The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Longtime Bloomington resident celebrates 100th birthday
Mercedes Roelofs, a longtime resident of Bloomington, celebrated her 100th birthday in the fall with two parties.
Waterman Canyon Post-acute in San Bernardino, where she now lives, hosted the first party, with Mexican music, rock’n’roll, dancing, pizza, cake and punch, according to an email from her daughter Monica Anderson of Yucaipa.
For the second party, family members came from Washington state, Arizona and Northern California, as well as from the local area. One of her granddaughters made 100 cupcakes for the party, and her granddaughters, great-grandsons and a niece and nephew entertained with a radio show, according to her daughter.
She was born Sept. 20. 1923, in Claremont, to Antonio and Ignacia Hermosillo, who immigrated from Mexico in 1917. She was the fourth of their nine children, eight girls and one boy.
Her father worked for Pomona College in Claremont for 40 years.
She attended elementary school in Upland and then Chaffey High School, but left school after her mother died to help take care of her five younger sisters.
In November 1942, nearly a year after the United States entered World War II, she began working at the Lockheed plant in Burbank, cutting out parts for the B-17 Flying Fortress
and the P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft.
That was where she met her husband Arthur Alldredge, when she was 19 and he was 31. One of Arthur’s co-workers saw her and said he’d like to take her out. Arthur said, “She’s mine. I’m going to marry her,” according to Monica Anderson’s email.
Not quite two years after he said that, they were married, on Sept. 25, 1944. They lived in Claremont and briefly in Texas before moving to Bloomington in 1949, after Arthur got a job at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino.
They raised four children, including Arthur’s daughter from a previous marriage. Mercedes made many of the family’s clothes, including suit coats, pants and dresses, and she made apricot and plum jams from fruit from their trees. She also made pies and jams from homegrown boysenberries.
Two days after their 24th anniversary, Arthur died at the age of 57.
Their children, in addition to daughter Monica Anderson, are daughter Betty Stanard, who died in 2010; daughter Peggy Avila, who died in 1998; and son Arthur Lee Alldredge Jr., who died in June 2023.
Mercedes also has 12 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and 11 great-greatgrandchildren.
Until well into her 70s, she jumped rope and played hide and seek with her grandchildren, according to her daughter, and on her 100th birthday she “danced” in her wheelchair with a staff member.