Life Story: Everett man, 105, was ‘irrepressible’

Chet Moyer showed up for his 100th birthday party in a white tuxedo. He carried a cane and sported a black top hat.

That day, he walked into the activity room at Everett Plaza Assisted Living and sang “God Bless America.” A female singer who visits retirement homes was there, recalled the Rev. Bernie Jensen, who leads Sunday services and Bible studies at Everett Plaza.

“I was there for his 100th birthday,” Jensen said. “He was dancing with the singer. He danced every song she sang. One time she asked him to sit down so she could rest.”

That was five years ago.

“He was indefatigable. Irrepressible,” Jensen said.

William “Chet” Moyer died March 12. He was 105.

For the last few years, he lived at an adult family home near Silver Lake, Jensen said. But until well past his 100th birthday, Moyer was living at Everett Plaza and keeping up a regular exercise regime at Everett’s YMCA.

Barb Bright, who now works at Everett Plaza, is a former driver with Everett Transit’s paratransit service. She remembers picking Moyer up at the retirement home by 8 a.m. for his YMCA workouts, which lasted several hours.

“He was very talkative, a very nice man,” Bright said. “And he was just so healthy. He loved to swim, he loved to dance. For him it was a determination — ‘How long can I live?’ “

Moyer was born Oct. 6, 1903, in the tiny town of Hamilton, just east of Sedro-Woolley in Skagit County. He was married twice, but both marriages were brief, and he leaves no close survivors.

In January 2005, a 101-year-old Moyer told the story of his life to Teri Baker, a freelance writer whose article about him was published in The Senior Source. The Mukilteo-based newspaper is published by Senior Services of Snohomish County.

According to Baker’s article, Moyer was raised with two older sisters on a 40-acre homestead. He recalled driving his sisters to school in an old Ford. During summers, he said he drove a team of horses and helped clear land as the railroad was extended north.

He graduated from Sedro-Woolley High School in 1922 and worked on the construction of the Baker River Dam.

Moyer told Baker that he then set out for Chicago in hopes of working on a power plant project, but that job fell through. Instead, he worked nights as a clerk at Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel while studying to become a certified public accountant.

In 1935, Moyer said in The Senior Source article, he moved to Alaska. During World War II, he said, he tried to join the U.S. Army Air Corps, but instead his accounting skills were needed at Ladd Army Airfield in Fairbanks.

After the war, he returned to Seattle. Moyer told Baker that he sold used cars in the Lake City area and later sold real estate in Burien.

“I made three fortunes, lost three fortunes, and wound up with nothing. But I keep on going,” Moyer was quoted as saying in the article.

In 2004, Herald photographer Dan Bates took pictures of Moyer during one of his workouts at the YMCA. One photo showed the 101-year-old serenading the Y’s staff before Moyer began his regimen in the sauna, the swimming pool, the hot tub and on a treadmill.

Singing was a lifelong avocation, Moyer told The Senior Source writer. The article said he’d been a member of a 1,000-member choir at the Chicago World’s Fair. While at Everett Plaza, he sang with a group in the city’s Fourth of July parades.

“He rode the Plaza bus in the parades, and sat in the stairwell,” said Jensen, the pastor. At intersections, Moyer would sing his signature song, “God Bless America.”

“He was extraordinary,” Jensen said. “And he was clear right up until almost the last day I saw him, when he was sleeping.”

Jensen said Moyer not only attended Sunday services, but came to Bible studies at Everett Plaza. “I got the impression he was very devoted,” he said.

Moyer had outlived all of his close family members and friends. Still, Jensen said the old man never dwelled on the past.

“He lived in the present,” Jensen said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.