Centenarian : Pioneer’s 100 Years of Living Was Full of Firsts

Blanche Hubbard Jacques sat at a lace-covered kitchen table spread with a century’s worth of black-and-white tintypes, faded portraits and yellowed diplomas.

The Monrovia woman, whose 100th birthday is Tuesday, plucked out a sepia-tone of herself as a young girl--one of six teen-agers who graduated from Nebraska’s Alexandria High School in 1906--and another of herself posing with the school’s first girls basketball team.

“I was 5 feet, 10 inches, so I always played center,” she said, recalling that the girls made their own uniforms.

Although she never ventured from her home state of Nebraska until she was married at 18, and has never set foot outside the United States, Jacques has lived through times that most people have only read about.

She was the first woman in her town to own and operate a general store. Widowed during the Depression, she survived by raising food for herself and her six children.

As a young woman in the 1920s, she shocked the townsfolk by shearing off her long hair to sport a stylish marcel wave.

And when most people retire to an easy chair, she carved out a new career, caring for elderly people until she was near 80.

“She reminds me of an early American pioneer, very slim and straight and basic but very caring,” said Sue Church, the Los Feliz woman who was Jacques’ last employer 20 years ago.

Church and other friends will be among a large group gathered from across the country in Monrovia today to honor Jacques at a gala one-century party.

She has two surviving children, a dozen grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren, one of whom is expected to make it to the party.

Jacques, who lives with her youngest daughter, Winnie Olson, grew up on a Nebraska farm, where she was born in 1890 to parents of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry.

After graduating from high school, she worked in her father’s hardware store until local banker Fred Jacques began frequenting the place, sometimes just to chat with her father and sometimes to stare at her. She married Jacques on Oct. 10, 1908.

“We just went and got married over to the county courthouse,” Jacques recalled. “I never had met his people, so we went from the courthouse down to Hiawatha, Kan., so I could meet his family.”

The honeymoon trip was the first time she had left Nebraska.

Her husband built a large, two-story house two blocks from the bank, and there Jacques raised six children, first three boys and then three girls.

She was up before sunrise to milk cows and feed children, gather eggs, weed her garden, and can fruit, vegetables, jams and pickles.

Olson remembers the basement shelves lined floor to ceiling with Mason jars brimming with her mother’s handiwork.

“The kids all worked in the garden,” Jacques recalled. “They liked to do it and they liked to eat what came out of it. We had an asparagus bed and there were cherry trees, an apple orchard and mulberries.”

When her youngest daughter was a year old, Jacques became one of the few working mothers in town, hiring a neighbor to baby-sit while she drove a Model A Ford 10 miles over unpaved roads to her mercantile store in the next town.

“I sold cloth and spools of thread, and I would go to the local farmers and get their eggs and chickens to sell too,” Jacques said. After the happy, prosperous years of the early 1920s, the family’s fortunes changed, Jacques recalled. Her husband’s bank closed after the stock market crash, and he died a few years later.

Jacques kept the family going by contracting with the railroad to feed workmen and by running a boarding house.

When Jacques’ children were grown, she moved to California to be near them, and in 1950 she began a 20-year career working as a nurse and companion to elderly people.

Jacques cared for Mary Stermer’s mother for four years, living with the family in Tustin. Stermer is one of several former employers who has kept in touch with Jacques for more than two decades.

“She was an absolute mainstay,” Stermer recalled. “She was extremely capable and mentally alert, and her physical strength was enormous. She was so thoughtful and good to all of us that we thought of her as a member of the family.”

Sue Church also hired Jacques, who was 78 at the time, to care for her 70-year-old mother. “I remember on her days off Blanche would do all the cleaning and ironing for her daughters and grandchildren,” Church said. “She had this great caring for people.”