A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Pioneer, 102, Tells Tales of Rural Reseda

Harry L. and Elsie Cady rolled into the small town “out in the sticks,” after an arduous monthlong cross-country journey and took stock of life around them.

Only about 10 houses dotted the landscape of farms and orchards. It’s going to need a church, they said to themselves, and a library.

This is not a scene plucked from an old Western movie. Elsie Cady describes it all as if it were just yesterday.

It is 1923, a year after the little town changed its name from Marian to Reseda.

“We had an interest in everything,” said Cady, now 102 and still a Reseda resident. Her husband died in 1978.

“Our interest was not to stand still, but to build,” Cady said. “You can’t sit still. You either go one way or go the other.”

So, the Cadys joined with the community to build. Harry L. Cady, a religious man, offered the couple’s home for religious services. By the end of their first year they had begun the Community Methodist Church, which later became the First United Methodist Church of Reseda.

Elsie Cady helped start the library--the area’s first regional library--in a small room over the bank where her husband had landed a job.

“The library in the city said they would not help us,” said Cady, sitting in her wheelchair in her living room. To get help, they had to prove that there was a need, that people would borrow books.

“We were busy making sure people were checking out those books,” Cady said. Every child was marshaled into the library to check out books, even if they did not intend to read them, she said.

The Cadys drove their Model T to California after banks they had worked for in South Dakota failed. One was destroyed in a fire. “My husband said he always wanted to go to California,” she said.

Cady describes a deceptively simple life begun in Iowa. She says the best thing that happened to her was meeting the man she was going to marry while working in a small post office in Nebraska. It was love at first sight.

The couple worked as a team, and benefited from luck. Harry L. Cady, originally assigned to work in the bank to cover for a man on vacation, took over when the man died after getting home. Later, Harry L. Cady started the first escrow service in the Valley, and Elsie worked as “his right hand man” handling the bookkeeping and other jobs.

“I’ve been through fire, flood, earthquakes, everything, you name it,” said Cady, who has also seen it snow twice in Southern California. Her home was also broken into 10 years ago and the intruder pushed her to the ground, injuring her hip. “That’s why I’m crippled,” Cady said, adding that otherwise she would be able to get around fine.

Her talk of the early community brings the listener into a past that does not seem so far removed.

“It was enthralling to talk to someone so bright and vivid and alive,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who met Cady last week. Her office sent a special certificate to commemorate her 102nd birthday in January and when Cady called to thank her, Chick decided she had to meet her.

A planned 15-minute talk turned into a 45-minute encounter as Cady brought out pictures and old newspapers and regaled the councilwoman with stories of the rural beginnings and long-absent features of the Valley, such as the Red Car.

“She had some real nostalgia that things used to be better and in lots of ways I agree with her,” said Chick, who plans to use Cady as a resource in the future. “I’m not going to wait for her next birthday. There’s more I can learn from her.”

The length of Elsie Cady’s life has surprised even her. “I thought 90 would be a long life,” said Cady, who has some Midwestern advice for living:

“Do more than you’re required to do and be honest,” Cady said, simply. “Those things together are the biggest assets in anybody’s life.”

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