PORT TOWNSEND— Dorothy Graham turns 100 years old today and would rather that people not make a fuss.
“I can’t tell you what it feels like to be 100,” she said Monday.
“I’m not 100 yet.”
The big party was on Saturday, when about 25 people from Oregon, Canada, California Montana, Texas and Rhode Island came to visit.
“I am grateful for my loving family, that they all came here and they all get along,” Graham said.
Family connections have been important to her during her entire life, from the time she was born as Dorothy Eileen Webb on March 29, 1911, in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
She was born two months premature when one grandmother said she wasn’t going to make it, but the other disagreed and put the infant in the oven as a makeshift incubator.
For much of her life, her two brothers called her “our half-baked” sister,” she recalled.
At the beginning of the Great Depression she had a job at men’s clothing store in Vancouver, B.C., but came back to work in January 1931 to find “that everyone had been let go except me and the manager, and I was the low person on the totem pole.”
The store manager “taught me everything there was to know about sales” that carried her through that job and into the next.
During the Depression, she was the only person with a job and supported the whole family.
She made about $10 a week, and her mother gave her back 25 cents a day for lunch.
“All the money I made went to my parents and there was never any questions about it,” she said.
“The Depression brought us closer, and if a family didn’t work together they didn’t make it.”
Dorothy married Harry Graham after knowing him for about four years.
“He told everyone he was going to marry me, but he didn’t tell me,” he said.
The family, which included 2-year-old Peggy, moved from Vancouver to California in 1941.
A second daughter, Barbara, was born in 1943.
Harry Graham died in 1983 and Peggy Graham Joseph died in 1999.
After her daughter’s death, Graham moved to the Fifth Avenue Retirement Apartments in Sequim to be closer to other daughter Barbara Graham Way, who had moved to Port Townsend.
She moved to Seaport Landing in Port Townsend last year.
“I’d rather be living in Sequim, where I have more friends,” she said.
“But its better for the family that I am here.”
For several years, she knitted hats and blankets for foster children “so they would have something of their own.”
Knitting is something that her hands can no longer manage.
She used to take classes, but now when she goes to class, “I just fall asleep.”
On her birthday today, her daughter plans to take her to the Public House Grill in Port Townsend “because she really likes the fish and chips.”
She has slowed down, but still responds quickly when asked about what she does to fill the time.
“These days I just sit next to the window and look at the birds,” she said.
“What would you do if you were 100?”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
