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| Stockton Record, Sunday, July 11, 2004 |
| by Jennifer Torres |
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| New town's 94-year-old offers lots of good advice |
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MOUNTAIN HOUSE-Nearly a century ago and well before houses sprouted on these 5,000 acres northwest of Tracy, dahlias bloomed in Darnell, La., where Pauline King carved out a flowerbed on her family's farm.
On July 21, King-- who lives in Mountain House now and figures she is the oldest resident of the county's youngest community-- will turn 95. She attributes her longevity to the happiness she's attained by tending her relationships as lovingly as she does her gladiolas.
"Treat people as you desire to be treated," she advised. "And make sure you treat yourself good."
King was born in 1909, the eldest of 10 children. Living on a farm, she said, she learned how to care for animals, how to "skin a goat and have it for breakfast." But also, she learned to kneel on the ground and nurture a garden.
"It takes a lot of work and planning," she said, picking a dried blossom off a mound of gold chrysanthemums. "And if you want pretty flowers, you have to water. You must water."
When she wasn't minding her flowerbed, King was minding children: first the five sisters and four brothers whom she helped raise, and later hordes of 5- and 6-year-olds, her students in a small country school.
But when she moved with her husband, Roscoe, to Oakland in 1943, she left teaching behind. West Coast students, she said, wouldn't have taken well to Southern discipline.
"I'm from Louisiana, and if they don't do it right, you tap 'em."
King's penchant for plants, though, traveled with her. Along with two children, Leonard and Bernice, King raised colorful blooms-- yellow and orange ones are her favorite-- in the family's yard.
"We both gardened, but I think she can beat me," said Allie Lewis of Tracy, who was King's neighbor in Oakland for more than 50 years. "I don't think it’s ever too hot or too cold for her to be outside in the garden."
Gardening later helped bring King to Mountain House.
"She caught me climbing trees," King explained, grinning and pointing to her daughter, Bernice Tingle, with whom she shares the new house.
Last year, Tingle said, she found her mother up in a tree, pruning its branches.
Concerned for King's safety, Tingle made her promise to stop climbing. But it happened again.
"I told her, 'you promised me you wouldn't climb up and prune any more trees,' " Tingle remembered. "And she looked at me and said, 'I wasn't pruning the tree, I was spraying it.' "
The women decided it would be best for them to live together and moved in October to Mountain House. King brought some plants with her and spends time every day watering flowerbeds in the front and back yards and weeding a neat row of mustard greens along the side of the house.
Often, she said, children from the neighborhood run up to her when they see her outside with the hose or clippers.
"They come over here saying, 'Hi, Grandma Bigga,' " she said. Bigga is a nickname King inherited from her mother.
"I ended up having lots of brothers and sisters," Tingle said, referring to the small neighbors in Oakland and now in Mountain house who have been drawn to King. "She's collected them. She's still collecting them."
Later this month, some of those children along with friends and relatives from as far as North Carolina and Arkansas will celebrate King's birthday in Mountain House.
When King clipped the last of the season's gladioluses last week to put them in a vase, Tingle worried the garden would be bare when guests arrived.
"I said, 'Bernice, the dahlias will be along right after them,' " King recalled. And a few days later, they were. |
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