The spry 97-year-old grandmother of Toledo weightlifting instructor Crista Dobyns and matriarch of five generations runs around the house, jumps down steps, tends a garden, rattles off pioneer history and drives wherever she wants to go.
“I have to tell her ‘please don’t run,’” Dobyns said of her Grandma Denny, Margaret Denzil (Kirkendoll) Cole, of Ethel.
“It’s nice to keep moving, that’s for sure,” the nonagenarian said. When I pointed out the petite woman’s quick-footed scurry throughout the house without balance issues, she responded, “Well, I can slip on my feet. I’ve been known to fall on the floor a couple of times.”
But she keeps going every day, said her daughter, Sheryl McKinley, of Chehalis, who is the sister of Dobyns’ father, Rick Cole.
“If she sits down to watch TV, she falls asleep,” McKinley said.
Cole, a founding member of the Lewis County and Toledo historical societies, attributes her longevity and health to good genes.
“I come from pioneer ancestors,” said Cole, a descendant of the Shultz, Prince, Davis, Burbee, Layton and Kirkendoll families. “And they had to be pretty sturdy. My great-grandmother was pregnant when she came across the plains in 1877.”
Five generations of Dobyns’ family were alive on both her mother’s and her father’s sides until early January, when her mom’s mother, Ethel Keen, passed away. A Christmas photo depicts Dobyns with her son, Jesse, and his two children as well as her parents, Rick and Pam Cole, and their mothers, Ethel and Denny.
When she was a young grandmother in the early 1990s, Cole also appeared in a five-generation photo in the newspaper with her mother, Edith (Layton) Kirkendoll, her son Rick, granddaughter Crista and great-grandson Jesse.
“I take after my mother, and she lived to be 100,” Cole said. “But I don’t know if I’m going to be able to stay upright that long.”
I’m pretty sure she’ll celebrate her centennial birthday in three years surrounded by family members and friends. At 99, her mother took her first airplane ride in 2003, soaring above Toledo in a Cessna piloted by her grandson, Rick.
Born near Layton Prairie on Sept. 20, 1926, to Mark and Edith (Layton) Kirkendoll, Cole was named Margaret after her grandmother but preferred to go by her middle name, Denzil, or her nickname, “Denny.” Her parents had lost a child during pregnancy before she was born. She has a younger sister, Marie, and brother, Garry. They grew up on a dairy farm near where IFA Nurseries operates on Eaden Road near the Cowlitz River.
“She’s an old farm girl,” McKinley said of her mother.
In 1995, Edith Kirkendoll told granddaughter Rebecca McKinley about life during the 1920s and 1930s Great Depression, when she washed everything using a washboard. The family milked 75 cows every day and raised chickens, sheep, goats, turkeys and geese. They hauled milk in 10-gallon containers to the Toledo Cheese Factory and chilled food in cold spring water. Although they pumped spring water to the house, they visited a two-seated outhouse, using the Sears and Roebucks catalog for toilet paper.
“We had to walk quite a little ways to get to it because I don’t think they wanted the fumes any closer to the house,” Cole recalled. “My folks lived in a renovated chicken house. It was kind of elongated. They had a big shed where they kept machinery, and we had to go around that to the outhouse.”
Cole began her academic studies at the one-room Wayside School on Collins Road, but her parents quickly switched her to the Knab School, across the road from the home of Grandma Margaret Layton, who once ran the store and post office. The one-room Knab School, which served perhaps a dozen students in first through sixth grades, was later torn down (other than the gymnasium). The teacher, Ethel Henriot, picked Denny up each day and took her to school.
She recalled dressing up to perform in Christmas plays. Her mother, who tended a large garden until she was quite elderly and walked with a cane, packed her a sack lunch for school — and coffee.
“Her favorite was the cucumber sandwich,” daughter Sheryl said.
“I liked bean sandwiches,” Cole said. “And any kind of meat that Mom had.”
When districts consolidated one- and two-room schools in the late 1930s into larger buildings, Cole attended classes in Toledo, where students were farmed out to different buildings initially after the old high school burned. She liked her home economics and typing teacher. In high school, she wore a “D” for Denzil on her shirt.
“She never liked Margaret,” her daughter said.
Instead, she went by Denzil.
“Then when I got married, they nicknamed me Denny,” Cole said.
When Japanese pilots dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, she was on the farm and heard about the attack over the radio. Her future husband was home on leave at the time.
“My dad said he was just spittin’ mad,” Sheryl said.
Most of the boys left school to enlist in the military and fight in World War II, Cole recalled.
Her talent for artistic design brought her a position as the school’s yearbook and newspaper art editor, which kept her busy.
“I’ve always dabbled,” Cole said. “My only talent there.”
She created the cover artwork for the 1944 yearbook, the Twalmica, signing her creations M.C. Kirkendoll, at a time when the high school with the Toledo Indians mascot featured a Squaw Club.
While Squaw Club is definitely politically incorrect, Cole said, “I was kind of sad when they gave up the Indians because this area was the Indians. I think the young generations get a little hypersensitive.”
She attended the new Toledo High School, which today is the middle school, and graduated in 1944.
“I wasn’t a good student,” Cole said. “But I graduated, I think, thanks to the blessings of the teachers.”
She met Laurence Frederick “Larry” Cole when he was working for her family’s dairy farm. Larry was born June 14, 1921, in Idaho to Walter Robert and Eva May (Auer) Cole and grew up eating dandelion salad. His family moved west from Idaho after a stint in Texas battling chiggers and settled in the Adna area. His parents later moved to Fords Prairie in Centralia.
During the Great Depression, Larry quit school and worked on the Kirkendoll dairy farm near Toledo. That’s where he first met Denzil. At 17, Larry joined the Navy as a carpenter and, while on leave from California, visited his former employers, the Kirkendoll family. He and Denny started dating, usually with visits to the theater in Winlock or dinner at a restaurant.
“The movie was about the only thing to go to,” Cole said. “I wasn’t much of a dancer, and he wasn’t either.”
They were married on Aug. 6, 1944, shortly after she graduated from high school.
I’ll share more about Margaret Denzil “Denny” Cole next week.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
