A century plus 6

The ninth of 10 children born in 1901 to a Utah farming couple, George Cunliffe’s earliest memories are of running around the farm.

“We had a garden and orchards with apples, peaches, plums, cherries and apricots,” recalled Cunliffe, who’ll celebrate his 106th birthday April 23.

His role in the family was a vital one. “I’d catch the horse, put a harness on her and drive the wagon a half-mile away to fill a barrel from my uncle’s well. I was only 9 years old, mind you. I’d haul water every other day in the summer but less in winter,” he said recently, warming himself by a fire in his south Spokane Valley home.

“Once a week, on Saturday night, we’d bathe in a 50-gallon tub that was 18-inches deep and 3 feet around,” he said.

A devout family, the Cunliffes made sure they looked their best for Sunday church services, he said. Today, George keeps the tradition, rising at 6 a.m. Sundays, donning a crisp white shirt and attending 8:30 a.m. services at a close-by Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints.

By the time he turned 17, he’d landed a full-time job that paid 40 cents an hour in a Utah sheet metal shop. And in a short time, he’d squirrelled away enough money to buy his first car, a 1918 Ford touring car. “It cost me $414,” he said with a big smile.

In 1921, he and his 18-year-old sweetheart quietly slipped away to be married. “I paid the county clerk $5 to keep it out of the newspaper,” he said, because he and his wife wanted their union kept secret from his new mother-in-law.

So when his mother-in-law popped in for her first visit, she whisked her daughter back to Colorado for a month.

“She didn’t know our wedding date the first 25 years we were married,” said Cunliffe with a chuckle.

Soon, the newlyweds moved to Los Angeles. “I had my first house built on a 400-square-foot lot and I paid $1,800” for the property and dwelling.

Happily married for 77 years, Cunliffe advises young people in his clan to follow a principle by which he thrived. “Never go into debt,” he said. It’s the secret to eliminating most of life’s stress.

Now a widower, he lives with his only child, a spry, 82-year-old daughter Donna Haycock, whom he helped the doctor deliver at home.

He praises her home cooking and said he’s always shied away from spirits. “He doesn’t drink, not even coffee or tea,” Haycock said. He stays fit by “doing laps around the house with his walker” and exercising in his favorite lounge chair.

Cunliffe worked until he turned 65. Then he taught himself to carve. Today, he tracks time on one of the stunning grandfather clocks he made. It sits in the living room, which enjoys a view of a nearby Mormon temple.

He said he was “too young for World War I and too old for World War II, but they made me register.” If he could get President Bush’s ear, he said he has one tip: “Keep the Social Security system.”