Soaring at 100

Beatrice Nigella Teicher Larson, who turns 100 today, celebrated reaching her century mark in a party with family and friends Sunday afternoon at First United Methodist Church here in Red Oak.

Bea, the name used by those closest to her, said she had a happy childhood, is “absolutely” proud of her sons, and, suspects the secret for reaching 100 has to do with living a clean life.
Not all of life has been easy, but she has few regrets.
Bea was born in Minnesota on January 18, 1911. She arrived 20 months before her only other sibling, her sister, Bernice.
Though most of her youth would be spent in Minnesota, in her early childhood, her parents moved the family to live with her mother’s father, a homesteader, in Montana. They stayed there for two years.
By the time Bea was seven, her family had moved to Pine River, Minn., where she attended school for the first time. Her time in the town school brought with it a few challenges.
“My neighbor was a crippled girl, and we were in the same school,” Bea said. “The children made fun of her, like children sometimes do. I stood up for her, so you know, that made it so I wasn’t very popular either.”
Did she regret standing up for her new young friend?
“Absolutely not,” Larson said with a confident certainty that fits with her still being an independent woman at 100. She knew she did the right thing.
Helping those who needed help become a way of life.
She has good childhood memories.
“My parents were both ice skaters, so they took Bernice and me to the other side of a lake and we had to skate back home. That’s how we learned to skate. We had sore ankles from it, but we knew how to skate,” she said.
With Minnesota’s multiple lakes, she also swam some, but she did not find that particularly enjoyable. What she did like, though, was playing girls’ half-court basketball.
Bea and Bernice were close sisters. “I was the cut-up, and Bernice was more reserved, so she was sometimes a little embarrassed by me, but we were close as sisters.”
Bea thinks having a sense of humor as one goes through life is important to Bea. “Oh, my, you better not get too serious,” she said.
However, life brings sobering moments, too, even to sisters still playmates.
“I remember, when the flu came through in 1918, and thousands of people were dying. Bernice got sick and we thought we were going to lose her.”
Bea explained that one method of ridding the body of the disease was to put in a drainage tube into an abscess.
“The doctor did surgery (on Bernice) right on the kitchen table. We all tried to take care of her so she would recover.”
Her mother was not a nurse, but the care she gave Bernice so impressed the doctor that he asked her to accompany him on other calls to his patients. Her mother also made pneumonia jackets to help keep patients warmer as they recovered.
Bea said since she was the oldest, her father had her accompany him as he did his farming, and taught her skills he would have taught a son.
“We didn’t have much money, but we ate well.” By well, Bea also means, “healthy.”
“We always had a big garden, and we had chickens, hogs, and a milk cow, so we really only had to buy flour and sugar, and maybe coffee,” she said. 
Her father had a gun collection, with some guns from wartimes though he had never served. One gun even had a bayonet.
Her father sent a rifle along with Bea when she took the milk cow out to find some grass. After staking it, Bea could occupy herself by using the rifle. “I shot a lot of gophers,” she said.
Her parents never owned a car, so she became accustomed to walking, later even walking home for lunch because her $1 a day wages would not have allowed her to buy lunches.
Family duties interrupted Bea’s schooling.
 “My father wasn’t well. He became bedridden, so I quit school to help,” she said. Being the oldest child and the healthiest family member, she took on responsibilities for the family’s income.
“I became the family’s wage-earner, so school was not going to happen for me then.”
Even so, there is contentment as she looks back on her life with family in Minnesota.
“I had a happy childhood, we were a close family. When I was a teenager, there were revival meetings in Pine River. I think they were held at the fairgrounds. There was a lady whose last name was Davis, who kind of helped with that,” Bea recalled.
The meetings led to one of Bea’s most important decisions and added another dimension to her life.
“At those revival meetings, I accepted Jesus into my heart, and we joined the Methodist Church. We were baptized (in the church) there afterwards. It was not a big church, but we were like a big family,” she said.
Her faith has remained strong to this day.
“The Lord helps me get through the day, every day,” Bea said. Now, at 100, she had some “old age” pains, especially in her knees, and she says her hearing is not as good as it used to be, but she is grateful for the influence those revival meetings during her childhood had upon her life.
