Gene and Susan Gonzales pose with Virginia Breen at the celebration of her 103rd birthday.
Virginia (Bond) Breen, who celebrated her 103rd birthday Wednesday, grew up in the Newaukum Valley during the 1920s and early 1930s surrounded by extended family.
Everybody worked. They chopped firewood, planted seeds, harvested crops, fed animals, weeded the garden, washed clothes by hand, cooked, cleaned, and milked the cow.
“I never was good at milking,” Breen recalled. “The old cow finally walked away.”
As a child, she was close to her Aunt Ruby (Ely) Hamilton, wife of her mother’s brother, Art, and mother of two boys, Hal and Kelly. Art and Ruby raised cattle and bred turkeys, including the broad-breasted bronze, which provides more white meat.
“We were not only aunt and niece,” Breen said. “We were real close.”
Her mother was always so busy.
“She’d call Mom and say, ‘Can I get Virginia to help me today?’ We had our little chores that we had to do and then we goofed off. We had a lot of fun.”
Ruby taught her to swim in the Newaukum River. Although Breen grew up during the Great Depression, many youngsters never knew the difference.
“Most of the kids in school, or an awful lot of them, were farmers, so the Depression was just every day for them,” Breen said.
Farm families planted gardens and raised beef, so they had plenty to eat.
“It wasn’t easy, but it was healthy living,” Breen said.
One of her brothers received one of the first smallpox vaccinations during an epidemic. She knew people crippled by polio.
In more than a century of living, Breen said, cars are among the most amazing changes. Her family had a car.
“We also had a wagon and team of horses too,” she said. “We didn’t use the car much. That was a luxury.”
At Chehalis High School, Breen participated in Girls’ Glee Club, Girls League, and Crimson and Gray. She was an honor society student who worked four years as secretary.
“Well, you know, that was a hard Depression time and you did what you could to get a nickel,” she said. “If somebody offered you a job, and they paid halfway decent, you took it.”
Breen was baptized in the First Christian Church of Chehalis while in high school. Her mother attended church; her father hauled milk, even on the Sabbath.
After graduating in 1935, she started working at the Washington State Training School for Boys, today known as Green Hill School, a fenced school for male offenders. Art and Dennis, two of her Hamilton uncles, also worked there.
“I graduated from high school and went to work the next day,” Breen said. “They called the principal and asked him if they thought I could do the work, and he said, ‘She’s done mine for four years.’ He said, ‘That’s good enough for me.’”
She also worked for a dentist and a doctor in offices above the former J.C. Penney store on Market in Chehalis. The doctor encouraged her to train as a nurse.
“He says, ‘I’ll pay for it,’ and his wife came to me and said, ‘Why don’t you listen to him?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to be a nurse.’ She looked at me like I had a hole in my head.”
Virginia’s family, the Bonds, owned a telephone, but their neighbors John and Anna (Bostwick) Breen didn’t, so when people called for the Breens, one of the Bond kids had to deliver the message. One time, when Virginia delivered a message from a young lady to the Breens’ son Sterling Chester, who went by “Bud,” he invited her on a date to see a show.
Bud, a native of Francis, Wash., and graduate of Lebam High School, liked the messenger better than the message.
The romance blossomed. She was honored with a kitchen and pantry shower in late October 1936. Rev. Tim Goodwin officiated at their wedding at the home Art and Ruby Hamilton (on the original Hamilton place near McDonald’s at I-5’s Exit 72 today). The training school supplied the flowers. Their wedding certificate listed her age initially as 19, but it was scratched out because they married Nov. 7, 1936, the day after her 20th birthday.
The couple moved to Ryderwood, where their son, Harvey Richard, was born July 25, 1939. He was a toddler when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
“Everybody figured they would be bombed, but we never were, thank God,” Breen recalled.
She recalled how upset her mother was. Her brothers Glenn and Russell enlisted right away.
“I think all of the young boys here did,” she said.
Her husband, Bud, registered for military service. His draft card described him as five-foot-ten with brown hair, blue eyes, and a light complexion. But they wouldn’t take him.
“They said they would rather he worked as a foreman in the machine shop,” Breen said. “They needed him worse there than as a soldier.”
