SEQUIM — Opal Ward is happy and eager to live another year.
Coming from anybody else that might seem unremarkable.
Coming from Ward, who on Monday marked her 102nd birthday with family and friends, it’s a whole different story — and a long one at that.
“I’m over 100 now,” she said with a broad smile, an almost giddy tone to her voice. “I get younger every day, not older.”
She survived the Great Depression, two world wars, triple-bypass surgery and most of the 20th century altogether.
A positive attitude and keeping calm is the secret to a long life, Ward said.
“I’ve always been on the right side,” she said. “I feel good and I hardly ever get sick.”
Ward has been living for the past three years at Sherwood Assisted Living Center on Hendrickson Street, and her son, Richard, watches over her.
A retired engineer who owns Model A and Model T Fords, Richard and his wife, Betty, were going to celebrate with Opal at their Sequim home Monday night, inviting friends over to have dessert with Opal.
Although she is wheelchair-bound after a broken hip and gangrene in her right foot resulting from a vascular blockage, Ward is determined to get up and walk again. From the sitting position, she still exercises regularly.
She has been a walker for much of her life, remembering years when she walked five miles a day along the shores of Long Beach, Calif., where she and her late husband, Lloyd, lived in the late 1920s and into the 1930s.
They were both schoolteachers in Raton, N.M., before moving to California, but also owned a restaurant and gas station — even ran a bus tour business to Las Vegas and Laughlin, Nev.
Lloyd died in 2005 at 93.
The daughter of an Oklahoma cattleman, Opal remembers growing up and riding a horse named Bones.
Another thing that stands out in her life is surviving the 1933 earthquake in Long Beach while she was pregnant with Richard.
“I went for the door and fell to me knees,” she recalled, saying for some reason she had moved her car out of the garage before it collapsed during the temblor.
“People slept outside for weeks and weeks,” she said of the magnitude 6.25 quake that caused widespread damage to brick buildings with unreinforced masonry walls, including many of the school buildings in Long Beach and surrounding areas, which were destroyed.
Ward said she wears a hearing aid so she can better know what goes on around her.
“I don’t want to miss anything,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
