She’s 103 years old and still going strong. Mildred Hersman, who looks impossibly young for her age, is fiery, delightful and full of history.  Hersman currently lives at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, but spent the majority of her life at a residence along Northeast Lynden, an area she lovingly refers to as the Northwood Corner.

“She’ll tell you what’s on her mind,” Wendy Mejia, the environmental director at Life Care Center, said of Hersman. Mejia said she enjoys coming to work every day and her favorite part is hearing all the old stories.

During the 1920s Hersman went to school to become a nurse at the Virginia Mason Hospital. But after 18 months she left school to marry her high-school friend, Lewis Hersman. Two months later, he left for the Navy.

Since women found it difficult to go to school and be married at the same time back then, she decided to do housekeeping and nursing privately while her husband was gone. He would return four years later and they began growing their family. They had four children, one who died at 18 months from pneumonia and whooping cough.

After Hersman lost her son, her sister recommended that she work with children and youth to remedy the pain. So Hersman became actively involved in her community.

“I taught Sunday school for 30 years, and worked on the election board. People came to my house to vote,” said Hersman.

She also led a boys 4-H group at her house, was the leader of the Northwest Washington fair committee and led an anti-alcohol group.

The family’s livelihood consisted of raising 20,000 chickens on their 10-acre farm, one of the largest egg factories around. They were also involved in carpentry and built houses in Whatcom Valley as well as their three-story chicken barns, which were unusual back then.

Hersman was very proud of the fact that she drove, recalling: “Not many women drove back then. I was one of the few.”

It was necessary for her to drive as a farm wife while her husband was in the Navy.

After retirement at the age of 56, she and her husband were finally able to take vacations. During winters they traveled to Yuma, Ariz., and became square dancing aficionados. They spent lots of their time travelling together and going on fishing trips in their camper. She also fondly remembers traveling around the perimeter of the U.S.

Lewis, her husband of 64 years, passed away in 1995 due to emphysema.

Her family currently sends emails to stay in contact with her, since she can’t hear on the phone, and they opened her a Facebook account.

The computer she received at age 80 makes this communication possible.

Sharlene Hague, Hersman’s daughter, said her mother’s long life is attributed to the fact that she grew her own vegetables, never drank alcohol and apparently because of genetics, since her father lived to be 100.

Hague visits her mother a few times every week and is still a strong presence in her life. She said the reason her mother is doing okay in a nursing home is “partly because she has short-term memory loss and doesn’t know what she’s missing.”

Starr Burroughs is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.