Wasilla woman celebrates 100 years

WASILLA — Margaret Baer has lived through two world wars, breast cancer and heart surgery. And as she turns 100 today, it doesn’t look like she’s slowing down anytime soon.

“I still have all my teeth, too,” Baer said proudly during a visit with her two daughters Friday at her Primrose Retirement Community apartment in Wasilla.

Mary Podvin, 70, of Settler’s Bay, and Susan DeYoung, 68, of Colorado, were on hand to assist their mother with a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of her century on Earth.

“She’s been planning this thing since her 99th birthday last year,” Podvin laughed about Sunday afternoon’s birthday bash at Primrose, complete with pink champagne and a disc jockey playing her favorites from the 1920s through the 1940s. “She really is an inspiration for all of us who think we’re already getting too old.”

Four generations of her family flew in from six states for the party, joining an estimated crowd of 94 well-wishers to share stories, photos, bites of strawberry cake and colorful cocktails.

Born Feb. 15, 1911, in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc., Margaret Mary Beardsley was the youngest of five children in a family known for its strong women.

She was only 18 months old when her father, owner of the town’s general store, was murdered at age 50 by a disgruntled former employee trying to rob him. Her mother was forced to take over the store while raising the children on her own.

“Can you imagine?” DeYoung said. “Especially back then when people weren’t accustomed to women running anything outside the home. But she did it. And I think she taught our mother how to be strong and independent.”

And strong she was. She not only graduated from high school at 16, but studied education, math, social studies, Latin and French before graduating from college in 1935, hoping to become a teacher or maybe a librarian.

But because she married Leonard Baer soon after college, she was not permitted to teach. It was unheard of for married women to earn money. Their job was to stay home and raise a family, according to a biography of Baer’s life written by her great-grandson Zachary Boyden, a senior at Colony High School.

“Len worked in a paper mill testing the qualities and later, bookkeeping for the company. His wages? Twenty-five cents per hour,” Boyden’s biography states. “Yet that wasn’t enough to buy land close to Port Edwards for the family. The farm wasn’t for living at, however. The kids sold minnows from the creek to fishermen for bait and trapped muskrats to sell to furriers.”

Boyden explained that his great-grandparents also sold gravel around the creek to their Wisconsin county for extra money and cut and sold for lumber trees on their 66 acres. They were eventually able to build a cottage on a lake near her parents’ home in Northern Wisconsin.

At Sunday’s party, Boyden sat quietly at a small table with his laptop computer, singing along to a song he happened to recognize from his great-grandmother’s “oldies” collection.

He said he loved talking to her about her life for the biography project and is still in total awe of her.

“She can fish better than anyone in the family and she still remembers so much of her life and the people in it. I probably forget more than she does and I’ll only be 18 soon.” he said. “She seems to have a trend of luck in her life, but she doesn’t rely on it. And her energy is exactly the same as it was 10 years ago — or at least what I can remember of it.”

Baer, who had no trouble dancing with her son-in-law Jim Podvin to the playful piano piece “Alley Cat” Sunday, said she’s not sure what her secret is, but she plays a lot of bridge and eats a lot of chocolate.

“I’ve liked chocolate since I was a little girl,” she said with a grin. “I can remember stopping at our store on my way home from school and taking a bag and getting into the candy cabinet. Because I was so thin, my mother would encourage me to eat all things that were fattening.”

She also remembers being sweet on a young man named Dan before meeting her future husband Len. This was news to her daughters, who suddenly were on the edge of their seats during their visit Friday.

“I went out with him a few times,” she said shyly as Podvin and DeYoung pretended to cover their ears. “I thought I was kind of in love with him, but it didn’t amount to much. When I met Len, I knew he was the one.”

Their marriage lasted 50 years before her husband succumbed to a rare blood disease at age 73. She’s been single ever since, never meeting anyone else she fancied enough to take seriously, she said.

“A woman told her once she needed to dye her hair red and go to the bars to meet men,” Podvin joked. “She never did, of course.”

Baer stayed in the same house in Wisconsin until she finally moved to Alaska when she was 88 to be closer to family.

She’s seen a lot of changes in the world in the last century, of course. From only having large radios the size of today’s 30-inch televisions before seeing the first fuzzy TV images in a store window, to horse-drawn carriages giving way to the first motorized vehicles and seeing a man walk on the moon, Baer has witnessed technological advances first-hand and imagines there’s much more to come.

Recalling when her family got its first telephone — a party line — when she was growing up before having her first video conversation with a great-granddaughter on her grandson’s smart phone via “Skype” on Sunday, Baer just shakes her head.

“I can’t keep up with all this stuff,” she said, adding she wasn’t even sure how to use the tiny red cell phone given to her by Primrose staff.

“My grandson wants to get me on the computer with this video stuff so I can talk to family in the states, but I don’t know about that.”

She said she strongly believes, however, that she’s got a few more years to enjoy her friends and family — near and far.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, adding she loves the fact that Primrose has just about every amenity she’d ever need — a hair salon, a pub, a movie theater and a lovely library containing a bound copy of her great-grandson’s biography book featuring about a dozen fellow residents. “I’d say I’m pretty happy. I’ve been lucky.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.