Model citizen turns 100
Published 11:00 pm Tuesday, September 25, 2007
MONROE — People say Pearl White was born with a golden heart and a fantastic sense of humor.
White, who helped found the Sky Valley Food Bank more than 30 years ago, turned 100 on Tuesday.
A group of family and friends gathered at the East County Senior Center in Monroe to celebrate her significant milestone, including the city’s mayor and White’s 85-year-old stepdaughter, who flew all the way from Alabama for the party.
White’s secret to longevity?
“I don’t know,” she said with a smile between birthday kisses and bites of chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. “I’m afraid I can’t give you any anecdotes on that.”
John Wayne and Gene Autry were born the same year as White. In 1907, President Roosevelt was in office — Theodore Roosevelt, that is — and the average lifespan for an American woman was less than 50. Ford’s Model T wouldn’t be released for another year.
Boy, how the times have changed, and much for the better, said White, who was anything but rueful wearing a tiara at the senior center Tuesday morning.
White’s parents, Clifford and Minnie Lane, were hardworking homesteaders who ran dry-goods stores near the former prospecting camps of Gold Bar and Startup around the turn of the last century.
It was a fast-growing period of prosperity and optimism for early Snohomish County.
The Lanes would later move to Portland, Ore., where their only child, Pearl, learned to play violin in high school.
White was eventually drawn back to her roots in Snohomish County. In the 1960s, she and her husband, Leo White, bought a house south of Monroe’s Main Street in the 300 block of S. Blakeley Street. She lived there until earlier this year, when her family moved her to a nursing home in Bothell.
For decades, White gave back to the community, volunteering for a number of charities and civic organizations, including the Degree of Pocahontas and a women’s auxiliary of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
“The more you get to know her, the more you fall in love with her,” said Julie Morris, executive director of the Sky Valley Food Bank.
Morris said White’s sense of humor pushed the envelope. In her 90s, White gave Morris steamy romance novels as gifts. After undergoing hip replacement surgery several years ago, White returned to work at the food bank with a piece of her hip that doctors had removed and she used it as a paperweight.
White graduated from Shattuck Grammar School in 1920, according to a school certificate hanging along with photos on a display at White’s birthday bash.
“I don’t see any of her classmates here,” observed White’s cousin, Bert Arndt, a relative kid at 75.
For a decade in the 1960s and 1970s, Arndt lived just a half-block from White on Blakely Street. He said she has always been kind, hardworking, civic-minded and giving of her time.
Arndt said White and her husband traveled around the Western United States for years as cooks aboard a Union Pacific train, where they fed road crews working on the tracks.
He said White also worked for a time as a state employee with Monroe Correctional Complex back when it was a reformatory.
Monroe Mayor Donnetta Walser said White’s good deeds should be recognized.
“Pearl is a role model for all of us in what she’s done in her lifetime,” Walser said.
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
