Charley Vingo prepares for 100th

From all indications, Charley Vingo never really has acted his age.

So it was not surprising when he was asked how it feels to be turning 100 on Friday, he shot back: “Not yet! I’m still 99 until Friday.”

As Vingo enters the triple-digit birthday club, his feat will be honored with a party hosted by friends from the American Italian Club. Even Spokane Mayor Dennis Hession is expected to attend.

Vingo worked an orchard well into his 60s. He sold real estate until he was 84; at 90, he wrote an enormous book on the history of American Italians in the Northwest.

Of his retirement from selling real estate for the Rose Co., Vingo said, “I had to quit when I couldn’t read the earnest-money agreement.”

Vingo is proud of his long involvement as recording secretary of Spokane’s American Italian Club and his commissioning of that group’s Leaning Tower of Pisa parade float that is seen all over the region.

“I’m improving with age,” Vingo said with a wry smile and a laugh from the wheelchair he uses to get around his condo.

Vingo has lived alone for the past three years since a divorce from his most recent wife of 25 years. He was married 38 years to his first wife, Katharyn, who died in 1969. The couple had two children, Steve, of Yakima, and Christine Hoskinson, who lives in Spokane.

“I think I’d do a lot better and live a lot longer if I wasn’t single. I don’t enjoy that at all,” Vingo said. However, he added, there “are not a lot of ladies who want to go out with a decrepit old man.”

Vingo gets around with either the wheelchair or a walker. He still has a corded phone and easily hops up when it rings to thwart yet another telemarketer’s sales pitch.

Vingo apparently has not lost an ounce of his memory, evident by his ability to rattle off an amazing number of names and memories from the past century.

He can recall every house in which his family has lived, as well as the street corners such as Cincinnati and Marietta or an address on East Indiana that still remains in the family.

There’s the Baltimore Cafe at Washington and Stevens, one of the many businesses his father operated here after emigrating from Italy.

And there was the paper route for The Spokesman-Review in which Vingo covered a massive area from Division to Perry streets, collecting 15 cents from his weekly customers and a dime from those who took the Sunday paper.

“I had to get up at 4 a.m. every day,” Vingo remembered.

He would ride his bike to the newspaper office on Saturdays to pay his paper bills.

Born in Spokane in 1907, Vingo attended McKinley Grade School through fifth grade. Then it was on to St. Aloysius School and Gonzaga High School, which at the time had an eighth grade.

Following high school, which he left after his junior year to attend Northwest Business College, Vingo engaged in a few business ventures. He had aspirations of becoming a pharmacist until he realized how much money it would take to get his business started.

It wasn’t long before Vingo returned to his roots in the newspaper business. He recalled that a man once told him that when the ink rubs off on your hands, it gets in your blood, “and you’re doomed to be a newspaperman.”

Vingo began a lengthy career working for The Spokesman-Review in the circulation department.

Working the “outside crew,” as it was called, Vingo traveled from town to town, selling subscriptions. “They paid us $1.25 for every one we sold,” he said.

His travels read like a road map of towns from the Cascades all the way to Great Falls.

When he was through with the newspaper business, Vingo’s travels didn’t change, just the nature of his business. He owned a series of hotels and motels across the region.

And there was the orchard in Yakima. Being a “city boy,” as he called himself, Vingo admitted he didn’t know a thing about agriculture. But, in his 60s, he enrolled in the farm management program at Yakima Valley College.

Charley Vingo never has been one to shy away from a challenge – or to act his age.