Vet says staying active key

Orin “Pete” Peterson gave up riding his bicycle about the time he turned 98.

“It wasn’t that I wasn’t able to do it,” he said. “It was getting too hard to see what I was doing.”

Now blind and living in the Spokane Veterans Home, Peterson gets up every day before breakfast to ride a stationary bicycle for at least 20 minutes.

On Sunday, Peterson celebrated his 105th birthday and gave credit to his active lifestyle for his longevity – which has set a record for the Spokane home, according to Kaye Conrath, Spokane Veterans Home spokeswoman.

Peterson has never stayed still for long. Even Sunday while sitting in his wheelchair, the constant motion of one foot rolled him backward, away from visitors seated nearby. His nephew, Orville Kirkevold, had to engage the chair’s brake so he wouldn’t roll across the room and out of earshot.

“Very few people can keep up with me,” Peterson joked.

Born the middle child in a brood of 10, Peterson’s family moved from Wisconsin to eastern Montana when he was a teenager. There he lived the idyllic life of a cowboy. “We’d have little rodeos, gather up some steers and broncs,” he recalled.

In World War I, he joined the cavalry and might have seen combat on horseback, except for the fact that the horses were being replaced by motorcars and tanks. He was discharged from the infantry without ever joining the actual fight, he said.

Back in Montana, when he was 27, he and his younger brother Rufus decided to drive a Model T Ford from eastern Montana to Spokane to find work fighting forest fires.

“It took about a week,” averaging about 100 miles a day, he said, grinning a little at the memory.

“We slept along the road. We’d go a couple hours and we wouldn’t meet anybody. We had the whole world to ourselves.”

When they did see someone along the way, “we stopped,” he said. “In them days you never passed up anybody.”

The roads were bumpy dirt paths, and signs were scarce; “There were handwritten signs on trees.”

At one three-pronged fork, the brothers took a wrong turn and wound up at a sheep camp.

When they finally made it to Spokane, the brothers found work on a North Idaho fire crew, making $4.80 a day. “It was big money.”

Out on one fire, Peterson had a close call. One of their crew members was killed when a tree fell on him, and the six crew members took turns carrying him the 20 miles to the nearest road.

“I decided that was enough,” Peterson said. “I just checked out.”

Peterson was a wanderer, traveling from town to town, taking up jobs and staying until he got the urge to move on, said Elvina Chapman, a niece.

He stayed in touch with his many siblings, however, and became the beloved uncle of his nieces and nephews, many of whom grew up in Spokane.

“He was just a kick,” Kirkevold said.

“He’d play with us and tease us.”

The younger generations have similar memories: “When I was 2 or 3, we’d ride bikes down to Bowl and Pitcher,” said Ty Lagerstrom, a 40-year-old grand-nephew said. “He was 60-something.”

Peterson stayed the longest in Sacramento, where he was a chicken farmer for many years and raised the deaf daughter of good friends who had been killed in a car accident.

Carol Herman was 6 when her parents were killed and came to consider Peterson her father. Her death two years ago of cancer was hard on her foster father, Chapman said.

Peterson considers the best years of his life from about age 65, when he qualified for Social Security, to about 80.

“I had a little travel trailer, and I just roamed around and had a wonderful time,” he said. “I was free as a bird.”

Asked why he never got married and settled down, he responded that he had a life-long love, but she had married someone else.

“I had a genuine love affair all my life,” he said. The affair was honorable, however, and he kept a respectful distance.

He never married anyone else, seeing too many unhappy married couples to settle for less than his true love.

And while Peterson might harbor a few regrets about playing his romantic cards wrong, he’s maintained an upbeat attitude most of his life – and kin say they feel uplifted after visiting him in the Veterans Home.

“Just stop and enjoy life,” he said.

“I was never one to give up or taking things too serious.”