The compassionate centenarian

She has never owned a cell phone or computer, and can’t recall when she first owned a TV, but Polly Lackey of Sallisaw recalls so much more — a candy-apple red Chevrolet convertible with white leather seats, her 74 years of marriage to her husband Charles, growing up in rural Sequoyah County, vacationing in Europe, watching her fellow Okies abandon eastern Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl for promises of California’s prosperity and even witnessing Hollywood at work when film crews descended on U.S. 64 in Sallisaw in 1939 for the filming of scenes for “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Lackey has lived through 18 U.S. Presidents beginning with Calvin Coolidge, saw her first airplane as a child — “we didn’t know what it was” — which gave way to the International Space Station, witnessed American cars transition from the Model T to those powered by electricity, was seven months old when television was invented in October 1925, and now lives in a world where artificial intelligence is pervasive.

With apologies to Frank Sinatra, regrets, she’s had a few, but then again, too few to mention. Lackey prefers to focus on her many blessings rather than any unfulfilled dreams she may have had. After all, reflect on the past century, and you’ll discover she’s had a wonderful life.

And when Monday dawns, Lackey will be among the very few who have celebrated a 100th birthday, “if I make it that far,” she joked just a week before her landmark occasion.

Born Polly Anna Mills in the Sequoyah County community of Miller Ridge, she was the eldest of five. Only she and her youngest sibling, Wanda Lu, still survive. Her parents were school teachers, mainly in small rural schools, but her mother retired from Sallisaw Public Schools.

Ask Lackey about her life, and she’ll modestly tell you hers has been “a very mundane life, just a normal life, nothing unusual about it.”

But spend some time getting to know her, and you’ll find she has lived a life many would envy.

Wagons, milk and eggs

As a child, Lackey’s world had very few paved roadways. “Of course the vehicles that they used were mostly wagons,” she points out. She was still very young when her parents built a little house in the Kesterson community “at the foot of Wild Horse Mountain,” on land that was her mother’s Indian allotment — “she was a Cherokee, part Cherokee.” By about 1930, the family had moved to Liberty where her parents taught school.

“Of course they didn’t have school buses, so they used wagons,” Lackey recalls. “There were two wagons — one had a route one way, and the other had a route the other way, just like a school bus, only they were covered wagons. The community called them ‘hoodlum wagons,’ because they carried the school kids, the hoodlums.”

Living on a farm, Lackey and her younger sister Lee shared in chores. “One of us would help with the milking, while the other one cleaned up the kitchen — washed the dishes and put them away. We’d do that every other day. One would milk and the next day, the other one would,” Lackey remembers. “But my mom and dad decided I wasn’t doing a good enough job milking, so I wound up with the KP duty while my sister got to milk. We never went hungry because we did have milk cows and gardens.”

Also common to the Mills barnyard were chickens, so eggs were plentiful. No one could imagine a time when eggs would sell for $6 or more per dozen. “They were cheap, I’ll tell you that,” Lackey says of egg prices in her youth. “They were probably 10 or 15 cents a dozen. You could get a loaf of bread for a dime, or a nickel.”

Movies were on par with eggs and bread. Lackey recalls going to the movies in downtown Sallisaw for “a dime, maybe just a nickel at one time.” There were two theaters on Oak Street — “they were across the street from each other” — one of which became the current offices of Your TIMES.

But the Great Depression’s toll was widespread. There were five years Lackey’s parents didn’t teach. Like so many men at the time, her father jumped at the chance for work, even if it meant leaving the family behind on the farm.

“Daddy got a job on the WPA (Works Progress Administration). Then later on, he worked in Pryor at the nuclear plant there, and then he went from there to Pasco, Washington, to the nuclear plant out there,” Polly recalls. When he moved back to Oklahoma, her parents continued teaching.

Life in the 1930s, 1940s

As school teachers, Lackey’s parents valued learning. They instilled in their children the importance of education, and her parents led by example. Although they were already teaching school while raising a family, Lackey’s parents continued their education, earning their college degrees while attending Northeastern State University part-time.

