Norine Jones celebrated her 100th birthday Sunday at the Baw Faw Grange with more than 100 family members and friends in attendance. Jones was the subject of an article in The Chronicle in 2018. Jones, who was born in 1923, didn’t grow up in the Boistfort Valley. Her mother did, though, and Jones has lived in the valley since 1950. Her mother, Lois Miller, was born in the Boistfort Valley in 1903 and went to school in the district. Later, Miller took a job as a housekeeper on a small farm on the edge of Chehalis. When Jones’ father returned from World War I, he took a job on that same farm. “My dad was in World War I; he fought in France,” she said in 2018. “He was gassed with mustard gas, which destroyed his lungs and that’s why he died.” Her parents lived in a logging camp for a time, but her father died when she was only a year old. Her mother moved back to Boistfort and later married a man she went to school with named Hugh Morgan. Jones’ family left the valley, but came back for her freshman year of high school when her uncle died. Within two weeks, her grandfather died as well. Her family left the valley again a year later. Then came World War II. “I remember World War II — the beginning of it, and the end of it and the time of it,” said Jones, a teen when the war began. “It was a strong factor in my life, right at the time when I didn’t need that kind of a factor.” Norine moved to the Boistfort Valley permanently in 1950, when she married her husband, Ed Jones. The full 2018 story can be found online at https://bit.ly/3QpErrk.
