Clarence Estenson | Spotlight on Seniors
Published 2:08 pm Tuesday, September 4, 2012
By Gretchen Wing
Clarence Estenson has seen the 20th century unfold. He has driven horse teams on his family’s farm, survived a truck rollover that killed two fellow loggers, and celebrated 74 anniversaries with his wife. At age 97, the (unofficially) oldest male Lopezian, he has earned his daughters’ nickname for him: “King of Lopez.”
Born in 1914 in a North Dakota town just below the Canadian border, Clarence learned early to accept the hardships of nature and of work. The family’s nine children milked 30 cows and helped farm 800 acres of wheat and feed crops without a tractor. Clarence loved driving the horse teams. He also learned to let the horses take charge when the weather turned dangerous.
“If you get caught in a blizzard, you let them go, and they’ll take you home…That’s about the first thing you learn when you’re a kid,” he says.
But by age 18, Clarence “had all the farming I wanted,” and headed west with a cousin. They picked fruit in Wenatchee, then landed in Scotts Mills, Ore., where Clarence began a new career as a logger.
Two years later, at the height of the Great Depression, his high school sweetheart, Alice Naismith, joined him. They had not planned to marry right away, but Clarence’s sister, also living in Oregon, hastened the process.
“I came home from work and she says, ‘You want to do something fun tonight?’ I said, ‘Sure, whatever you folks want to do.’ ‘Well, we’re going to take you up to Washington state and get you married.’”
In those days marriage licenses were easier to procure across the state line. The Estensons were married just before midnight. Then, as a “honeymoon,” Clarence’s brother-in-law took them to the amusement park at Jantzen Beach, and “put them on the roller coaster and wouldn’t let them off,” laughs Clarence’s daughter, Colleen Biggs. Clarence and Alice were married for nearly 75 years before Alice passed away in 2010.
The Estensons bought land in Mill City, Ore., and settled down to start a family as logger and farmwife. Clarence’s essential logging work kept him out of World War II, then an arm badly broken by a tree made him 4-F. For 15 years, life was tough but satisfying. A good community member, Clarence added volunteer firefighting to his workload. Then came the accident that nearly killed him.
A truck carrying ten loggers went off the road’s edge, dumping men and heavy equipment down a 150-foot embankment. “I was laying on top of one dead guy…” Clarence remembers, trailing off as with a war story. Colleen adds that more men may have died later, and one “went nuts” from the trauma.
Clarence suffered a broken back and ribs and a fractured skull, stayed in the hospital a month, and was out of work for a year and a half. The family never considered going on relief; instead, they lived off their farm and sold some timber and chickens to get by. And after his recovery, Clarence was done with logging.
In 1951, Clarence’s brother offered him a carpentry job in Seattle, and Clarence was ready “to get out of the woods.” Alice kept the business books and the household of three daughters, and Clarence built houses in the expansive Seattle economy. A few years later, Alice’s parents moved in next door, bringing her uncle who was mostly paralyzed by rheumatoid arthritis. So the Estensons now had an extended family to care of along with their own. “It was a lot of work,” Colleen remembers, noting her father’s tremendous strength in lifting and carrying her great-uncle.
Alice was a social woman, and her bowling friends first introduced the Estensons to the San Juans. It was not love at first sight. Clarence describes getting stuck in a ferry line on Orcas “for five or six hours, and I said, ‘I’m not going to come up here again!’ But,” he adds, “here I am.”
With their daughters grown and gone by the early 1970s, the couple bought Lopez land, becoming full-timers once Alice had weaned herself from her Seattle life. They soon became active Lopezians, involved with the Lutheran church, bridge, golf, and hunting and fishing. For 15 years they “snowbirded” in Arizona, until age began to interfere with travel, but Colleen says her dad was still up on the roof cleaning gutters at age 90.
Except for accidents, Clarence has led an extraordinarily healthy life, which he attributes to his farm diet. A “Norski,” he still enjoys lutefisk and lefse when he can get any of his daughters, five grandkids, or 11 great-grandkids to fix it. Colleen and Arletta Mansfield, his other surviving daughter, care for Clarence full-time, and he enjoys an ocean view from his easy chair…a fitting throne for the King of Lopez.
