Although she wasn’t a Rosie the Riveter, Mazie Schlickeiser often shares the “we can do it” mantra in conversation about her first century of life.
Left alone when a friend failed to meet her in Lewiston, Idaho, she told herself, “I can do it.”
Abandoned and alone in Seattle, she again recited her catchphrase.
When the Lewis County Food Bank Coalition needed money to remodel a donated site, she told her fellow volunteers, “We can do it.”
Mazie Schlickeiser, who turned 100 on Jan. 9, celebrated with members at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Chehalis. People may know Mazie and her late husband, Bill, from work with local food banks, the Retired Senior Volunteer Program offering tax assistance to seniors, the Miss Lewis County pageant, and the Optimist Club, which sponsors the Lewis County Historic Bike Ride in the spring.
Her mother always told her she was born under a small bridge near DeSart, a now-defunct community in North Dakota homesteaded by a family of that name in 1905. The community of 75 on the southwest plains had a bank, post office, store, and dance hall.
After her parents, Ernest and Florence (Hovland) Donner, were married in Ziebach, South Dakota, in January 1924, they moved to DeSart, where they raised nine children — Wallace, Mavis (called Mamie by her father who hated her English name and Mazie in high school), Beverly, Betty, Richard, Ronald, Robert, Leroy and Douglas. Only Mazie, Bob and Douglas are living after Leroy died last week.
Her uncle, Albert Donner, fought in France during World War I as a private with Battery F, 339th Field Artillery. He sailed from New York on the Empress of Britain in August 1918 and returned from France in January 1919 a changed man.
“When he came home, his hair was just as white as could be,” Mazie said.
Her father didn’t fight in World War I but registered for the World War II draft when he was 52. Mazie described her mother as Norwegian with a wonderful sense of humor, which she needed as her six sons teased her endlessly. Her father was an uneducated but educated man. He quit school after third grade but could do math quickly in his head.
He initially farmed with a horse and plow and drove Wallace and Mazie to the one-room school near DeSart in a horse and buggy. During nasty cold weather, he walked his children 1½ miles to the home of their neighbors, the Braatens, who hauled them to school in the covered wagon they had used to cross the plains to North Dakota.
Later, they rode a school bus.
But even in a small North Dakota community, children had heard of the ill-fated Donner Party, which started west on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1846 from Independence, Mo., and became trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by a winter blizzard. Of 87 who left on the journey, only 48 survived, with some said to have resorted to cannibalism by eating parts of the bodies of Mohawk guides and people in their party who had died of starvation, injury or disease.
Mazie and her siblings bore the taunting of classmates who claimed they descended from cannibals, even though George Albert Donner’s family emigrated from Germany in 1715 and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, while Mazie’s German grandparents arrived in 1850, several years after the ill-fated pioneer venture. Her uncle George always claimed they were related but didn’t believe they actually ate people.
“That’s when I say, I’m a survivor,” she said.
From the age of seven or eight, Mazie milked three or four cows every day, helped her mother separate cream from the milk, and churned butter.
“My grandma, when she did that, she had one of those old-fashioned pieces of wood — a paddle — and separated it over and over.”
By fourth grade, Mazie had transferred to the school in Reeder, N.D., which served students up to 10th grade. Today, the flat-roofed brick school erected in 1924 serves as the nonprofit Reeder Community Center. The town’s population slowly dwindled from 400 to 125. As for DeSart, little remains except for deteriorating farmhouses and a marker for the DeSart Lutheran Cemetery, resting place of Mazie’s grandparents Ferdinand and Alvine F. (Haase) Donner.
“As kids we would play, but I don’t think we ever had play toys,” Mazie said. “If you could get a toy to play with, you shared it. And a lot of the toys were homemade. Dad was very handy.”
He taught himself to play a violin he purchased at an auction.
“He sang and played with a small group,” she said. “There were three guys, and they all played violins, and they would get together and play for dances.”
After her freshman year, Mazie switched to the high school in New England, N.D., where she graduated in 1945, just before World War II ended.
She remembered hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and her brother Wallace enlisted in the Army in 1943. Her father donated excess farm machinery to scrap metal drives. They grew most of their food, she said, but “sugar was always difficult to find during the war.”
Even in North Dakota, families prevented light from shining at night so any enemy planes couldn’t identify nearby towns or factories. Her father dug a 12-foot root cellar into the side of a knoll where they stored potatoes and other vegetables.
“We were sent to the cellar quite often,” Mazie said, primarily for protection against tornados.
“One time, Mom looked out and the barn was gone,” she recalled. “A tornado came through and took out the barn, but the cow was standing there. She was tied to a well, something solid. My brother teased us, saying ‘if we go out and milk her now, would it be curdled?’”
After graduating, Mazie and a high school friend planned to travel to the West Coast. Mazie left first, visiting an aunt in Billings, Mont., before riding a train to Lewiston, Idaho, where they were supposed to meet. But her friend never showed. What was she to do?
I’ll share more of Mazie’s story next week.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
