Shelter Bay centenarian still lives life to hilt

Theodore Roosevelt had only recently yielded the White House to longtime friend William Howard Taft and was already in the midst of a celebrated African safari.

The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opened in Seattle.

Famed neurologist Sigmund Freud delivered his only United States lectures on psychoanalysis.

A new Navy base was established at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands.

The year was 1909.

It was also the year Shelter Bay resident Frances Kent was born.

The timing couldn’t have been better for someone who has embraced change and adventure – and continues to do so.

“I try to plan for every day,” says Kent, fondly known as ‘Fran’ to her many local friends.

It was they, along with Fran’s daughter, Linda, a U.S. Foreign Service retiree, who gathered recently at the Farmhouse Inn to celebrate Fran’s 108th birthday.

“It was quite an eclectic group,” says Jeanie Hertz, of La Conner Hair Design, among the two dozen or so people who attended. “It was all the people she interacts with.”

It has been that way with Fran for more than a century.

A registered nurse who became an early United Air Lines flight attendant, Fran met a host of celebrities in the friendly skies, heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey and beloved comedian Jimmy Durante among them.

Dempsey would provide mementos for the thick, neatly filled album Fran keeps in her room, and also extended an invitation for her to dine at his famed restaurant on Broadway in New York City.

It was pretty heady stuff for an Iowa farm girl whose dad would have preferred she stay close to home and marry a rancher rather than work shifts aboard the 10-passenger Boeing 247s United flew in the 1930s.

“He thought it was too dangerous,” Fran recalls. “In those days you couldn’t fly above 10,000 feet because the cabins weren’t pressurized yet. So you had to deal with mountains. It could get rough. We did lose a few.”

United had begun hiring registered nurses as flight attendants – then called stewardesses – to help calm passengers who were afraid of flying.

It bore little resemblance to flying in style.

“There was no food on planes in those days,” says Fran. “Just coffee. And it was so strong it was like acid.”

The harsh winters of rural Iowa made working on airplanes worth the rigor and risk, however.

“Growing up, we didn’t have snow days,” Fran says. “We went to school regardless of the weather. I remember my dad would hitch up a horse and wagon and go around and collect all the kids and carry them to school.”

Vehicles weren’t equipped with heaters or air conditioners. So, in the dead of winter, Fran remembers putting heated bricks in cars for warmth.

What she really warmed up to was the opportunity to become a nurse.

“I always wanted to be a nurse,” says Fran. “I worked hard for that.”

She entered nursing after completing a chemistry requirement at Drake University in her home town of Des Moines. The timing, though, could have been better. Her joining the nursing ranks coincided with the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

Banks went under and money became scarce.

“I was living with three other nurses and a lady who worked at the local bank,” Fran says. “The lady from the bank called one day and asked if we had any money in the bank. She said if we did that we’d better get down there and get it out because the bank was going to close at four o’clock. I had the grand total of $305 in that bank.”

A sense of shared crisis brought people together during the Depression, says Fran.

“People looked out for one another,” she says. “I took care of a man who owned a fur shop. He didn’t have any money so instead of paying me he told me I could come down to his store and get a coat. It was my first fur coat.”

The physician with whom she worked, Dr. Oliver Fay, was equally generous.

“You’ll never be hungry,” he told me. “I’ll take care of you.”

An early Boeing stockholder, it was he who encouraged Fran to sign on with United. It was counsel she never regretted – not even when assigned a flight that transported 10,000 baby chicks from Chicago to Denver.

“We carried anything we could make money on,” she says. “But it was the mail contracts that kept us going.”

For her part, Fran has kept going long after leaving United. Much more of her story remains to be told.