“They were teaching during the fall and winter, then in the summer they would attend college, so they got their degrees piecemeal. They would also go on Saturdays — they offered Saturday classes way back then. They did it the hard way, raising kids and teaching and going to school, all at the same time,” Lackey recalls. As the eldest, she was in charge of her four siblings in her parents’ absence, and she delighted in the perks that came with her omnipotence when she doled out what meager amount of candy they would have had.

By the time she reached high school, those who were abandoning Oklahoma for the West Coast had been memorialized by John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” which by 1939 was being retold on the Silver Screen.

“I remember when they made the movie, they filmed some of it here. I remember when they were doing that,” Lackey says. “Of course, they had these old cars all loaded down with everything from wash tubs to whatever, all were leaving town. The Joads supposedly lived out in the Brushy area.”

Polly Mills, 1942

She graduated from Sallisaw High School in 1942. “At that time, of course the war had already begun, and the girls were all going to work, and the boys went into the service. There were very few of my class that went on to college, right at that time. Of course later on they did, they picked up their education later.

“I was Salutatorian of my graduating class,” Lackey says proudly. She was also secretary for a class of 64 seniors.

“My sister was two years younger than me. By the time she graduated from high school, Mom and Dad had moved and were teaching out from Vian at Stony Point,” Polly says of Lee. “When she graduated, she went on to Connors [State Agricultural College] at Warner. After she had enrolled over in Connors, she decided she wanted to change one of her subjects that she was enrolled in. She went to the dean and was talking to him about it. He said, ‘Well, what kind of grades did you make when you were in high school?’ And she said, ‘Well, when I graduated, I wasn’t Salutatorian or Valedictorian, but I was third in the class.’ He said, ‘Well, how many were in your class?’ and she said, ‘Three,’ which is true. In Vian, there were only three of them that graduated that year. He thought that was funny, and was telling that years later.”

Life after high school

Although education was a priority for the family, Lackey says she didn’t pursue college, opting to join the workforce during the war years.

“I didn’t go to college,” she acknowledges quietly. “That’s one of my regrets is that I didn’t go ahead and go on.”

Instead, she went to work doing clerical and bookkeeping at St. Clair Lime Company, located between Marble City and Flute Springs. “They had kilns and the quarry for the lime was at Marble City. When I first started work out there, they trucked the lime in to the plant, but after awhile, Kansas City railroad put a spur out to the quarry, so it came in by rail after that. I worked there about 12 years.”

Four years after she graduated from high school, and when Oklahomans were returning home from World War II, Polly met her future husband, Charles.

“He had just gotten out of the service, hadn’t been out too long,” she says of her husband, to whom she was introduced by a mutual friend. “I didn’t know him until after he got out of the service. He was a paratrooper — 11th Airborne — in The Philippines, New Guinea and the South Pacific. He earned a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars. He was a Staff Sergeant when he got out.”

Charles grew up in Gore, but his grandparents moved to Sallisaw, where his aunt and uncle also lived.

“His uncle owned a business here in town, Lackey’s Auto Supply,” and Charles took advantage of the GI Bill’s opportunity for on-the-job training. But with the war over and the resurgence of auto manufacturing, Charles wanted to be where the new cars were.

Life after the war

The young couple’s first car came from Mattox Studebaker Company, where Charles purchased one of the first available.

“After the war, Earl McDonald Jr. — the McDonalds owned the National Bank of Sallisaw (which was originally Sallisaw State Bank) — got the Chevrolet agency here. Charles was hired as the parts and accessories manager. He worked for them for years,” Polly remembers. After the Chevrolet dealership closed, Charles became parts manager at Hastings Motor Company, which was a Buick and GMC dealership.

