Battle Ground resident celebrates 101 years

Gertrude Levanen, second eldest of John and Anna Ek’s nine children, recently celebrated her 101st birthday.

Though her husband of 63 years passed on over a decade ago, Levanen continues to reside in Battle Ground and be surrounded by loving family members who treasure her stories of the past as they embrace the gift of the present.

Levanen’s father, John, was born in Raahe, Finland and her mother, Anna, in Vadso, Norway.  She was born on Aug. 6, 1913, in the Quincy-Clatskanie, OR, area and lived between there, Mist, OR, and Mount Solo, now known as Longview, until she enrolled in college at the age of 20.

Water and water crossings by dugout canoes and less primitive boats were a large part of her childhood memories. Levanen recalls moving from Quincy to Longview by boat, and back to Clatskanie to care for her ailing grandmother and crossing the Nehalem River in Mist by canoe on the first leg of her journey to attend college at Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburg.

Back then, the Columbia River routinely flooded and so the family home was built on stilts to allow for the river’s fluctuation with the seasons. A rowboat tied to the porch and 10-foot-tall wooden walkways allowed residents and visitors to come and go and be able to access the barn, chicken house and outhouse until the water receded.

While her dad was away fishing for several days at a time and then working in logging camps, Levanen’s mom took charge of milking the cows, bringing in water, tending to nine growing children and any other task that needed seeing to.  She’s remembered as a strong and creative woman by both Gertrude and her 91-year-old sister, Louise.

From a young age it was apparent that Gertrude would be a school teacher. She would return from her lessons in the afternoon and hold “school’’ in the evening to teach what she had learned that day to anyone who would listen.

With all her younger siblings, people were clamoring to hire Gertrude for entire summer daycare jobs in Portland. She stayed in homes she described as “mansions’’ and even cared for the children of Samuel Rosenblatt, owner of Samuel Rosenblatt & Co. Clothiers on Alder and Fifth Streets in Portland back in the early 1900s.

She remembers high school in Vernonia, OR, as a 34-mile round trip endeavor in a boxy jitney-style vehicle on a gravel road loosely referred to as a highway. Apparently, those same ill-constructed roads were all over the U.S. back then.

“Summer had come and the time seemed to be ready for everybody else to start off for North Carolina ‘cause we never got that far before’. After visiting people on the coast (we set out for Michigan). We took five extra tires because the roads were rough and gravelly. We didn’t change one tire, just hauled them around,” Gertrude said.

January of 1934, the time that Gertrude attended college, was a far different time than now. She tells how she lived with a family, tending to their young daughter for the first two years and shared an apartment with two other girls for $15 a month rent the last year. Her job at a nearby creamery brought in $20 each month and tuition at Central Washington was all of $100 per year. Students used books from the library rather than purchase their own and “everything possible was done to keep students in college who wanted to be there.”

With Gertrude’s first teaching position, she was able to pay back the ladies’ club in Ellensburg who had loaned her $150 to have her appendix removed in her second year of college.

In the summertime, Gertrude would take trips with her sisters to the east coast and it was on one of those adventures that she met the man who was to be her husband – Lavey “Butch’’ Levanen. After their 1941 marriage, she joined him in Michigan and taught there and in East Lansing for several years before returning to the West Coast.

Among other locations, Gertrude taught at Ellsworth Elementary School as a remedial reading teacher for many years. Her great niece, Sara Massie, recalls her teaching classes into her 80s and community education classes into her 90s. She was visiting Scandinavian friends in Europe at 92 and took a Clark College class about Iran at the age of 96 with Massie because she wanted to learn about their culture and what kind of foods they ate.

Gertrude and Butch continued their adventurous spirit after fostering two children and adopting and raising Jane Day by enjoying a cabin at the beach, traveling around the U.S. in a teardrop trailer and taking many visits to Europe together.

Just like her mom, Gertrude has passed down her talent for making gorgeous woolen braided rugs and Finnish cardamom bread called Pulla. Family is a legacy for Gertrude and her life-long membership in the Old Apostolic Church is a faith she’s proud to proclaim.

Massie summed Gertrude’s heart and purpose up perfectly by saying, “I’m her great niece and she has been like a second mom to me for decades.”