Pioneer reflects on century of life

Whitefish native Felicia Holter Burleigh Stimson, a retired teacher, turns 100 on Tuesday with wise advice for those of us who hope to celebrate centennial birthdays.

“I eat what I want to eat, but I never eat all I want,” she said. “I like meat.”

She laughed at the idea of popping vitamins for longevity but agrees that never drinking alcohol or smoking helped her arrive at 100 with just a few aches and pains. She has some vision and hearing decline but prefers to focus on what she has rather than what she has lost.

Stimson still knits, crochets, reads and walks vigorously around the hallways of Mountain View Manor in Whitefish. She fuels up each day with a strong cup of coffee, down from four in her heavy imbibing days.

She looks toward her second century with her characteristic positive and youthful attitude.

“I feel like I’m 60 or 70,” she said.

Fortunately, age has not diminished fond memories of the Whitefish of her youth when tree stumps served as lawns and wooden planks provided sidewalks. It was a paradise for Stimson, who loved romping about in bib overalls with her brothers Jim, Clifford and Richard — much to the horror of her lady-like mother.

“I was a tomboy,” she said with a laugh.

Her fascinating family saga began with the tragic death of her paternal grandmother as she gave birth to Stimson’s father Ben and his twin brother on board a ship out of Norway. The ship’s captain and owner of the shipping line was the twins’ father, Balzar Anodsen.

According to Jackie Ward, Stimson’s daughter, Anodsen gave the twins to two Scandinavian couples headed to make new lives in America. Ben was taken by Hilda Holter to raise in North Dakota.

“He (Ben) always figured his twin brother lived close by because people were always saying ‘Weren’t you just here?’” Ward said.

But, sadly, the twin brothers never met.

In about 1905, Ben Holter struck out for Montana, got settled and sent for his former neighbor, Clara Prescott, to come by train and join him in Whitefish.

“It was said that she was the most beautiful woman ever to alight the platform,” Ward said. “She never went downtown without her gloves and hat. She was called ‘Lady Holter.’”

Ben Holter was a Whitefish policeman who served as the chief from 1914 to 1919. A reference to Stimson’s father in Dorothy M. Johnson’s book “When You and I Were Young, Whitefish” reveals the awe he struck in local youngsters.

The segment describes how the town fathers decided to pay the town’s youth to collect tin cans that were an eyesore piling up in all the yards. Their idea was to use the cans to fill up gullies under sagging wooden sidewalks.

 Whitefish’s two police officers, Holter and George Taylor, were charged with counting the 100 cans in each gunny sack before paying the princely sum of 5 cents.

Johnson wrote of them:

“Both wore stern mustaches, they were pretty stern men. Mr. Holter, I heard, once brought in four wanted men at the end of an empty gun; they thought he had one shot left and were taking no chances.

“They radiated authority. They did not wear uniforms. They wore ordinary dark clothing, always a vest to pin the badge on, and Stetsons with moderately wide, severely flat brims. Those men were, believe me, The Law.”

When Stimson finished high school, she left Whitefish with seven friends to attend Cheney Normal School in Washington for the two years required to become a teacher. At age 19 in 1930, she accepted her first position at a school in the North Fork that initiated her 33-year career.

“I had three pupils,” she said. “I earned $90 a month. That was good pay.”

It was to become her favorite teaching experience in spite of expectations that would enrage a union representative today. Along with teaching all day, Stimson was charged with shoveling the snow off the roof of the school house and keeping the fire roaring and water supplied.

“She would snowshoe down to the river, break the ice and get two buckets of water each morning — one to wash with and one for drinking,” Ward said.

Stimson brushed off the hardship, saying the buckets weren’t heavy. As the only single woman for miles around, she enjoyed an active social life with many invitations to play cards and visit.

Her daughter recalled her mom’s story of one night when she played cards well into the night, then stopped by the schoolhouse to bank the fire at 1 a.m. before going back to the Braytons’ house where she boarded.

“The next morning when she went back to school, she saw the tracks of a mountain lion that was stalking her all the way,” Ward said with a laugh.

Stimson said she wasn’t at all frightened. She still counts the North Fork as her favorite place in the world because of the wonderful people she knew.

It seemed that mountain lions menaced Stimson wherever she went. At a later teaching assignment at Kuhns School located 8 miles out of Whitefish, Stimson was trapped inside her house when a lion plopped down on her porch, making odd noises that she remembers to this day.

“It sounded just like a child crying,” she said.

During her time at Kuhns in January of 1935, Stimson met and secretly married Jack Burleigh, a handsome railroad employee she met by chance at a mechanic’s garage. They kept their union quiet to shield her position from scrutiny by the persnickety school board.

“I got the job because I was single,” she said.

In the fall, she moved on to a job at Higgins School on the Blackfeet Reservation where her marriage was accepted. Unfortunately, it was a long way from Whitefish where her husband was employed.

In the midst of the Depression, no one considered giving up a job to stay with their spouse. Stimson said that era, added to deprivations suffered in childhood, profoundly affected her psyche.

“I got so used to doing without a lot of things that I feel the effect of the Depression now,” she said. “It made me stingy.”

Even as her family grew to include three children — her late daughter Sylvia, Jackie and Fred — she continued to teach at various schools including Central School in Whitefish. When teaching requirements changed, she began working on a bachelor’s degree, which she earned in English and home economics in 1958.

Each summer, she and her family went to Eastern Washington College, formerly Cheney Normal School, as she worked on her degree.

“It took me 30 years,” she said with a laugh.

In an earlier Inter Lake article, she shared the agony and ecstasy of teaching young Whitefish women to cook and sew in home economics. She recalled the lemon pie with salt substituted for sugar and the frustration of a zipper meticulously installed on the wrong side of the fabric.

Stimson kept at it for more than three decades before retiring in 1973. Single again in the early ‘80s, she renewed her relationship with David Stimson, her childhood sweetheart.

The two had been engaged out of high school but married other people after she went to college and he went in the military and became a park ranger. When she was 79 and he was 81, the two finally became husband and wife in a very happy union.

‘I always wanted to marry a man with a green shirt,” Stimson said, referring to his park ranger years. “He was better than he was as a kid.”

The two traveled to Arizona, Florida and Washington, D.C. during what became 12 golden years for Stimson before David died in 1995. In 1996, she moved to Mountain View Manor where she has enjoyed living ever since.

“It’s always warm and it’s very secure,” she said.

Stimson celebrated her birthday there Sunday with an open house organized by Ward with family and friends. She appreciated the party but didn’t want “a big fuss” over her landmark birthday.

She said she doesn’t find it constructive to focus on the number of years behind her.

“I think about tomorrow,” Stimson said. “I learn something every day.”

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com