It bothered him, although he worked in the shipyards and later for the Chehalis Post Office
“Then he quit, and he decided he didn’t like indoor work and he went out to work on his own,” Breen said. “He was a machinist.”
He first operated a business selling war surplus machinery. Then, in 1946, he started S.C. Breen Construction Company delivering top soil, gravel, and ballast in Chehalis. The company specialized in rock crushing and hauling but expanded to riprapping and breakwater work throughout Western Washington. By 1966, the company employed 20 people, plus truckers. Bud was president, Virginia vice president.
While her husband built roads and did construction, Virginia raised three children — Harvey, Sterling Jr., and Tammy — and oversaw work on their hundred-acre farm. They raised 70 head of Hereford cattle, turkeys, and hundreds of black and white swans on the pond.
Like her mother, Breen canned hundreds of quarts of fruits and vegetables every year.
“I had a family, and it was a lot better,” she said. “It was fresh out of the field — good, wholesome food.”
At one point, someone complained to state officials, saying that the Breens kept wild swans in a pen.
“I said, ‘Well, that’s odd.’ I said, ‘Who turned me in?’ I wanted to know. They wouldn’t tell me. It’s a good thing they didn’t.”
Breen pointed the officials toward the barn to see the swans. “They were never in a pen,” she said.
The wild swans lived free on a trout-filled pond. The Breens fed them grain.
“They loved that,” Breen said. “And of course we fed them there. That kind of kept them in the water because the wild animals were awful bad.”
When their children were young, the Breens enjoyed seeing movies at the outdoor theater near the fairgrounds, which had a good screen and speakers at each car.
“It was real nice cause you could take the whole family, and when children were real tiny, put them in their little blankets and they’d go sound asleep,” she said. “You didn’t have to worry about a babysitter.”
In the 1950s, they traveled by train to Wise County, Va., and saw the headstones of ancestors and met relatives.
“The conductor, he took a liking to Bud, and he couldn’t do enough for us,” Breen said. “We traveled like royalty, and we’re paupers.”
Later, relatives from Virginia visited the Breens near the Newaukum River. They were surprised when they saw the house.
“I said, ‘What did you expect us to be living in? A tent?’ Made me kind of mad.”
Tragedy struck in April 1958 when Breen’s brother, Glenn Bond, was accidentally shot in a freak accident while fishing in the Cowlitz River between Salkum and Mayfield. He was 44.
Four years later, in August 1962, Breen’s father died at the age of 80. Her mother passed away only months later, in October 1962.
Breen’s sons worked for their father during high school, but then they independently started their own separate businesses.
“It wasn’t a hand-me-down,” Breen said. “They did it with their own two hands.”
Harvey started his business with a dump truck around 1960 and built logging roads, primarily for Weyerhaeuser Co., during his 39 years in business. He died April 6, 2013, at the age of 73.
Sterling Breen Jr. started Sterling Breen Crushing in 1978. The company has provided aggregate products regionally for 40 years and supplied rock and built roads at TransAlta mine before the mine shut down in 2006.
For vacation Bud and Virginia Breen spent time at a place at Long Beach, Wash. They also owned a small cabin in Palm Springs, surrounded by wealthy people in beautiful homes.
“I told Bud, I said, ‘They’ll all look down on us, and probably ask me if I’d like to do their housework.’” She chuckled. But, she added, “I’ve never had nicer neighbors in my life.”
They also lived in Mazatlán in Mexico but left after Bud suffered a stroke.
“I was afraid that he wasn’t going to make it because it was a bad one,” she said. “He had a wonderful doctor in Mexico. After he worked hard all day, he would come and see Bud at home — every night.”
Bud was 81 when he died April 13, 1994. He’s buried at Fern Hill Cemetery on Bishop Road, land for which was donated by his wife’s grandfather, William Hamilton, and a wealthy farmer named Mr. Dempsey.
Breen still feeds squirrels outside her home.
“People are spraying everything, and it’s passed on to the wild critters that are out there,” she said. “It’ll kill them.”
She has worked hard all her life — on the farm, in doctors’ offices, at schools—but said, “I never thought it was hard at all. I loved that.”
Breen never smoked and seldom drank alcohol.
“I’ve worked all my days, and I don’t think work hurts anybody,” she said. “I think it keeps you out of mischief.”
Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
