Kathryn “Kay” Wells appears to have found the fountain of youth, but when she celebrated her 100th birthday April 26, she said, “It’s just another year. My mom died at 47, and my dad died at 97. I just never thought about age, and I worked until I was 70.”
Kay’s mom was a nurse, “but she wanted me to be a musician,” Kay said. “I took piano and violin lessons for 12 years, and music was my avocation my whole life. I grew up with a Steinway piano and got up at 6 or 7 to practice before school. My brother was 2 ½ years older and played the coronet and piano. I have kept music in my life and am glad that I did.”
(Kay lives in King City Senior Village and is known to tinkle the ivories on the piano in the dining room from time to time.)
Born in Grays Harbor, Wash., Kay graduated from high school in 1942. “After high school, I had to have some college,” she said. “I moved to Portland and attended St. Helens Hall, a junior college where Portland State University is now. The war was on, and they needed nurses, and the Army had a cadet program where they paid women to become nurses.”
Kay joined the program at Good Samaritan Hospital and moved into a home for nursing students. “We were in the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps and had to wear uniforms when we were not wearing our white nurses’ uniform in the hospital,” she said. “They were gray wool, and we had to wear them wherever we went, although they were lighter weight in the summer.”
After three years, Kay finished the cadet nursing program, but World War II ended weeks before she graduated. “I was almost packed up and ready to join the Army, and the war was over,” she said.
Kay later took classes in psychiatry and became a psychiatric registered nurse. “I wanted to make some money, and I went to Honolulu for six years and worked at Queen’s Hospital,” she said. “While there, I played with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.”
Back in Portland, Kay played “and sang a little” with an early Portland orchestra and also played in the Portland opera. Kay met her husband Arlen when she was singing in an opera in Washington Park and he was setting up the stage, and they married in 1954. Arlen flew P-51 Mustangs during WWII and escorted bombers over Germany.
“He made 30 trips over Germany,” Kay said. “Sometimes the crews didn’t come back, and he had pictures of them. After the war, he was a teacher at Wilson High School and taught psychology and social studies. His students loved him and still come to visit me.”
Their son Ralph was a talented and award-winning opera singer who sang in 40 operas, but he died at age 47 from a brain tumor, and Arlen died in 1991.
Over the years, Kay said that she worked at “all kinds of nursing,” adding, “I worked in doctors’ offices, private duty, anything that made more money, I did. When I think about my life, what’s made me stay young is working. I only retired in 1994, and I had saved enough money to travel.”
Travels took her across Europe from England to Capri in Italy, including Germany where her son was living, and Czechoslovakia, where her dad was from.
Living in Northeast Portland, Kay said she had “vaguely heard” of King City, but her first move after selling her house at age 87 was to Calaroga Terrace, a senior-living complex in Northeast Portland. Almost three years ago, she moved to King City Senior Village, where she likes the staff and residents.
Kay sings in the Senior Village choir and exercises half an hour every day with a group, which she said keeps her young.
Just as music was always part of Kay’s life, so was art. Her beautiful paintings fill the walls of her apartment, and Kay said she originally took painting lessons and sold paintings to her fellow nurses when she was young. “Then I quit painting, and didn’t start again until I was at Calaroga Terrace and took lessons again” she said. “Then I quit because I took up bridge. You can either paint or you can play bridge but you can’t do both.”
Now she plays bridge in a group at Senior Village that is looking for more players.
