Northwest authority

The odds of living to age 103 are somewhere around three in 1,000.

But what about the odds of still living in your own home? Still doing all of your own housework? Still tending your own rose garden?

Whatever the odds, Dorothy Nokes, 103, has them whipped.

“I can’t complain,” she said as she stalked through her rose garden. “I think I’ll live forever.”

Her roses, on the other hand, were looking frail and spent.

“It’s been too nasty, the weather,” she said flicking petals off an old bloom. “I haven’t got all these trimmed off.”

To sum up: Dorothy Nokes is the kind of 103-year-old who apologizes because she hasn’t dead-headed her roses for two days.

One other thing: Her rose garden contains 85 rose bushes.

“100, if you count the ones in front of the house,” added her son, Gene Nokes.

Does she really do it all herself?

“Why, sure,” she said, sounding a bit taken aback. “What there’s around here to do, I do myself. Oh, I have to have Gene or one of the boys till the garden. But other than that, you do what you do yourself.”

Then she paused and added, “Of course, a lot of it doesn’t get done anymore.”

Plenty gets done, but not as much as in her younger days.

“I have a picture of her and her husband up in the apple tree, pruning it,” said longtime neighbor Dorothy Stone. “And they were both in their 80s.”

Her brick home near Whitworth College is tidy inside and out. The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening sits on a coffee table in her living room. A brand new baseball sits on her kitchen table, where she likes to sit in the sun and listen to Seattle Mariners games on the radio. The baseball has a signature on it.

“That’s Edgar Martinez,” she said, pointing to the signature. “They (the Seattle Mariners) sent it to me. The neighbor ladies told them I wanted a baseball, and they sent it to me for my birthday (on Aug. 11).”

She was thrilled, but she’s also a little irritated with her beloved Mariners right now.

“They got rid of most of my favorites,” she said.

Obviously, Dorothy is a woman who keeps up.

And even though her younger days are a long time ago, she remembers enough to be a living store of Inland Northwest history. She has lived in the region for all of her 103 years and taught school for 37 of those years.

She was born on Aug. 11, 1901, on a farm in Cedonia, near Hunters, on the Columbia River in Stevens County.

“My first memories are of getting out there and milking the cows,” she said. “We milked some cows and sold some cattle, and that was about the size of it.”

The farm had no electricity, no indoor plumbing and no motorized vehicles. It had one modern convenience — a telephone. She was the second of 11 children, and despite a lack of cash, she had ambitions to become a teacher and go to college.

In those days, a young woman could get a teaching certificate at age 18 and work her way through college.

“My first job was at Huckleberry School up in Cedonia,” she said. “It was a country school, maybe 15 youngsters, and I rode from home to school on a cayuse. That way, room and board cost me nothing.

“The school was about an eight- or 10-mile ride from home.”

There were very few cars in that area at the time (about 1919). Dorothy probably would have preferred her little cayuse horse anyway. To this day, she has never driven a car or had a driver’s license.

She taught at Huckleberry School one year and earned enough money to attend Cheney Normal School, known these days as Eastern Washington University. She took classes there and in Ellensburg.

“I had to work my way for board and room at different places,” she said. “Oh, I’d wash the dishes and do the cooking and do what they tell you to do. I didn’t have any money and there was no money around, it didn’t seem like.”

What did she do for fun?

“We didn’t have any time for fun,” she said. “We didn’t do anything much. We were busy, and that was the size of it.”

After graduation, she taught at another school near her home, Hunters Creek. It was there that she met Gilbert Nokes, a carpenter from Spokane who was working a job in the area.

“We met at one of those country parties they used to have,” she said. “Where a group of country people would get together at night and they’d play games and do things we did in those days.”

The courtship lasted about five years, and they were married in 1930. They moved to Kellogg briefly, but before long they bought a tiny house near Whitworth.

“He put an addition on it, because he was a city boy and he didn’t like outdoor facilities,” she said, laughing. “Me? Well, I was used to it.”

She and Gilbert had three sons, Galen, Eugene and Delmer, and brought them all up in that little house. She remembers the 1930s as a friendlier time in Spokane.

“There’s so much stealing and things like that, and people in trouble all the time and fighting,” she said. “We didn’t seem to have that when we were first here.

“People weren’t as crowded, so they got along better.”

Also, in those Great Depression days, people did what they could to subsist. The neighborhood had a lot of small chicken farms.

“Of course, we used to raise chickens, too,” she said. “Those buildings there (pointing to some weathered outbuildings) were chicken houses. We had 500 chickens.

“We took a case of eggs to town every week. That’s where you made your money to get your groceries. In the 1930s, things weren’t so hot.”

Yet Gilbert’s construction business thrived. He helped build schools in Ritzville, Colville and Spokane. Dorothy took off a number of years to raise her boys, but then went to work for the Mead School District.

She spent most of her 37-year teaching career at Whitworth Elementary School, near her home. She taught mostly first and second grade.

“She was a great teacher,” said Stone, whose husband, Cash, taught with her in the Mead School District. “She was kind of a strict teacher, very respected and loved by everyone.”

In 1949, Gilbert built a new brick house, where Dorothy now lives. The original house, where the boys were all raised, is now a garage and shop. The precious “indoor facilities” were ripped out a long time ago.

The boys all live nearby — Galen and Delmer in Colbert and Gene in Deer Park. She also has a number of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even two great-great-grandchildren. She has plenty of family members close by in case of emergency, but there hasn’t been much in the way of emergencies. She has never been in the hospital except for childbirth and has never taken any medications.

She goes to the doctor every so often. Yet she said, “I don’t know that they do too much, either.”

“I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke and I live a very clean life,” said Dorothy. “The good Lord has taken care of me, and I guess that’s the way it is.”

She has always been a churchgoing woman, attending Whitworth Community Presbyterian Church.

“But I can’t go now because I don’t hear so good,” said the former Sunday School teacher. “There’s no use going and not being able to hear what they say.”

And even though she makes jokes about “living forever,” a little sadness sometimes breaks through.

“I’m thinking I’m kind of staying around too long,” she said, standing on her back steps. “Sometimes it gets lonely around here.”

Gilbert died in 1995, at age 98, and, according to Gene, she has missed him immensely.

“They did a lot of things together,” said Gene. “They had a very happy marriage. They used to go fishing together.

“She fell in the creek up by Springdale when she was 85, going after a fish.”

One more thing makes her sad: seeing obituaries of kids she taught in grade school.

As for the state of the world, she’s a little discouraged by what she sees.

“There’s quite a bit of scrappin’,” she said. “People are not as peaceful as they ought to be. Bush — I’m not particularly fond of him. But I’m not fond of the other gentleman, either.”

So Dorothy is the kind of elderly woman who is often described as feisty. But it might be better to describe her as tough.

“She used to work from 7 a.m. until sundown around here,” said Gene, looking around the garden. “My dad was like that, too. Everything had to be spotless.”

And, according to another book on her coffee table, you realize that “tough” may be the perfect word.

The title of the book: “Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do.”