The secret to newly minted centenarian Al McFarling’s longevity?
“Drinking scotch every once in a while,” he joked, then revealed the real recipe for his 10-decade run: surrounding himself with family and friends.
The ingredients encircled him on a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, four generations radiating out on the King City Senior Village lawn, helping McFarling ring in his 100th birthday.
At the center of the celebration sat McFarling in his “It took me 100 years to look this good!” T-shirt, with his 92-year-old girlfriend, Muriel Dresser, by his side. And, according to U.S. Social Security Administration data, only 2.4 percent of men born in 1926 reached the milestone.
“I’ve had a very good life. There have been so many good moments. So many good things,” he mused, and the best part is “being with my family. I have three wonderful daughters, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”
McFarling, charming and quick with a joke, is also part of an even smaller statistic. The former Marine is among the last .2 percent – fewer than 31,000 of 16.4 million – of remaining World War II veterans.
He needed his “mama’s” signature to enlist at 17 and narrowly escaped action. His unit was preparing to attack Japan in Sept. 1945, when the war ended.
“We were all set to invade. We were on landing ships off the coast of Saipan, and we were supposed to invade any minute,” he recalled. “They surrendered, thank God, and we went ashore to the southern island, Kyushu.”
After spending 13 months there as part of the occupying U.S. forces, the Commerce (now Cleveland) high school graduate returned home to Oregon, where he met his future wife, then Anna Millar, while working in a shoe store.
The way his daughter, Gwen Edmonds, tells it: “He met my mom in the shoe store back in the day they would give you a foot massage when they were selling shoes, and my mama fell for him.”
The couple raised daughters Edmonds, Sherrie Thompson and Cindy Mondlick in the Tigard home he and a brother-in-law built. McFarling worked at Tigard Family Dri-Vin on Barbur Boulevard, while raising his family, eventually rising to management and taking on wider responsibilities supervising about 40 theaters throughout the Northwest for the cinema’s parent company.
“I wish my wife had lived a little longer,” he says of Anna, who died “young” in 2016 at 89. The couple cruised the country in an RV for more than a decade post-retirement, spent another decade in Port Townsend, and eventually landed back in Tigard.
These days, the man his daughters and son-in-law describe as “adventurous,” “a great guy who always has a smile,” and someone who “will win you over in a heartbeat,” continues to charm friends and neighbors at King City Senior Village, where he is the second-oldest resident and hosts the weekly Saturday morning gathering, Donuts with Al.
