Editor's note: Read the first installment of this two-part series here.
As a teenager in the late 1940s stranded in Lewiston, Idaho, where she knew nobody, Mazie (Donner) Schlickeiser, of Chehalis, ate occasional meals at a small restaurant in a five-and-dime store.
A waitress named Grace listened to her story, then offered her work waiting tables so she could earn money to travel by train to Tacoma, where a cousin lived with a friend.
While she excelled at math and spelling, Mazie always enjoyed doing hair — brushing and shaping the hair of her cousins, her sisters, her aunts and her mother. So, upon arriving in Tacoma, she enrolled in beauty college and learned to cut hair while working in a Nalley pickle plant from four until eight.
“Came out of that pickle factory, you smelled like a pickle,” she recalled, chuckling over a memory from more than 80 years ago.
For fun, she and a friend from beauty college went dancing — until her friend married and moved to Alaska.
Mazie found a job in a small shop where the beautician who trained her left that same day, so she was on her own. But, she said, “I’ve always been self-sufficient.”
A year or so later, she moved to Seattle to live with an aunt, uncle, and cousin and worked in a beauty shop on Capitol Hill. She rode the bus to work, and it was in the Emerald City where she slowly fell in love with the bus driver, George W. “Bill” Schlickeiser.
During a visit to a bar called the Drift Inn on Fifth Avenue, where women stood on one side and men on the other, she spotted him and they danced.
Then, as she left the bus one day, Bill asked if she could help a friend of his whose wife had abandoned him with a baby. Would she babysit for a few hours after work? She agreed, but she didn’t like walking home from the bus stop late at night. He volunteered to pick her up and drive her home.
“So that’s kind of how I got acquainted with him,” she said.
Bill invited her to stop for coffee with him and then to join him for summertime picnics with friends. “He was a pretty nice guy,” she said. He and his four siblings were orphaned young after the deaths of their father and Cherokee mother in San Francisco. He was raised in the Portland area by an aunt who operated a candy shop. During World War II, he joined the Army Air Corp and flew as a pilot in the Pacific Theater before becoming a Seattle transit driver.
After dating about a year, Bill and Mazie decided to marry.
The wedding took place in a Lutheran church in Seattle on May 28, 1949. She’d attended Lutheran services in North Dakota, and her father, a dedicated Lutheran, refused to attend her sister’s wedding in a Catholic church. “He was pretty solid,” she said. Her parents did attend her small wedding, and Bill was baptized in the Lutheran church.
“I kept working,” she said. “I’ve always worked. No reason not to. He drove bus.”
After a couple of years, they packed their belongings in storage, quit their jobs and traveled east to explore the United States. They’d stay a few days or perhaps a week somewhere and then continue east.
“But by the time we reached Chicago, we were kind of out of money,” Mazie said.
She had worked as a switchboard operator for Bell Telephone Co. in Seattle and quickly found an office job at Western Electric Co., while her husband worked at Montgomery Ward and then began driving bus again. After a while, he applied for an opening as a county surveyor and later as a cartographer doing aerial surveying. He once flew over their home close enough to see their garbage can had tipped over.
They never had children, although Bill had two daughters from a previous marriage.
“It just didn’t happen,” Mazie said. “ I guess we never tried to say, ‘Oh, well, if we don’t have them, let’s see what we ought to do.’ We didn’t even talk about it.”
She did ask if he wanted to adopt, but Bill said no. He enjoyed playing with her nieces and nephews and their children, and that was enough.
The couple lived in Chicago four decades, retired from their jobs in the late 1980s and moved back to the Pacific Northwest.
“This felt like home even when we lived in Chicago,” Mazie said. “Washington was home.”
They settled in Lewis County because of friends who lived across from them in a new Chehalis development.
“We just liked the area,” Mazie said. They worked with a builder to tailor their new house to their desires with two bedrooms, a computer room and arches near the entryway. “So I think it’s pretty much the way we wanted it.”
And retiring didn’t mean sitting at home. The couple involved themselves in the Greater Chehalis Food Bank, where Bill joined the late Harry Zopolos of Chehalis and others as a ROMEO — Retired Old Men Eating Out. They also volunteered with the Lewis County Food Bank Coalition and belonged to the Chehalis Moose Lodge and Optimist International. The Chehalis-Centralia Optimist Club organizes the Lewis County Historic Bike Ride, which Mazie suggested changing to a fundraiser to help children.
“We’ve had riders from Germany come in,” she said, with others from Switzerland, Spain, England and throughout the United States.
Both she and Bill served as volunteers in the AARP Tax Aid of Lewis County program, and Mazie became treasurer of the Miss Lewis County program and solicited donations from local businesses.
“I just walked in and said, ‘This is what they want,’” she recalled. “I didn’t know those people, so it was easy.”
She described Bill as an agreeable, easygoing and giving person, but as a military veteran, he liked his clothes ironed and folded nicely.
“I never heard him swear,” she said. “He never hollered.”
They were both Republicans, especially because Bill believed President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted the United States involved in World War II. Her father also hated Roosevelt, saying he never did anything to help wheat farmers during the Depression. Like her parents, grandparents and her husband, Mazie has always voted Republican.
After a short illness, Bill died on Feb. 24, 2008, at the age of 82. A friend at St. John’s Lutheran Church took ill first and died.
“Bill and I kind of just looked at each other and said, ‘he’s not that old.’ He wasn’t sick more than two, three months, and he’s gone,” she said. “Same thing with Bill. He was just gone. It was not a horrible thing, but he’s not here anymore.”
They had been married nearly six decades.
Mazie, a widow for 18 years, lives with her easygoing green-eyed cat, Gracie, who has a bobbed tail. She had taken shelter beneath Mazie’s porch with her two kittens. A woman fixes dinner for her daily.
Even at 100, she still drives — her father taught her to drive at 12 in a Model A — and stops by the Lewis County Food Bank Coalition behind The Station restaurant in Centralia to help where she can, but she doesn’t do as much as in the past because she can’t stand long. She helped raise money for the renovation of the building and worked closely with Sen. John Braun and his father.
“I said ‘Yes we can. We can do it.’” She knocked on doors to solicit support for the volunteer effort to raise $160,000 for the renovations. “That wasn’t hard to do it really.”
As for reaching a hundred years old, she said, “It just is. What’s the difference? I’m just 100. It’s just another year, another day.”
And the secret to her longevity?
“You just don’t die,” Mazie quipped.
She never smoked or drank alcohol and eats healthy.
“I should exercise more than I do,” she said. “I don’t jump around, but I stay limber and keep the strength.”
She’s outlived her parents and most of her siblings.
“When you’re 100, then everybody is young,” she said.
If she could offer any advice to the younger generations, she said, “Think of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. People are just running off at the mouth, so to speak. They don’t really think about what is left behind.”
Mazie said she hopes people remember her as nice, kind and empathetic.
“I have always thought of the other person, how they feel, if they’re hurting or whatever,” she said. “If they’re feeling well and glad, I try to be happy for them.”
She injured her back in a fall two years ago so uses a walker, and she finds stairs difficult, but overall, she’s healthy.
When she visited her doctor’s office in Rochester, they visited a lot. Then he told her, “You’re so healthy, I don’t think I have to ask you to come see me again, but I’d like you to come see me.”
She hopes to continue living, as long as her mind and body are healthy.
“Why not live?”
•••
Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