Bea and the rest of her family became active in Pine River’s Methodist Church. She taught “the little ones” and she remembers that her mother made aprons so she and Bernice would wait tables for some of the church dinners. She also sang in the choir. She has been in the Methodist Church here in Red Oak, too.
Her father was a talented man, a “jack of all trades” man. His talents enabled him to make violin repairs.
“He could repair violins, and he played them, too,” she said. At his encouragement, Bea tried violin for a while, but she said she really didn’t take to it.
Her father died at age 47, and later, her mother died at age 51. Bernice died in 1981.
One summer Bea worked at a resort near Pine River. When the work ended, P. F. Limbergh came to ask Bea to become his store clerk. Her reputation for pleasantly and precisely filling customers’ orders made Bea a popular with the store’s clientele.
Eventually Limbergh sold the store to the Zigmans. However, Mrs. Zigman was jealous of Bea’s popularity, so she devised ways to make work difficult for Bea so customers would not be able to request Bea’s help. Mrs. Zigman would even intentionally spill eggs to keep Bea busy.
One day after Mrs. Zigman had snapped at Bea, she fired her, expecting Bea to be out of work. However, Katerers, owners of the competing store across the street, had been asking Bea to work for them, so Bea walked across the street to her new job.
Bea held those three clerking jobs before her marriage to Marshall Larson Nov. 3, 1940.
Like others in that era, hers was not a big church wedding.
“There wasn’t much money (to spend on weddings) so a wedding in the pastor’s house was a sensible thing,” she said.
Her husband, being “an Iowa boy”, wanted her to move with him to Iowa. Over the course of her marriage, she and Marshall moved 12 times. 
“He drove Greyhound buses for awhile, but he mostly farmed. We lived here in Iowa and in Minnesota. I guess it was his nature to move around,” Bea said.
Besides doing the typical household duties, Bea had to learn to drive a tractor and do other farming alongside her husband, and later, alongside her sons Marshall Jr. and Richard. Sometimes her sons proved to be the most patient teachers for new tasks.
Her sons said their father made fixing up and reselling farms into a profitable hobby in both Minnesota and Iowa.
When the family arrived at one farm, for example, nearly all fences and buildings had been removed on the 1,000 acres. When they were moving on, the rejuvenated farm had its fences and about 40 buildings.
Marshall passed away in 1992.
Both her faith and her decision to help others have been important guidelines throughout her life. “If people needed help, then if you could, you did it,” she said.
Though Bea would say her mother was a better cook than she was, she also said, “I did get some compliments, though, on my cooking.”
Her “secret” for reaching 100 years of age, she supposes, “is living a clean life. We worked hard and we never had much money, but we had a big garden so we always had food. We ate well.”
The biggest change in 100 years, according to Bea Larson, is “what is happening right now. Why is America going down the drain? Why is common sense out of vogue?”
She questions why America has so much to do with Great Britain.
“Over the years people would say, ‘Great Britain is the mother country’. In the 30s, you would hear people say (about Great Britain), ‘Like mothers do, she’s always expecting something from us,” she said.
Mothers and fathers have important roles in families, though, and Bea has noticed those roles changing during her lifetime.
One of her concerns is that parents are not keeping tighter restraints upon their teenagers, especially when the youth should be home with families.
“I always knew where my sons were,” she said.
As for those sons, Richard (Dick) of Red Oak, and Marshall Junior, from Minnesota, she said, “I’m absolutely proud of my children. They are smart cookies.”
Marshall is the older of her two sons.
“Both of my boys have four tool chests. One is for electricity, one for mechanical repairs, one is a carpentry tool chest, and the other one is for plumbing.”
Besides having tool chests in common, both sons like to collect antique cars, but they have pursued their own careers in their adult lives.
After high school, Marshall went to Minneapolis and  be-gan working with computers when computers were still uncommon. He is now retired.
Richard, (Dick), of Red Oak, has established a popular business known as Dickel Duit Outdoor Power on Hwy. 48, south of Red Oak.
Those sons and several others came to help celebrate Bea’s 100th birthday. Bea had three grandchildren, but only two are now living. She has seven great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
Besides being grateful for a family to love, Bea has a century of memories to add to the ones she’ll be busily making in 2011.