Harder times recalled by almost 100-year-old woman

For Dorothy Riley, laundry day involved pouring 30 gallons of water into a large copper boiler, setting it on the stove and throwing in chips of thinly sliced brown soap.

When the water came to a boil, Riley -- who her daughter said weighed only 100 pounds -- would carry the 80 pounds of hot water to the bath tub, dump it in along with a weeks worth of laundry and agitate the steaming load with a wooden stick.

This was more than 70 years ago.

"You know I had it so easy," Riley said with a smile and a tinge of sarcasm. Riley now uses a walker to get around, but has no trouble seeing the world around her through were wide eyes.

Riley, who favored President Franklin D. Roosevelt over any other president because he was "such a gentleman and spoke so well during his 'Fireside Chats,'" will celebrate her 100th birthday Wednesday.

London-born and raised, Riley's accent is still detectable 79 years after she said goodbye to her family and friends and headed for America on an ocean liner with her husband, a U.S. citizen in the Canadian Armed Forces.

The Las Vegas resident of 16 years has seen a lot of changes in her lifetime, things that she says seemed to make everything easier.

She recalls the first pop-up toaster that her daughter bought from the electric company in 1935 and smiles when her daughter talks about how in the 1930s -- pre-air conditioning and pre-crime -- people from the neighborhood would take their bedding to Garfield Park in Chicago and sleep under the open sky where the breeze would save them from the hot, muggy summer air.

Riley made beer and wine during Prohibition, and laughed as her daughter explained how her bottles of Fig Wine, left too long in the pantry, exploded without warning.

She was also a part of the small percentage of American women who went to work, her daughter Mary Briltz said.

She worked seven years in the kitchen at the Chicago Daily News and was there the day the stock market crashed in 1929. During World War II, she worked in machine shop running a lathe.

The now-reserved senior was known to cut a rug in her day. She loved to dance a waltz so much so that she went dancing every Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, her daughter said.

Today Riley may not go dancing every weekend, but after all these years, she still hasn't lost a step. She also might not say as much anymore but she doesn't hesitate to give it her all when singing "You Are My Sunshine," one of her favorite songs.

When asked if she ever thought she'd lived to be 100, Riley just shakes her head in disbelief. "It feels pretty good," she says.

According to the U.S Census Bureau and the Nevada State Data Center, there are more than 17,000 residents in Nevada who are age 85 and older. There are no statistics on how many are 100 and older.

archive