At 95, Alberta "Bertie" Rich still lives on her own, cooks and drives. Her "B-Rich" personalized license plate is familiar to many in her hometown of California, Missouri, where she's known for her delicious pies and her involvement with the United Church of Christ.
A historian of sorts, she has so many memories of the small town of California back in the '20s and '30s that she's a living archive. She brings places that many people have only heard about to life. Although she's having some health issues, her mind is sharp as ever and she quickly retrieves dates and details of her long and full life.
"Many of our relatives come to visit Mother to find out more about the history of our family," said her daughter, Sue Cashion, who works as a technician in the Missouri Highway Patrol Crime Lab. "I can't remember yesterday, but she remembers everything. Mother had a hard life and lived through the Depression but that has made her who she is today.
"She is and is definitely the center of our family."
Born in the river town of Sandy Hook on Sept. 29, 1920, Rich was raised by her grandparents K.F. and Caroline Kubli, after her mother died at 24 of tuberculosis and her father had left the family.
Then, Sandy Hook was a town with a bank and church, she said, and the little house she was born in is still standing.
"I was a tomboy. I liked to climb trees and run races," she said. "I also had freckles when I was young, and I hated them."
She attended high school in California, and went home for lunch where her grandmother made her and her siblings a hot meal. One day when she was a junior, she visited her sister, LaVerne (Stahl) after she had an emergency appendectomy at the former Latham Sanitarium. Once a regional hospital, now the building stands empty on a half-acre city block.
"When I got to the hospital to see my sister my Aunt Amelia Gouge was talking to this young man from around Lebanon who had stomach problems, and that's how I met Walter," she said. "My aunt always told me that she's the one that got me a husband."
She and Walter started dating, a courtship that consisted of him visiting her several times a year. There were no cell phones or email then, and the road from California to Eldon was all gravel and Lebanon was quite a distance. Sometimes she spent time with him when he returned for a follow up with Dr. Kenyon Latham. The couple would sit at a store across the street from where Central Bank is located today on South Oak and nurse sodas that cost a nickel and put another into the slot of the nickelodeon, what we now call a jukebox, and dance.
"We wrote letters back and forth," Rich said. "One Christmas he sent me a gift, and not long after, on a Sunday, he and his brother and sister-in-law visited me. He went out to the kitchen to ask my grandfather if I could come home and meet his family."
To her surprise, he agreed and she was off to his country home for a week, during which time he proposed. They were married on Feb. 2, 1940, a year after she graduated from high school, in the small town of Phillipsburg. She was 19, and Walter was 28.
"I remember the preacher holding up my ring and saying, "This is perfect circle, and that's how your marriage is supposed to be.' That made a big impression on me at 19 years of age."
None of her family attended the wedding, because they didn't know about it. She had received a letter from her sister asking when she would be coming home, and she replied that she was married.
"Walter and I returned to California to get my things, but my grandma was over being mad then," she said.
The couple lived with his family for a year and a half and then followed his younger sister and her husband to Los Angeles, California, specifically to the town of Lakewood, near Long Beach. They needed jobs and wanted to help in the World War II effort.
"Walter couldn't enlist because of his health, but he wanted to do something," she said.
He worked at then Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach that merged with McDonnel Aircraft Corporation to became McDonnell Douglas, which in 1997 merged with Boeing. She stayed home with her daughter for more than 10 years.
"Mother was a wonderful seamstress and made all of my clothes, along with wedding dresses for people," Cashion said. "She was also a great cook. She started cooking as a small child with her grandmother.
"My mother was industrious. When she wanted to drive, she took a class and then another so she could find a job when I was around 12 or 13."
Rich worked at the Rancho Los Amigos, also known as Downey Hospital, in Downey, California, that was an emergency hospital for the U.S. Army and after the war served as a long-term care facility for patients, most of them with polio. It later became a world-renowned rehabilitation center.
"I scrubbed OR instruments there, and I loved that job," she said.
She and Walter were involved in the Mayfair Community Reformed Church, and later, he went to work for General Motors until he suffered a heart attack and retired. They celebrated 50 years of marriage and he died the next year. She never remarried.
"I was happy with the first one and I might not get lucky again the second time," she said.
While they had often visited family back in Missouri, after Walter's death she wasn't sure what to do and like she has always done she turned to her faith to help make her decision.
"I pray a lot and bawl a lot, too, and I always figure that whatever the Lord wants is what I would do," she said.
Rich and her daughter and her family returned to California, Missouri, in 1992. She quickly joined the Evangelical Church, now the United Church of Christ, where two of her high school friends - Irma Cook and Katherine Ratcliffe - were members.
Since then, she's been a part of the Women's Guild, the Sunday school class and really any effort that needs volunteers.
"Bertie is an endless bundle of energy with a generous spirit," said Carole Barbour, who first volunteered with Rich at the Middle School library. "She bakes cookies, plans a meal, whatever needs to be done, she's always part of the life of the church.
"Alberta is like a member of our family," Barbour said. "She's always ready to love one more, there's never too many people to be in her circle."
While neuropathy in her feet means she has to rest more, she also has some hearing and sight issues, but seems to take these challenges in stride.
"I don't want to slow down but I have to because my body makes me," said Rich, who laughs often. "Everything is faded and worn out."
She's referring to her pale blue eyes behind her eyeglasses. Every morning she begins her day reading the Bible followed by her devotions, using a large magnifying lens on a stand by her sofa in the living room. She has a second one for when she embroiders. She made the delicate flowers on the quilt in her bedroom, where the huge fan of "Gone with the Wind" has two Scarlett O'Hara dolls. Perhaps that's because Rich, like her heroine, is resilient and perseveres.
A sports fan, she watches Mizzou basketball and the St. Louis Cardinals. She calls manager Mike Matheny "a beautiful Christian man."
Her guest bedroom is full of containers of candy that she makes from her well-worn cookbooks to give out to friends and family, or whomever stops by. When I arrived, there was a warm chocolate meringue pie cooling in her kitchen that she had made for me. She also shared some of homemade fudge, sea foam, like divinity only made with brown sugar, and penuche, a creamy caramel fudge.
Her home is filled with photographs and mementos of her life, her three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. There's also a Bible that's been in the family since 1871 and a clock made out of cherry wood by her great-grandfather, Emmanuel, who came to America in 1879 from Switzerland.
Her mother along with great grandparents and grandparents are all buried in the Kubli family cemetery near Jamestown.
"Mother is always saying that she wants to be the oldest Kubli to be buried there. Frank Kubli died at 97, so she wants to live until she's 98," Cashion said. "She probably will."
As much as everyone marvels at her longevity, independence and spirit, it's her capacity for love and enjoyment of life that's perhaps her greatest legacy. Rich is living proof of the wisdom in the adage, "you reap what you sow."
"Sometimes when I lay down at night to go to bed, I think about my day and my troubles, but when I start counting my blessings I can't really complain," she said.
"I was raised by loving grandparents and my mom's brother and sisters helped out as much as they could. I had a great husband and daughter, and I have a wonderful church family," she said. "I have been so blessed throughout my life."