100-year-old shares secrets to a long life

WILLOW — World War II veteran Joe Rayfield says he doesn’t know why or how he’s lived to be 100, but thinks God and good doctors probably have something to do with it.

“They’ve kept me alive this long,” he said.

Tucked away in their two-story, lakeside home, Joe said he and his wife Aileen, 82, have everything they need. They’re not rich and they haven’t held onto much, he said, but the house is paid for and they have a wealth of family and friends both near and far.

“I have so many friends,” Joe said. “Everybody’s helpin’ me.”

After two heart valve replacements and another major operation in the last decade, Joe said he now needs to rest after about half an hour of activity, but he’s still in good health.

Last week, three of Joe’s doctors threw him a birthday party to celebrate his century of life. Though Joe claims that a birthday is “just another day” to him, this one was a little bit special.

At the party, friend Jim Huston presented the Rayfields with a tiny spruce tree bedecked with dollar bills donated by members of the Willow community. The sum of money totaled more than $100.

“We’re so grateful to the people of Willow,” Aileen said.

Humble beginnings

Joe’s lived in Alaska since he was stationed in Kodiak with the Coast Guard in 1954, but his story starts in Painter, Virginia, where he was born on Feb. 8, 1916.

Joe grew up on several different farms with few personal possessions — and maybe fewer ideas about the outside world.

“I never found out what girls were for until I got in the military,” he said.

When Joe turned 18 he joined the Army and was stationed in Panama for three years. He said he “didn’t like the long hikes” his company had to take on duty, and later opted out of the Army to join the Coast Guard.

He was a search and rescue man when he was transferred to Kodiak from North Carolina, and on July 1, 1959, he retired.

Joe said the military was a valuable experience — though he wouldn’t want to go back and do it again.

“Farm life taught me a whole lot and what (it) didn’t teach me the military did,” Joe said.

Shaking things up

After he retired from the military, Joe moved to Anchorage and continued to work. He started as a district executive for the Boy Scouts of America, then moved on to sell life insurance. He “didn’t like that too good,” he said, so he went looking for something else to do. In the process, he discovered that Alaska didn’t have a licensed driving school. With encouragement from his son, Joe started the first one — with four yellow Chevrolets, he remembered — and called it Royals School of Driving. He later sold the business and drove school buses, and for some time chartered both fishing and flight-seeing trips.

It was around the time the driving school started that the 1964 earthquake hit. Joe remembered being at home, getting ready for work that evening when everything in view began to move.

“Somewhere around 4 or 5 o’clock, the earth started to shake real slow. And all of a sudden it goes whoopee-de-whoopee-de-whoop,” Joe said, making a horizontal wave motion with his hand. “I thought all the walls’re gonna cave in.”

The walls of his house didn’t cave in, but three houses in the surrounding area did go down.

“He was fortunate,” Aileen said, having seen the damage in other areas during that time.

Second time around

At the time of the quake, Joe and Aileen were living separate lives. Each had been married, but both their spouses were lost to terminal illnesses.

The deaths were hard on Joe and Aileen, but eventually they agreed to be introduced by a mutual friend. Not long later, Joe and Aileen went on a picnic with his golden retriever and her cooking — spare ribs and baked beans.

“That’s the way with all women, she’d get to a man’s heart through his stomach,” Joe said.

Sure enough, “one thing led to another,” he said, and in 1987, they were married.

“Not taking anything away from our former spouses, but … I say it’s been the best 29 years of my life, and she says the same thing,” Joe said, with a nod to Aileen. “I’m real happy with my life.”

For the younger generation

In his 100 years of life — “I’m 18 with 82 years experience,” the back of his sweatshirt reads — Joe’s come to a few conclusions about living.

“I don’t know what I can tell you why I’m in such good health, (but) I am a firm believer in Jesus. I talk to him all the time. He’s my buddy,” Joe said.

However, it wasn’t always that way.

“I’ve had every reason – every reason — to be an alcoholic, a doper, a hoodlum, a thief, a murderer, any of that,” Joe said.

But he resisted, and he says Alaska’s youth ought to do the same.

“We have so many people … runnin’ up and down the street goin’ ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme,’” Joe said. “I think if the people would put their trust in Jesus, they’d do well.”

That makes the going easier, too, he said.

“I have no fear of dying. I just live one day at a time.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.