Weiser resident turns 100 next week


Linda Nelson, left, with her mother, Leona Clark, who celebrates her 100th birthday on Monday, July 18. Leona said the secret to her good health is plenty of activity and exercise. Photo by Philip A. Janquart
By: 
Philip A. Janquart
Leona Clark walks more than many people half her age.
 At one point, she was putting in three miles a day but recently scaled back to two due to some lingering hip pain. 
 That’s saying a lot of a woman who turns 100 on Monday. 
 “I don’t feel any different than last year,” Leona said from the visiting room at Indianhead Estates, an assisted living community in Weiser where she has resided for the last three years.
 “I walk a lot,” she said. “This younger generation doesn’t walk much.”
 Leona, a Weiser native and former local businesswoman, hurt her hip when she fell off the steps leading into her home.
 “She didn’t break anything,” said daughter, Linda Nelson. “She never breaks anything.”
 And maybe that’s because she grew up tougher than most and has stayed active throughout her life.
 “We worked a lot,” Leona said. “We worked from the time we were tiny, little kids and a lot of it was heavy work. It makes a difference. I’m still active. The main thing is taking care of yourself.”
 
The Early Years
 Leona was born on July 18, 1922, in a small farmhouse near the Weiser River.
 “My dad was working for a farmer and that’s where I was born; no hospital,” she said. “They got hold of a doctor that was supposed to deliver me, but I decided I wasn’t going to wait, so dad went out on a horse to meet him and told him he might as well just go back to Weiser.”
 The family was poor and during the ‘20s and ‘30s, Leona’s father took jobs when and where he could. 
 “You couldn’t find a job, so you looked around until you could find one; I lived all over,” she said. “The game warden would let us poach out of season during the Depression so we could have something to eat, otherwise you wouldn’t have any meat or anything like that.”
 The family eventually moved to Goodrich, located northeast of Cambridge. That’s where Clark spent first grade before transferring to an elementary school in Boise. The family came back to Weiser a year later, Clark attending Monroe School, near Monroe Creek east of Weiser.
 Her dad was a good farmer. During the Depression he brought the family to Baker City where he also worked a cattle ranch and drove a 22-head mule team out of area mines, some of them in the Riggins area.
 Like most others, the family lived in a bunkhouse during their time in Baker City. Leona remembers poor living conditions and rats jumping up on her bed in the middle of the night.
 “We got used to it,” she said. “There was a lot; I don’t know, it didn’t bother us because that’s how we were raised.”
 She has fond memories of her uncle who Leona said was always with them.
 “The best part of it was my uncle, he lived with us, and he’d take us down, my sis and I, to see all of the gold,” she said. “It was beautiful, and it was exciting to think that we were going to be able to go down into that mine.”
 
Hard Work
 Leona learned to milk cows by hand in the third grade and herded sheep and other types of livestock on horseback and on foot.
 “We would get up in the morning, do the milking, get our horses, get the sheep out of the field, and take them out into the hills,” she said. “We had nothing, but we didn’t know any different because that’s the way we were born, that’s all we knew.”
 Creature comforts were scarce, Leona’s family making do without electricity in many of the places they lived. She didn’t know what indoor plumbing was until she was 10-years-old when she saw a toilet for the first time.
 One of her fondest memories was her mother, Josephine or “Joe”, who helped her husband run cattle aside from raising their kids.
 “My mother was a homemaker; Mom was the best mother you could ever want, and she took real good care of us,” Leona said. “We lived out on a big cattle ranch, and she would drive cattle with my dad. She would put me, my sis, and my brother, who was just a tiny, little thing, in the saddle and we’d ride along.”
 The family bought a car, a Studebaker, when she was nine.
 Life wasn’t all hard work, her mother teaching her kids how to dance, her parents playing musical instruments at community gatherings and dances on Saturday nights.
 “Mom was always teaching us how to dance and my sis and I were pretty good at it,” said Leona, who danced at the local grocery store and post office for farmers who gathered to play cards.
 “That was before I was in school,” she said. “They would say, ‘Ok, Leona, it’s time for you to have some candy but you have to dance for it.’ So, they would put me up on the counter and I would Charleston for them, and I’d go home with a sack full of candy.”
 Leona later attended Weiser High School but dropped out to go to beauty school where she became a beautician and eventually ran her own business in Weiser for about 30 years.
 She married Jim Skow in 1946 and had a daughter, Linda, and a son, Mike. The two were married for 32 years before Jim passed away from cancer in 1978. She married Glendon Clark in 1979. Her second marriage also lasted 32 years, Glendon passing away in 2011. 
 Leona retired in 1984 at the age of 62, she and Glendon spending much of their time dancing with friends. Leona also loved to cook and became known for her pies.
 She said people today have too much and that she is happy with the life she has lived.
 “They don’t appreciate what they have,” she said of modern society. “It was a hard life, but it was good. We had good times, and we had bad times, but that’s just how it is. I wouldn’t live like kids do nowadays. 
   “Back then, everything and everyone was the same; everyone was just working hard to survive. All of us kids learned a lot. It was a real good lesson, to be raised in a place and time like that.”
 

Category:

Signal American

18 E. Idaho St.
Weiser, ID 83672
PH: (208) 549-1717
FAX: (208) 549-1718
 

Connect with Us