Gwen Koski outlasted the paper.
And that’s a good thing.
The 92-year-old began getting notices that her “lifetime” subscription to the Salmon Arm Observer would run out Dec. 28, 2011.
“The paper ran out before I did,” laughs the animated woman, who for 41 years, wrote for the Observer and then the Shuswap Market News, retiring in 1997 at the age of 77.
Koski, who arrived in White Lake with her new husband, Jim, in February 1946, continues to write and engage in pastimes many younger people would have long given up.
An artist who continues to paint colourful scenics, Koski plays her keyboard and writes about things that engage her, such as the poem she wrote about the Louisiana Hayride.
Setting out china cups in her cosy townhouse, the gracious hostess says she also starts each day with a series of exercises to keep herself flexible and in good health.
But the city girl, who ended up farming a huge homestead in White Lake, says the real secret to longevity is laughing and being happy.
“I’m happy, I’m quite satisfied with life. I still get a kick out of things and I still get a good laugh,” she says noting local radio personality Patrick Ryley told her she was funny. To which she quickly responded, “Funny, or funny-funny?”
This is a lifetime attitude that has carried the feisty woman through her adventurous life.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on New Year’s Day 1920, Koski emigrated to Calgary with her family when she was a little girl.
In 1942, Koski, her sister and a cousin had each saved up enough money to pay their “one- cent-per-mile” tickets to Vancouver, where they quickly obtained jobs vacated by men who had joined the Armed Forces in British Wire Ropes, a factory on Granville Island.
“We got dirty and oily, it was pretty heavy work for women,” says Koski, whose job was to put heavy coils of wire onto a bobbin. “If the wire ran out or broke, we had to weld it together and we had to file it so perfectly that nobody knew where the weld was.”
Like a song from South Pacific, Koski spied her husband across a crowded room at a 1943 dance she attended with a friend.
“I said to her, it’s too bad women can’t ask a man to dance, because over there stands the man that would be my dream man,” she says. Being too shy to ask for a dance in the ‘ladies’ choice a few minutes later, she had posted herself near the cloakroom to watch the action on the floor. “I felt a pat on my back; somebody said ‘do you want to dance?’ I turned around and there was my dream man.”
Three years later, the couple married, a happy union that lasted more than 57 years until Jim’s death nine years ago.
“When we got married, we didn’t have much, but we had a lot of love,” says Koski, who relates the story of how scared she was when the newlyweds fell into their beds in their new little White Lake digs four days later, only to be treated to a hair-raising cacophony.
The young bride soon discovered she and her husband were the subjects of a post-wedding prank known as a chivary by their Finnish neighbours, a group of people she came to love and write about.
When the Koskis first arrived in White Lake, there was no electricity, no bathrooms and no telephones.
“Here I was, a city girl going to an outhouse and that seat was ruddy cold,” she says, noting sometime later, she removed the squirrel collar from her coat, arranging it neatly around the hole.
Jim had been away at work and didn’t know about the new fixture. He went out in the evening, rushing in to get the gun, shouting about ‘the wild animal on the toilet seat.’ “Oh yes we had some happenings all right; I laugh to think about them.”
This city girl also had to learn to milk cows, feed chickens and drop hay on the farm the couple acquired through the Dominion Veterans Association.
Though then-owner Frank Marshall told Koski he didn’t think Observer readers would be too interested in reading about White Lake, she accepted his challenge to write one column, the first of many over 41 years.
And while most of her columns were lighthearted, Koski also reported on serious matters, including an account of a terrifying accident she and her husband came upon on the Trans-Canada Highway near Canoe.
And writing about the history of the Finnish neighbours she came to love led to a book called Milk Pails and Winding Trails.
While things are a little quieter now, Koski continues to face life with the same outlook – “live, love and laugh.”