“They used to make a big deal when the new models came out. They’d have a big car showing in Oklahoma City for the new models, and, of course, he went to all those. And he’d see those new cars, and he’d have to have one. We usually changed cars about every two years,” Polly recalls.

1975 Chevy Caprice convertible

Her favorite of the many cars they owned was a 1975 Chevy Caprice two-door convertible. “He claimed it was for me,” Polly says. “It was red with a white top and white interior, and I thought it was really pretty.”

“So did we,” interjects her namesake niece, Polly Fox of Tahlequah, who was visiting her aunt earlier this week.

“Candy-apple red, white leather seats. It was a beautiful vehicle,” Fox waxes nostalgic, remembering that her aunt and uncle “always had cool cars.”

“We kept it for a long time,” Polly says. “It looked new, and it had been from coast to coast.” Polly and Charles drove to California (“maybe more than once”) and to Maryland, where their son Robert lived.

Life with Charles

“I got married in 1946. We didn’t have our first child until we had been married nine years (1955),” Polly says. “So when I became pregnant with my baby, I quit and I stayed home for quite a while. Robert was about 12 before I went back to work.”

Polly returned to the workforce, first handling payroll for Perini Construction Company, which helped build the Robert S. Kerr Dam, then returning to St. Clair Lime Company. After that, she served as part-time secretary at First Baptist Church, before becoming full-time secretary and retiring from there in 1994.

It was while working for the Chevrolet, Buick and GMC dealerships that Charles received several trips abroad — “My uncle was quite the salesman,” Fox interjects. “He won quite a few trips” — to London, Bermuda and Spain.

Sometimes the couple didn’t have to travel very far for the highlife.

“I grew up in the Big Band era,” Polly says proudly. “That’s always been my preference. We went one time to Tulsa to see Tommy Dorsey, and I got his autograph. It was after we were married, after ’46. Either the late ’40s or early ’50s.”

Newlyweds, it has been observed, often survive on love alone, which worked out well since Polly had some domestic deficiencies.

“I didn’t know how to cook before we got married,” Polly admits. “Charles said he didn’t care, he knew how to cook. So he did a lot of the cooking when we first got married. He cooked breakfast every morning.”

But over the years, Polly found her footing in the kitchen.

“I always kind of liked to make pies,” she says.

“And we’ve always kind of liked to eat them,” Fox interjects. “Polly’s pies is what we deemed her; Polly the pie maker. She’s taught the whole family, anybody that wanted to know, how to make a pie crust.”

Polly was also a member of one of Sallisaw’s garden clubs, the Good Earth Garden Club. When she served as president, the club did a “clean up the litter” display in the window of Holder’s Department Store on Cherokee Avenue. “My picture was in [the newspaper] for that,” she recalls.

Looking to 100

Charles died in 2020 — “he was 97 when he died” — just six weeks short of their 74th wedding anniversary. Polly lost her only son, who was a minister for the Primitive Baptist church, in 2023.

Polly still lives in the house the couple purchased in 1951. “This is our original home, his and mine. This is where we’ve been always.”

As she nears her centennial birthday, Lackey, who says she’s always enjoyed good health, recalls her fragile beginning.

“I was born at home, naturally. My mother said the doctor put me in his hand and he said, ‘Two and a half or three pounds’,” she says, demonstrating how the doctor estimated her birth weight. “She said my back just fit in my dad’s hand. She said I looked like a spider, with legs and arms. That’s how I started life.

“My grandmother didn’t think I would live ….” Lackey’s words trailing off. “I always heard Momma taught that day, and nobody at school didn’t know she was pregnant.”

Now, 36,522 days later, Lackey looks back on the long life she and her husband enjoyed.

“It was more common in Charles’ family, I think, than mine,” Polly says of longevity. “My dad was 10 years older than Momma. She died when she was 83, and he had been dead seven years when she died.

“Charles’ immediate family were not — his mother was only 65 and his father was 75 — but his granddad lived to be in his 90s, and his grandmother was in her late 80s.”

