Family and friends key to living a century

MOSES LAKE - Sylvia Mabbot was born just before a classic World Series, won by the Boston Red Sox over the New York Giants, Boston's mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald leading the fans known as the Royal Rooters to every game. It was right in the middle of a red-hot, three-way Presidential campaign, Theodore Roosevelt versus Howard Taft versus Woodrow Wilson.

The year was 1912.

Sylvia Mabbot celebrated her 100th birthday during the weekend, with a party hosted by her nephews and nieces at Moses Lake Senior Living.

Mabbot said she was born "on a farm in the middle of North Dakota. It was on a Sunday. Grandma was the midwife and Mom said it was hot." Her parents were homesteaders; they worked 240 acres and raised three sons and Sylvia.

Her dad donated a corner of his pasture for a school, Mabbot said, and Sylvia and her brothers attended a one-room schoolhouse until she was in the fourth grade. "It varied in size, how many pupils there were," she said. There was a bigger, four-room school three miles away in town, and Mabbot said she attended school there through ninth grade. That might have been it, because the nearest high school was 15 miles away, a prohibitive distance in the mid-1920s. Besides, there were a lot of boys and girls who entered the workforce without finishing high school.

But her aunt thought Sylvia should have the chance at high school, and offered Sylvia a room in her Seattle home. "I took her up on it," Mabbot said, and moved halfway across the country to attend Queen Anne High School.

It was different from North Dakota. The first day, she said, she leaned up against the wall, let the kids stream by and didn't say a word. "I was scared to death." But the shyness didn't last. Mabbot graduated as valedictorian of her class. "The first time I got a permanent," she said of the graduation ceremony. "June 11, 1930. I was 17."

But June 1930 was a very bad time to enter the job market. The Great Depression was in full swing. Sylvia went home and helped her parents on the North Dakota farm until her mom suggested she get further education or a job, she said. She attended North Dakota State Teacher College for one year, enough to qualify for a teaching degree for non-urban schools.

A beginning teacher in the country in the early 1930s lived with a family willing to provide a room, walked to school, made sure the fire was going before the kids got to school, and usually taught kindergarten through eighth grade. "In my class I had 22 kids," Mabbot said. "I think I got $60 a month." She worked in rural North Dakota for three years.

Some of her brothers had moved to Washington by that time, and Mabbot followed them, attending the University of Washington to complete her teacher training. With more options available, she chose to teach high school.

"English and math were my subjects. But of course you did other things too," she said. When the school didn't have a gym teacher Sylvia ran PE classes.

Teaching was OK. It was one of the few careers women could easily pursue in the 1930s. But it was hard on Sylvia's voice, so demanding that doctors warned her of permanent damage. When the Omak School Board offered her a new contract, she declined, she said.

Unbeknownst to her, she had an admirer on the Omak staff, a guy her age who taught history and loved tennis.

Mabbot said she found a job with the Wenatchee Chamber of Commerce, working at the organization's travel desk for about 5-1/2 years. When her mom became ill she spent a year helping her, "then I got restless again." Visiting friends in Denver she applied for a job at an attorney's office. "There were seven attorneys and three girls in the office. I was interviewed by the oldest member of firm and hired on the spot."

In 1955 a cousin planned a trip to Europe and Sylvia accompanied her. "We went on the Queen Mary and spent the whole summer in Europe." By the time the two women returned Sylvia was done with Denver and moved on to Spokane.

There she got a job at a travel agency and met a teacher at John Rogers High School, a guy who used to teach in Omak, back when Sylvia was working there. Vern Mabbot taught social studies and coached tennis. "He loved young people and they trailed after him like the Pied Piper of Hamlin," Sylvia Mabbot said. Both were in their 40s and had never married, but that didn't matter.

"We never had a cross word between us. And we respected each other so highly," she said.

"He had a lot of friends," Sylvia said. Vern Mabbot was well-liked by students and staff alike, and he had a big fan in his wife; "41 years I was married to Vern," she said. He taught his wife how to hunt and play tennis, and they loved to go fishing.

Every summer they spent traveling, sometimes new places like Japan, sometimes places they loved like Canada.

"We knew Canada from Quebec to Victoria," Sylvia said. They traveled even more after Vern retired from teaching in 1973.

Vern Mabbot died in 1998. "After he died, I didn't know what to do." For a while she lived on her own, then a niece suggested Sylvia move closer to her, and when the niece passed away, she moved to Moses Lake to be closer to a nephew.

Among the factors that have kept her going 100 years is the presence of family and friends. "I had family scattered all over and friends scattered all over," she said.

Back in the day she wrote as many as 100 letters a year. Her Christian faith played a big role, she said, and she doesn't drink or smoke and eats wisely, she said.