Straayer celebrates 90th birthday, 25 years at Mat-Su Senior Services

PALMER — Not many people are still working when they’re 90 years old, but one local woman says it’s “the easiest thing I do.”

Eugenia “Gena” Straayer celebrated her 90th birthday on New Year’s Eve in the presence of friends, family, fellow swim club members and her co-workers at Mat-Su Senior Services in Palmer.

Though she said she never gave much thought to how long she would live when she was a young adult, Gena said the main reason she’s lived so long and in good enough health to continue working is probably that she didn’t have “a hard life.”

“I never had to do any plowing or, you know, any hard labor or anything,” she said.

After graduating from high school in Michigan — around the time that World War II started — Gena went to junior college for a little while, but soon realized she’d rather work for her father in his photography studio. He would sometimes send her on assignments to take photographs at her old school, but eventually she became “the accountant.”

She married her high school sweetheart, Jack, in 1946 and quit working to have a family. Jack became a U.S. Merchant Marine and Gena stayed home with their two sons, Jack and Jim, and two daughters, Shelly and Kris.

Jack senior and his brothers started a furniture factory soon after his time in the military, but when the factory went bankrupt, Gena had to go to work. Fortunately, the boys were old enough by then to babysit the girls, so Gena could take a job as a cashier at a local supermarket in Rockford.

Meanwhile, Jack picked up silversmithing and opened a jewelry shop.

He and Gena stayed in their respective jobs until one day, two of Gena’s former co-workers came to visit her after moving to Alaska the year before.

“They came to visit and said, ‘you gotta go to Alaska, you don’t wanna be in this supermarket the rest of your life,’ so we said ‘OK we’ll see you in July,’” Gena said.

So Jack and Gena sold the things they wouldn’t need, told the kids it was time to move and prepared for their big adventure.

“The hardest part was for my dad,” Gena said.

Her father was in his late 70s at the time and had had a heart attack recently. When he heard his daughter and son-in-law were moving to Alaska, he feared the worst.

“He thought we were going to the end of the world, you know, thought he’d never see us again,” Gena said. “Going to Alaska was like going to the moon at that time.”

That was 1976. The family lived in Anchorage for a few years, Gena working for Weight Watchers and Jack for a local trust company, but it wasn’t the Alaska they had imagined.

“(Jack) said ‘we didn’t come to Alaska to live in a big city,’ so we started answering ads for lodge sitting,” she said.

That’s when they found the people at Alaska Rainbow Lodge on the Kvichak River in the Bristol Bay region.

“The first idea was that we could see a lot of Alaska by lodge-sitting, but they were so good to us and we got along with everybody so well that we just always went back,” she said.

So for seven years, the elder Straayers spent their winters on the Kvichak, soaking in the Alaska wilderness they’d heard so much about.

But, as people say, all good things come to an end and in 1988 the Straayers bought a house in Palmer.

A few months later, Gena started volunteering at Mat-Su Senior Services as a dishwasher, and thus began her Valley legacy. Soon there was an opening for a paid “salad gal” position and Gena thought, “why not?”

After that she became the receptionist and continued as the front-desk face of senior center administration until computers came to the facility in the early 1990s.

Now, she does data entry for all the center’s services.

“I don’t have (a) computer at home, I only know what they teach me. I don’t even know how to get to the Internet on the one I (use),” she said, laughing.

So while Gena says her life hasn’t been physically difficult — compared, she used as an example, to women in Alaska Native villages who seal hunt — after so many years, she admitted that “nothin’s easy.”

“Life’s not easy, that’s our motto in our house,” she said.

The Straayers celebrate their 69th anniverary in April.

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