Stopping By: Walking toward 100
“I’ll probably take a walk,” said Kurpies, who makes a habit of walking four times around the parking lot of her McMinnville apartment complex every day.
Born July 15, 1924, in North Dakota and raised in Canada and Washington, she’s been walking ever since she could pull herself upright.
She and her siblings walked two miles to school when the bus driver forgot to stop at their home near Pe Ell, Washington. As an adult, she walked two miles a day for health until recent years.
She’s walked in just about every state on her travels, as well.
The walking, along with a regime of vitamins and alfalfa tablets, have helped keep her moving and healthy over the years. She also inherited good genes – aunts on her father’s and mother’s sides lived to 101 and 103, respectively.
She never smoked and rarely drank. “Maybe a beer with pizza or eggnog at Christmas,” she allowed.
Her advice: “Don’t do anything wrong. Just enjoy your life, and stay active.”
After first learning to walk in North Dakota, she moved to Canada with her family when she was 4.
Her father heard that the Canadian government was offering five acres of land free to new settlers. So off they went to tiny Livelong, Saskatchewan, a hamlet 300 miles east of Edmonton.
She was the oldest of the four children in her family. She remembers one of her first jobs around the house, weeding the carrots.
There was always time to play, as well. Back then, she said, children could be children longer. “At 12, you were still a kid, not a teenager,” she said.
She recalled having a doll as a child, a “hard-headed one with a ragdoll body and hard legs and feet.” Other than that, she said, “I don’t know if we had toys”; instead, they made up games.
“We were lucky for Christmas to get an orange and one piece of candy,” she said.
She was a teen when her family moved to the Pe Ell area (in the Coast Range west of Chehalis) settling into a five-bedroom house – spacious, but lacking indoor plumbing. They stocked the outhouse with catalogs for toilet paper.
The house was attached to a Shell gas station. “The pump was right outside our front door,” she said.
Margaret helped serve customers. “I filled the tank, checked the water and oil and did the windshield,” she said. She gassed up her family’s Model T, too.
In addition to pumping gas, Margaret worked at a fruit and vegetable cannery when she was a teen. “I could use my hands well, so I made cartons,” she said.
She also was good at sewing and made her own clothes.
Her family listened to the radio for entertainment and news. On Dec. 7, 1941, they heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
“We were afraid the Japanese were going to come over to Washington and bomb, too,” she said.
The next year, just after graduating from high school, Margaret took a train to Los Angeles, where her fiance, Marvin, was stationed in the Navy.
As her new life started, she looked for a job. She saw an ad for a hotel switchboard operator position; in addition to a salary, it came with an apartment.
She applied. “How long have you been married?” the kindly manager asked the young woman.
Margaret consulted her watch. “About two hours,” she told him.
She got the job.
“We didn’t even have a phone at home,” she recalled, “but I thought I could learn.”
She enjoyed the work. When the phones weren’t ringing, she filled her time by crocheting a large tablecloth.
A hotel guest, who happened to be the late President Roosevelt’s daughter-in-law, admired her work and offered to buy it for $500, a huge sum. But she said no, and later passed the tablecloth down to her son, Marty.
Margaret quit the switchboard after a few years in order to be a stay-at-home mother.
She made her own bread, rolls and waffles from scratch, using techniques she’d learned from her mother. “We had a wood stove with a reservoir for hot water,” she recalled. “I had to stand on a chair to reach the work surface.
As a mother herself, she passed her skills on. “Marty would be right beside me when I kneaded,” she said. “He’d make a bun out of the scraps.”
One day, Marty went to a friend’s house for lunch. But the other mother sent him home because he complained about the store-bought bread. He was used to the much tastier and healthier homemade kind.
Margaret also grew a big garden and canned – “so many green beans!” along with tomatoes, spaghetti, pickles and other produce.
Later, after her second husband, West, retired, she returned to work to earn her own money. She found a job in Washington state government offices.
Now long retired herself, Margaret enjoys reading — “true stories, not fiction,” she said. “I want to read something that’s really happened, not something made up.”
She also keeps scrapbooks about family history, and likes playing dominoes and the card game Hand & Foot.
When she married for the final time, it was to Maurice Kurpies, whom she had known all her life, she said.
They enjoyed traveling, spending seven years driving “all over the place, to every state,” in their motorhome.
Almost every state, she corrected. They parked the motorhome and flew, instead, when they went to Hawaii; they wanted to visit Pearl Harbor, where Maurice had been stationed when he was in the service.
Margaret enjoyed Hawaii and most of the other states, especially Maine, where they caught lobsters and clams. But Texas … well, “Texas was the longest state with nothing” to capture her interest.
When not on the road, they’d been living in Olympia, Washington. But after visiting Oregon, where her husband’s children lived, they decided to relocate to McMinnville.
The move put them close to two of his daughters, Kathy Rinck and Donna Fitzgerald.
It’s been 20 years since Margaret and Maurice moved into the apartment complex where she still lives. Sadly, her husband died only eight months after they arrived.
“I was happy with Maurice,” said Margaret, who wears his wedding band on a chain around her neck. “Our 12 ½ years together were the happiest of my life.”
She still likes the apartment, both for its memories of their life together and for its location. “I like to look out at the trees,” she said.
She enjoys watching the birds, too. Before she gave up her driver’s license at age 96 (“Police don’t like to see old people driving”) she often drove to the store to pick up 25-pound bags of birdseed for her feathered friends.
Once, while she still had a license, Margaret motored across the country by herself, first to Wisconsin to see her aunt, then back to North Dakota and into Canada. She meandered home, visiting relatives and friends along the way.
Now she looks forward to people coming to visit her. Fitzgerald is there daily, and Rinck almost as often.
Her son and two granddaughters, all of whom live in Alaska, will be here for her birthday, along with other relatives and friends.
With various people arriving on different days, Fitzgerald said, they will probably stretch their celebration from about July 6 to 10.
“We all love her dearly,” Fitzgerald said.
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