As she looks back over the years, she’s unable to recall dreams that remain unfulfilled. “I was usually content with whatever we had, or didn’t have. We always had everything we needed.”

It’s a similar sentiment when given the opportunity to point to her accomplishments. “I just never did do anything, other than just the normal things. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that stands out.”

But her niece, reveling in her aunt’s life, is quick to note qualities her aunt takes for granted.

“She’s a good example of being content,” Fox says.

‘A gazillion special qualities’

Fox points out that her son, Dawson, especially saves envelopes, cards and letters bearing his great-aunt’s handwriting.

“Her penmanship is the most beautiful,” Fox says. “You always knew when you had a card from Aunt Polly or a letter from Aunt Polly, because the writing was so beautiful. That’s kind of a lost art.”

And Fox comes to her aunt’s defense when Lackey concedes that her days are “pretty boring.”

“I don’t think she’s boring,” Fox interjects, “but she thinks she is. She’s a wiz at crossword puzzles, Suduko and game shows, Jeopardy. She’s an amazing cook, but she’ll never tell you that.”

Her niece’s kind words give Lackey time to reconsider.

“I like to read. I’ve always liked to read,” Lackey says. “I like to do puzzles, crossword.”

Then she thinks back to her childhood. “When I was a kid growing up, we didn’t have anything to do. We were lucky part of the years to have a radio.”

“She has a gazillion special qualities,” Fox adds. “She tells good jokes, too.

“She and I play cards when I’m here,” Fox says, “and I asked her, ‘Did you play cards when you were a kid?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, we had to make our own.’ That just blew my mind, because we take them for granted. I asked her, ‘What other toys did you guys make?’ and she’s told me some of those.”

Lackey remembers when rural children played football, which consisted of a tow sack that was filled and rolled into the shape of a football. Then there was hoop and stick (or bowling hoops), which entailed affixing a flattened Prince Albert tobacco can to a stick, “then they’d get an old iron wheel, and then they’d take that and roll that wheel.”

Then Fox issues a warning for those who might believe Lackey’s abilities may have dimmed in her Golden Years.

“Don’t try to play her in cards, because she’ll win.” Fox says. “My husband’s convinced she’ll always win playing Scrabble. The three or four times we’ve played it the last few months, she seems to be the only one that wins. She’s very good with words.”

Marking 100 years

That’s when Lackey offers some advice to the younger generations.

“Just be sure when you’re making decisions, that you make the right one, because there’s consequences to every decision you make, whether it’s good or whether it’s bad,” she says.

These days, Lackey’s visitors often consist of members of her church family — she’s the oldest active member of the church, although she points out there’s a homebound member who turns 102 this year — and her niece, who spends the night with her aunt each week.

Lackey still lives at her home of the past 74 years, and drives herself to church each week. “As long as I can do that, take care of myself, I would like to hang around. If I get to where I can’t do it, I want to just go on.”

Her church is helping her celebrate her monumental birthday with “a big birthday party Sunday afternoon.” It will be the biggest party Lackey has had since, well, last year.

“The only big party I ever had was last year,” she says of her 99th birthday. It was a party shared with other family members who share, or almost share, her birthday.

Fox’s son, Dawson, was born on his great-aunt’s birthday and turns 21 on Monday. In addition, Fox’s sister’s son, who will be 31 on Sunday, was born the day before her birthday. So to commemorate Lackey’s last double-digit birthday in 2024, “we had a big blowout for all three of us.”

Turns out March 10 is a birthday shared by many in Lackey’s extended family. She has two nieces who were also born on March 10, and Polly was born on her Aunt Margaret’s birthday.

But no matter the loving platitudes her friends and family shower upon her, Lackey still downplays her legacy.

“I’d like for them to think of me as being compassionate, just as an ordinary person,” Lackey says, “which is all I am.”

“She’s humble,” Fox says of her aunt, gently placing her hand on Lackey’s. “Humility’s a wonderful quality.”