PORT ANGELES — For Dorothy Waters, 100, of Port Angeles, the secret to a long life is a happy one.
“I’ve just never been depressed,” she said.
“If I feel myself going that way a bit, I just try to pull myself out of it.
“I think that happiness is what has given me a long life.”
Waters, who officially turned 100 on Oct. 25, said she was surprised to find herself there.
“I used to think 100 would be a terrible age to get to,” she said.
“But then I started getting closer, and I hoped that I would.”
Although she exercises by polka dancing and walking, she said she hasn’t always made a practice of it.
“I don’t know why I’ve been healthy — I haven’t always done things right,” she said.
“We won’t get into that.”
She celebrated in style on her birthday with 14 friends who came over to wish her well, she said.
“I’ve outlived almost all of my friends,” she said.
“But I got 14 people over here for my party.”
Still cleaning gutters
She regularly cleans her own gutters and mows her lawn.
“My neighbors just have a fit,” she said.
“I get a whole lot more done when they aren’t at home.
“But they don’t notice I’m only going up on the second step of the ladder now, not the third.”
Dorothy Waters was born Oct. 25, 1910, to Robert and Mary Christensen in Junction City, Kan.
She attended the University of Kansas to become a social worker — something her father never expected.
“He said for me to go to business school or nursing school,” she said.
“But I told him that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
“So after some thought — and I was their only child — he said that, yeah, he’d send me to college.”
Joining the Alpha Xi Delta sorority, she found her place.
“I was lonely growing up as an only child, but I joined a sorority and had some girlfriends,” she said.
As a young social worker in Beloit, Kan., she spotted 32-year-old Gene Waters, who owned a Deluxe Cleaners near her workplace.
“Someone had told me that he would never marry,” she said.
He visited her house to drop off her cleaning but refused to leave it when she wasn’t home because she hadn’t left payment for the clothes, she said.
“I thought, ‘Oh, good, it gives me another chance to go down and make another impression,'” she said.
Girl gets the guy
“It turns out he did marry.”
Not one for the fanfare of a wedding dress and large ceremony, Waters said she and Gene married on their way to a weekend trip out of town in 1935.
“We had kind of decided before we left that we’d go get married,” she said.
But because her office was in the process of layoffs — focusing on the married women — the couple kept their union a secret until Waters was laid off four months later.
She and Gene had one child, Gene Waters Jr., who died in Arizona at age 50.
Waters spent her life until 1970 in Kansas.
In 1969, she and her husband retired and decided to move to Port Angeles, the haven of their boat, the Gypsy Girl.
The couple sailed the boat up to Port Angeles in 1963 and visited a couple times a year until they moved in 1970.
When first visiting Port Angeles, Dorothy Waters spotted a plot of land on the bluffs of Port Angeles — now off Cedar Park Drive — which they bought on the spot.
She still resides there.
She attributes much of her good health to her happiness and polka dancing — which she took up after the death of her husband and meeting Tony Trzebiatowski, who was a companion of hers for 20 years until his death.
“It was a good life — different than with my husband, but both of them were very good,” she said.
“He had nine children, and they are very good to me. I have no family left, but they call me and check in with me, so that is good.”
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladaily news.com.
