Centenarians have lots of stories to tell

MOSES LAKE — Edna Watkins, Ann Klobucher and Helen Theis have seen a lot. They were girls in grade school when the Great Depression started, in their late teens and early 20s when World War II started. They were in their late 40s when men walked on the moon and in their early 80s at the start of a new century. They’re still going, 100 years — or more — after they were born.

Theis will celebrate her 100th birthday March 9; Kobucher will be 102 years old March 7 and Watkins turns 103 years of age March 3.

“Gee, Mom, you’re the young ’un here,” Theis’s daughter Jackie Chmela told her when the three women and members of their families got together at Monroe House, where they live.

Theis is a Spokane girl, the daughter of a farm family, she said.

“I milked cows,” Theis said, “I drove tractor. My brother was drafted, so I got to be the hired man,”

Farming was a lot of work in the early 1940s but she was up to the challenge, she said.

“I could fill the shoes pretty well. If only because I had to,” Theis said.

Watkins is a Warden native, one of a set of twins born on the family farm.

“My mother had a boy, 13 months old, and then she had twins, and then we weren’t two yet, and she had another baby. So she had four kids in three years,” Watkins said. “You can imagine.”

Klobucher was born in Spokane but grew up in Forks, where her parents operated the telephone exchange. Back in the day that required somebody at the switchboard, making the connection by hand.

She planned a career in social work and enrolled at Washington State University, then known as Washington State College, which was where she met a young student, Victor Klobucher, studying to be a doctor.

“He was the chem lab instructor – the student instructor,” she said.

Klobucher and her husband moved to Moses Lake in 1952 to open a medical practice. He was one of three physicians in one of the first clinics in Moses Lake.

“Fairbanks, Conklin and Klobucher,” she said.

She did not work in the clinic.

“I worked at home,” she said.

The farm where Watkins grew up, and which the family still owns, was a dryland operation in the days before the Columbia Basin Project, and that meant growing wheat. Harvesting wheat in the 1920s and 1930s required a gang of laborers, and the farmer provided the meals. Cooking for the crews gave Watkins her first job. During apple harvest, she was among the crews working the packing sheds, but otherwise, she was a cook, and on a farm near Lind she met the nephew of the farmer. Edna married Roy Watkins in 1942.

Theis met her husband Leo at a family party in Spokane; he was a distant relative from Montana and stopped by to meet the cousins he’d never known. She didn’t like him at first, she said, but she eventually warmed up to him.

The Theis family moved to Moses Lake in 1960, and opened a restaurant, Smitty’s Pancake House, in a building on Broadway Avenue. It’s still standing just off Interstate 90, although it’s no longer a restaurant. It was a big gamble, at least some people in Moses Lake thought so.

“The talk was that they’d never make it because nobody would drive that far out of town to go to a restaurant,” Chmela said.

But Smitty’s did last.

“It was a family affair,” Theis said. Her husband did the cooking and ran the kitchen, and she was in charge of the dining room, she said. Their children helped as well, she said.

Her husband was a good cook, she said, but his interest in cooking ended when he left the restaurant kitchen.

“My husband never cooked at home,” she said. “As far as he was concerned I hid the pots and pans.”

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.