Scott Swanson
When Sally Sicotte was 65 years old, she realized her daughter didn’t know how to do a cartwheel.
So she demonstrated.
“She did them all the way across the back yard,” recalled Sicotte’s daughter, Mary Ahola.
That was in 1980.
Sicotte celebrates her 100th birthday Feb. 4.
She has five children, 13 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren and 28 great-great-grandchildren.
She said she certainly never expected to live this long.
“I never wanted to get past 70,” she said. “My mother was old at 40.”
She attributes her healthy longevity to “God’s will.”
Sicotte was born Feb. 4, 1915 near De Leon, a small town in Comanche County in the heart of Texas. Her father was a sharecropper, who raised cotton. She was the third of eight children – six girls and two boys. The boys were the oldest and youngest of the clan, but her older brother was sickly, she said.
“My dad didn’t have any boys to help him out. I was his right-hand man,” she said.
Her family would move to one farm, “get the weeds out, then move to another.”
“Dad said he had to keep us busy.”
They had a “good work ethic,” she said.
“As we grew up, each kid had a job. When I was 6 years old, I picked my first 100 pounds of cotton. I looked at my dad and I thought he’d commend me, but he said, now you have to do that every day. My ego was deflated.
“I loved my dad so much, I really wanted to please him. He broke my heart. Such luck.”
Another childhood memory harks back to the time she and her sister climbed on the barn roof and discovered some loose nails up there. They used a claw hammer to pound them into the tongue of the family’s wagon.
“My dad took one of the nails and put it on our heads and pounded it into our heads, or at least if felt like he did,” she said.
Her grandmother, she noted, was half Native American and her mother had “dark skin and high cheekbones.”
One of her vivid childhood memories is the day her dad took a load of cotton to town and came home driving a 1924 Model T Ford, which he’d learned to drive on the way home. Well, sort of.
“He came up to the gate into the barnyard and yelled, ‘Whoa, Bessie!’ because he was used to driving livestock teams and ran it right through the gate. He’d never driven before,” she said.
“Mom wanted to go to church, so Dad told her if she could drive it around the pasture without hitting a tree, she could drive it to town. She made it, though she ran it into a ditch and we had to push her out.
“That was pretty gutsy, driving to town with a car full of kids.”
Sicotte graduated from high school as salutatorian – “I was second in the class.”
She said she was also “a top basketball and baseball player, but I never learned to swim or ride a bike” – though she eventually rode a tandem her husband bought.
Soon after graduating, she moved to California. She was 19 when she met a gas station attendant named Henry Lloyd “Boots” Rhone and they married. They had two children, but later divorced.
Sicotte, now 30, was working at Nash’s Department Store in Pasadena in 1945, when a soldier named Ken Sicotte walked in, seeking another employee.
“He was looking for another woman, but instead he asked me out on a date,” Sally Sicotte recalled.
“I turned him down.”
But he was persistent and eventually she capitulated and agreed to go out with him. They were married a year later.
Ken Sicotte was a career Army serviceman, who was stationed at various postings around the world during the first part of their 35-year marriage. Sally and their then-two children, Chuck and Mary, joined him in Osaka, Japan, for 13 months and then spent 1958 to 1962 in West Berlin, Germany, during which time the Berlin Wall was constructed.
There were adventures along the way, including seasickness on the way home from Japan and on the voyage to Germany – they flew the other ways, Sicotte said.
In Japan a “major” typhoon tore a portion of the tiles off their roof. In Berlin they “always had to be ready to leave at any time” in the face of the communist threat, she said.
“People were trying to escape all the time,” Mary said. “They were tunneling across. They used hot air balloons. A lot of people got shot.”
They told of two particularly innovative young men who purchased a low-slung sports car, calculating that its body would slide under the gate in the wall.
“They went real fast and tore their windshield off, but they got under the gate,” Mary said, noting that they survived a hail of bullets. “They got shot up but they made it.”
During their time in Europe, the Sicottes visited all the non-communist countries except Scandinavia, Mary and her mom said.
“France, Spain, Austria, Italy, Holland, Luxembourg – we hit them all,” Mary said. “I think every kid should have to do something like that.”
Back in the States in the early 1960s, now with another son, Mike, added to the family, they settled down in West Covina, Calif., east of Los Angeles, where Sally went to real estate school and then worked as an agent for several years. Ken retired from the military and got a job working for the Post Office.
Mary graduated from high school in 1967 and decided to move to Salem, so her dad accompanied her up. He decided they should all move to Oregon.
“Mom sold the house and moved up here,” she said.
Sicotte lived in Salem until 1983, when she moved to Sweet Home.
Her granddaughter, Rachel Ahola, inherited her athleticism and was a record-setting swimmer for Sweet Home from 1994-97, who earned a scholarship to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, but Mary Ahola said her mom missed a lot of that because she was caring for Ken, who was ailing.
“The only thing I do now is go to church,” Sicotte interjected.
She enjoyed sewing and made “tons of quilts,” her daughter said.
“I made a quilt for every grandkid,” Sally added. “I’ve still got quilts here. I was a good seamstress.”
Ahola noted that her mother exercised faithfully for years.
“She used to ride her exercise bike every day, well into her 90s,” Ahola said. “She’d turn on the TV and ride her bike for an hour a day.”
She also took meticulous care of her yard, Sicotte said, quitting only a couple of years ago.
“I had to quit getting up,” she said, gesturing at her knees.
“If these younger kids had half the work ethic of the older people, every yard in town would be beautiful,” Mary said.
Sally also reads stacks of paperbacks, usually at least one a day, she said, and does word puzzles and plays Solitaire for hours.
“This old brain doesn’t work very good any more,” Sally noted. “It’s very important to exercise your brain.”
Though she is largely a shut-in now, she said, she still attends regularly at Sweet Home Christian Church at 18th and Long, where a celebration of her centennial birthday was held last Sunday.
In addition to divine providence, she attributes her health and longevity to eating a farm-fresh diet for the first 20-some years of her life.
And then there’s her Christian faith which, she says, has sustained her through good times and bad – the latter which she likes to forget.
“I don’t count the bad ones,” she said. “God got me through them.”
“I read my Bible every day. The main thing for me was turning my life over to the Lord. I try to do what He tells me in His Word. I pray a lot.”