Lorraine Albert of Loveland turns 102, has party with friends

Albert lived during both World Wars and two pandemics

Lorraine Albert of Loveland celebrated her 102nd bir thday on Monday, joined by her friends from First United Presbyterian Church.

The former farmhand — who lived during both World Wars, the terms of 18 U.S. presidents and now two pandemics — said she is still independent, and she can still recite the alphabet backward.

“I just can’t believe I’m 102,” she said. “Here I am. I can’t get by without my walker, but I am still in independent living.”

She and her friends planned two parties for her birthday — on Sunday, 102 years after the day when her mother told her she was born, and Monday, the day when her birth was recorded by doctors.

Albert was born as the fifth child of nine at the close of World War I, and she said the first public place her parents took her to as a newborn was an Armistice Day celebration on Nov. 11, 1918.

The following year, her family moved from Hastings, Neb., to the farming community of Holyoke, in the northeast corner of Colorado.

“Our relatives were moving to Colorado, so we moved too,” she said. “I went to a country school with a horse and buggy until I was in the sixth grade, and then I went to the town school.”

She graduated from Holyoke High School in 1936. Alber t met her first husband in Holyoke at a Saturday night dance, and the two married in 1941, making a living as dryland farmers growing wheat.

“When we first got married, we lived in a little tworoom house with no water or electricity, and we had to dig our well,” she said. “And we built a house when we saved up enough to build.”

They also adopted a daughter who Albert said died last year at age 69. In the late 1970s, Albert and her husband retired and joined Albert’s brother-inlaw in Loveland.

“We thought it was beautiful,” she said. “After the harvesting was done, it was so hot, and we’d go to the mountains for a while. We’d drive through Loveland, and it was quite beautiful.”

Alber t continued working at the Colorado Cr ystal Corporation until 1988. She moved to Grand Junction to help care for one of her brothers and lived in Fort Collins for a period of time before moving to the Sugar Valley Estates independent living community, where she lives today, in 2009.

Albert remembered how the area where her apartment complex was built used to be cherry orchards and wheat fields.

“You used to see them selling cherry cider and stuff along the highway for people going to Estes Park,” she added. “It’s grown so much to the north and south.”

Today, she said she mostly enjoys spending time with her friends from First United Presbyterian Church. While she has one sur viving sister in her 90s who lives in Denver, Alber t expected her party would be mostly attended by her church family.

“I had an older brother who lived to be 93, and we thought he was old,” she said. “But I’m still getting by.”

The group planned to hold a party downstairs on Monday, with Albert’s friends dropping off cookies, driving by and waving to respect Sugar Valley’s social distancing guidelines.

For those aspiring to live to 102, Alber t advised a simple, healthy lifestyle.

“I didn’t smoke, and I didn’t drink or carouse around,” she said. “You just live a decent life, I guess you’d say.”