Meet the 102-year-old who refuses to let age slow her down

A few days after her 102nd birthday, Maude Ryan, of Orchards, was resting comfortably on her couch, thinking about the upcoming presidential election.

Ryan was six years old on Election Day in 1920 when millions of women first exercised their right to vote. Once she reached the legal age to exercise her own right to vote, Ryan never missed an opportunity.

“This will be the first time I haven’t voted since women got the right to vote!” Ryan said, referring to her own track record. “My eyes are too bad to read about the candidates, so I don’t know who to vote for.”

The irony that, after a lifetime of voting for male presidents, she may not be able to help vote in the first woman president doesn’t escape Ryan, a self-avowed Democrat.

“I’ve been for women’s rights all of my life,” Ryan says.

And what a life it’s been. Ryan has lived through not just World War II, when she worked as a crane operator, but also World War I, which started the year of her birth. Born in the South, in Arkansas, in 1914, less than 50 years after the official end of slavery, Ryan has lived to see our country’s first African American president. She’s lived all over the country, moving from Arkansas to Idaho, where her husband worked in the silver mines; to Alaska, where she was once lent her pressure cooker to a group of friends who were canning a freshly killed bear; to St. Louis, Missouri; and, finally, to Washington State.

Through it all, Ryan kept her spunky can-do attitude and never liked to take “no” for a final answer. Once, when she told her husband she wanted a dining room in their little, two-bedroom home, he told her there was no room and that, if he knocked down the wall where she wanted to put a dining room, their house would fall down.

“Well, when he went to work, I walked up and down the neighborhood, looking into the other houses – they were all the same – and saw that other people had taken that wall down,” Ryan says “So I went back home with a crowbar and I went at that wall. The roof didn’t fall down.”

And when her husband, Oscar, returned home? “Well, he had to give me my dining room,” Ryan says, laughing. “And I got dining room furniture, too.”

For a young mother who had spent the better part of her teen years in the Great Depression, getting dining room furniture was a pretty big deal – and Ryan has spent her entire life trying to reuse, recycle and repair. Her one-bedroom apartment at the Brookdale retirement center in Orchards, is filled with Ryan’s handiwork. She’s turned toilet paper rolls into really beautiful napkin holders that look like hammered metal, using a technique that incorporates silver foil, black paint and ribbon; taken basic food cans and snipped and coiled them into tiny pieces of dollhouse furniture that would probably fetch a pretty penny on Etsy or Ebay; and she’s even laminated disposable paper placemats to reuse for various holidays throughout the year.

On her wall, Ryan displays a few of the pictures she drew when she was a teenager living in rural Arkansas. The Great Depression was just beginning and supplies, especially paper for drawing, were scarce.

“If you turn them around, you’ll see what they are,” Ryan says, flipping the framed pictures. “See? I used old letters people had sent to my parents and old calendars!”

Talking to Ryan is a joyful experience. At 102, her bones may be more fragile and her hearing is starting to fade, but Ryan still remembers things from her childhood and loves to tell funny stories and dispense laugh-out-loud advice.

When she’s asked to divulge her beauty secrets, Ryan scoffs and laughs. “I was never pretty,” she says. “At least, I didn’t think I was … so I wore a lot of jewelry. To distract people! My husband used to call me ‘Sammy’ after Sammy Davis Jr., because he always wore a lot of gold jewelry when he was on television.”

“I wasn’t a pretty baby, either,” Ryan says, digging out a baby photo of herself, taken three months after her birth, in 1914. In it, she is wide-eyed and nearly drowning in a long, puffy baby dress. “Can you imagine? Dressing a baby in that? How would you change their diaper?”

Laughter seems to be a key element in Ryan’s life. She doesn’t go too long without laughing at a funny memory – even a seemingly tame basket of pinecones brings out her tinkling laugh.

“I love pinecones,” Ryan says. “And these, the two biggest ones, were pinecones I found when I was driving through California with my sister and her husband. I’d never seen pinecones that big, so I told them to stop the car and I ran out and grabbed those two. Well, my brother-in-law told me, when I got back into the car, that it was illegal to take the pinecones, so I told him, ‘Well, drive faster!’”

Ryan has always worked hard. She raised her son, Don, and worked throughout her younger years – as a crane operator and, eventually, as a machine operator at the Jantzen sewing factory in Portland. Today, she is the mother of one – Don Ryan lives in Ariel – the grandmother of three, the great-grandmother of two and the great-great-grandmother of one. She also is an avid volunteer and has plaques from the city of Vancouver on her walls for her work with local community centers.

As for Ryan’s take on how to live a long, healthy life, she shrugs. “I don’t know how I’ve lived this long,” she says. “I have tried to eat healthy … and I still get my exercise. I try to walk a mile before bed, that’s six times around here.”

And, she adds, always take things with a grain of salt.

“Honey, listen to what everyone has to say and then you believe half of it,” Ryan advises. “The good half!”