor advised Hedvig's husband to move to Arizona's dry climate for health reasons. The couple homesteaded 640 acres in the Tortolita Mountains near Marana, living in a surplus military barrack that had three canvas walls. That sort of grit came in handy a year ago. Suspecting a stockbroker of taking advantage of her failing eyesight, Hedvig demanded a hearing before an arbitration panel of the National

"THERE'S HARDLY ANYTHING YOU TOUCH TODAY THAT WAS IN USE IN MY YOUNGER DAYS:" KATHERINE BRECKENRIDGE

Association of Securities Dealers and won damages of $1.25 million. Robert Cushman, 104, lives near Yuma. Before joining General John J. Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, he was posted near the Mexican border at Fort Clark, Texas. "The Mexican Revolution was going on, and I was with the Eleventh Cavalry," Cushman says. "Revolutionaries brought up cattle they'd stolen in Mexico and sold them to the Army for beef. While the Army was busy buying beef, the revolutionaries stole Army horses to sell in Mexico." Anne Rush moved to Tucson from Kankakee, Illinois, in 1931, driving a Buick and stopping at tourist courts, the forerunners of today's motels. "When I came here, I thought I'd arrived at the end of the world. But when I look back on it, Tucson was really a charming town with its hitching posts, dirt streets, board sidewalks, wooden canopies overhead to protect shoppers from the summer sun, and dusty prospectors leading burros in from Oracle on weekends for supplies." One thing for sure about centenarians: their numbers are growing fast. "The Census Bureau estimates there are 25,000 centenarians in America today, 10 times as many as 30 years ago," says Jo Ann Pedrick, executive director of the Governor's Advisory Council on Aging, the agency charged with keeping abreast of age-related issues. State law requires that the majority of the 15 members appointed to the council be at least 60 years old. "Age slows people down, so many centenarians don't get around much and seem virtually invisible," says Robin Klaehn, a registered nurse whose Tucson-based consulting firm advises agencies how to improve the delivery of home health care. "As a result, younger people seldom come into contact with them. Fortunately, that's starting to change." Indeed it is. Lynn Peters Adler, chairperson of the Council on Aging's Centenarian Committee, deserves credit for putting the spotlight on Arizona's centenarians. In1985 she began devoting much of her time to them. Adler's lobbying resulted in the proclamation of an Arizona Centenarian Week in 1987, followed by a Salute to Arizona Centenarians at the state capitol. Since that time, centenarian-oriented activities on the local level have blossomed throughout Arizona.

"Centenarians teach us that it's possible to be active and productive for many, many years," says Jo Ann Pedrick of the governor's council. "In Arizona today there are 564,000 people 65 or older. In 10 years there'll be 844,000. You don't stop living somewhere around 65. By the year 2000, we'll have some 200,000 centenarians in the U.S. So when you're 60, you may have a third of your life ahead of you. You can be involved in your community, in personal growth. Once, people said life began at 40. Tomorrow, who knows, maybe it'll begin at 70."

"Having taken each year as it came," says Ullena Beal, "the buildup was so gradual that I don't realize I'm a hundred years old." Her words bring to mind a story Congressman Morris Udall told Katherine Breckenridge on her hundredth birthday. An elderly gentleman was asked on the centenary of his birth how he attained such an advanced age." Oh," he answered, "I never drank liquor or smoked. I always went to bed early, worked hard, and ate properly."

"But look," the questioner said, "I had an uncle who did just what you're talking about, and he died when he was 60."

"Well," the centenarian replied, "I guess he just didn't do it long enough."

That breezy, commonsensical approach characterizes Billy Earley. Billy was born in New York in 1888, grew up in Ohio, and lived in Missouri until 1929, when she drove her DeSoto to Tucson. "My first night in Arizona," she remembers, "I didn't go to sleep until I'd learned the names of all the counties and county seats."

After exploring Arizona, Billy settled on Florence, where she still resides. "I liked the people," she recalls. "Florence was a

"YOU'VE GOT TO RESPECT THE DESERT. AFTER ALL, THE SNAKES AND GILA MONSTERS WERE HERE FIRST. MAYBE I'M JUST A BORN DESERT RAT:" BILLY EARLEY colorful place, with its wooden sidewalks, dirt streets, and hitching posts." A history buff intensely interested in her surroundings, Billy plunged into studying Arizona's saga. She became a charter member of the Pinal County Historical Society, received the Sharlot Hall Award for contributions to Arizona historical stud-ies, led the drive in 1987 to place a histor-ical marker on Poston Butte, where Charles D. Poston, "The Father of Arizona," is buried (see Arizona Highways, August 1988), and pushed for repair of the marker at the spot near Florence where her friend, Western film actor Tom Mix, was killed in an automobile crash in 1940. Billy is also a cook of some renown, whose 100-year-old oatmeal cookie recipe appears in the Arizona Highways Heritage Cookbook. "Arizona's been pretty successful in preserving its heritage," says Billy. "We're paying more attention to historic buildings and the land than we did years ago. You've got to respect the desert. After all, the snakes and Gila monsters were here first. Maybe I'm just a born desert rat. "I still don't have a drier. The solar system's good enough for me," Billy notes with pride. "I even have all my own teeth, though a lot of them are retreads. Same stuff they use to glue tiles on the outside of the space shuttle, I think." Billy pauses to consider the question of age, then adds: "Getting old is in your own thinking. I want to be useful. Any time I can do something of value, that's fine. But just to sit here in a rocking chair in the glory of being 102 years old? That doesn't appeal to me at all. I want to do what I can to help other people. That's my reli-gion; that's what I practice." Billy says she'd like to go to Washing-ton, D.C., and visit the Vietnam Memorial. Or catch an opera at Kennedy Center. And, oh yes, there is one other item. "If NASA would let me, I'd go to the moon tomorrow."