100th birthday party planned for Lottie Poisal

PALMER — In some ways, Lottie Poisal’s story is like many others.

Why did she and her husband move from Missouri in June 1951 to carve a homestead out of the trees north of Wasilla?

“Why does anyone go with their husband?” Poisal quipped Monday during an interview at the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home in Palmer. “He got homestead papers, so we came to Alaska.”

The community is invited to a celebration of Poisal’s 100th birthday at 3 p.m., Dec. 5 at the Pioneers Home, daughter Susan Jones said.

In the early 1950s, there were just five or six homesteads out north of Wasilla, Poisal said.

“We did it the hard way,” she said of the effort required to meet the terms of their homestead agreement.

There weren’t many schoolchildren in the Valley back then either, she said. Their son attended school through the eighth grade in Wasilla, but had to go to Palmer for high school. He graduated with the class of 1954.

“You wouldn’t believe what it was like in those days. Wasilla, Palmer they haven’t left much the same,” she said. “I’m lost now when she (daughter Susan) takes me through Wasilla.”

Two daughters joined the Poisal family later. They entered the home as foster children, but Poisal said they loved the girls so much they adopted them as family.

Poisal is a longtime member of the Homemakers club, the quilter’s guild and the Wasilla Presbyterian Church.

“They’d just started the Presbyterian Church when we came here,” she said.

Poisal recalls milestones in national and Alaska history, such as the many changes that came to the nation after World War II and the 1964 earthquake.

The Poisal cabin survived the 1964 earthquake with no damage, but their neighbor whose house was closer to the roadway sustained serious damage, she said.

There also was quite a bit of damage in Wasilla, including to the school, Poisal recalled.

Even the site where the Pioneers home sits is a slice of history to old-timers like Poisal who remember it as the former site of the Alaska State Fairgrounds.

Poisal rattles off familiar family names, like Dinkel, Teeland and Hanson. She recalls shopping at Teelands’ store and being waited on there by the couple’s young daughter, Colleen.

She said her husband Clyde retired after 23 years at the Palmer Experiment Farm. But he didn’t have a background in farming when the two were married, Poisal said.

“We always had a beautiful garden,” she said. “Nothing is as good as Matanuska vegetables.”

Poisal was pleased Monday to show off a few of the prized birthday cards and gifts — like a delicate shawl designed and crocheted just for her — she’d received in advance of her centennial.

There was a card from her quilting friends, one from Court Appointed Special Advocates program thanking her for being one of its longest donors and the jewel of the group, a card made for her by her 87-year-old niece.

“I was a teenager when she was born,” Poisal said.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.