Julie McDonald Commentary: Chehalis Native Marks 100th Birthday With Drive-By Celebration

She never smoked, seldom drank alcohol, and laughed a lot while entertaining others as a stand-up comedian in Seattle, but 100-year-old Georgie Bright Kunkel attributes her longevity to fate.

Rather than a large party, as a concession to the coronavirus pandemic, people drove by her Seattle home Saturday to honor the Chehalis native for marking a century of life.

“I had a great day,” Kunkel said in a telephone interview Sunday, the day before her actual birthday. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

Kunkel was raised in a home at 768 Prindle St. in Chehalis, the youngest of 11 children born to George and Myrtia (McLoughlin) Bright. She was named Georgie Myrtia in honor of both parents. Her father died at 46 in June 1920, just two months before Georgie’s birth on Aug. 31.

“My father died just before I was born,” she said. “I never knew him.”

Her mother, a widow who earned her teaching credentials at 17, worked to support her family and served as Lewis County School Superintendent from 1923 to 1931.

“I don’t know how my mother did it,” Kunkel said. “She was brilliant.”

Myrtia taught herself to drive by reading the manual and practicing in a vacant lot. As school superintendent, she also served as truant officer and recounted in a December 1970 Centralia Daily Chronicle article calling on a Napavine boy who wasn’t in class. When the boy’s father said his son wasn’t going to school with long hair, she proceeded to crop the mop.

While celebrating her 90th birthday in April 1970, Myrtia noted that her great-grandfather lived to be 100 and her grandparents also lived into their 80s. She had never been hospitalized and visited a doctor only in her later years. She graduated from high school in Port Angeles and married George Bright in Sedalia, Mo., Aug. 22, 1898. After retiring, she enjoyed crocheting afghans and sewing quilts, bedspreads and tablecloths. She died in March 1971, only two months after Lewis County eliminated the school superintendent’s office Jan. 8.

Georgie enjoyed her childhood in Chehalis.

“I used to go out and play hopscotch on the sidewalk, and we played games all evening with all the neighbor kids,” she said. “I was the boss. I always could think up things to do. The kids always wanted to come to my house.”

After graduating in 1938, Georgie earned her teaching credentials in 1941 from Western Washington College of Education, now Western Washington University. Her first teaching job was at Vader Grade School and later at Edison Elementary School in Centralia.

During World War II, Georgie served as a local air raid warden, studying the shapes of planes so she could report the sighting of any enemy planes. She recalled the rationing of butter, when people added color packets to white pounds of margarine to make it yellow, and obtaining powdered milk from a milk evaporating plant. Her family grew corn, beans and strawberries on a piece of land a few blocks from their home.

During the summers, she worked at Boeing Co. in the Seattle office and later as a mechanic at the Chehalis branch plant drilling holes in B-17 wings. Women wore bandannas to keep their long hair out of the machinery, she recalled for my 2005 book, “Life on the Home Front: Stories of those who worked, waited and worried during WWII.” She said women primped in front of the mirrors several times a day to tie their bandannas in the most attractive way possible.

During the war, Georgie’s brother Norman Bright, who later competed to run in the Olympics, served in the Army Mountain Rescue Unit and her oldest sister, Anne Williams, served in the Army Nurse Corps in Africa and France. Her brother Raymond Bright suited up, but the war ended before he could serve.

Her fiancé, Norman Clyde Kunkel, served with the British in the India/Burma campaign as part of a private ambulance corps called the American Field Service and later with the U.S. Army in repatriation efforts in Italy. He was with the British when they liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

She watched a lot of movies during the war years, danced at Playquato outside Chehalis, picnicked at Deep Lake, sang in church choirs and rode a bike to music lessons. She belonged to the United Service Organization and met her future husband while seated in a corner during a dance at the Trianon Ballroom in Seattle.

Georgie, who wrote a book called “Color Me Feminist,” recalled the day at the Chehalis Boeing plant when whistles blew, bells rang and a loudspeaker blared the news: “The war is over! Everyone go home.” They tossed down their tools and raced for the doors.

“That was the last I ever set foot in the plant.”

After the war, Georgie married Norman Kunkel April 25, 1946. They both worked as teachers in Seattle and raised four children — Stephen, Susan, Kim and Joseph, who died in 2001. They had been married more than 62 years when Norman died April 2, 2009.

At 100, Georgie still lives at home, cooks her meals, and intends to visit the Comedy Underground again soon to entertain with her stand-up routine, which often focuses on the trials of aging. Her children persuaded her to sell her car, but she still has her driver’s license. She has a boyfriend, Emil, who has accompanied her on trips to her hometown.

“I don’t know how I made it this far,” she said. “I’m still well and I’m doing whatever I want to do.”

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.