'I've had a very good life:' Key celebrates 100th birthday

By Audrey Posten | Times-Register

From growing up on a farm and a decades-long teaching career to summers spent golfing with her late husband Jack and traveling with family, Eunice Key has led a fulfilling 100 years.

“I’ve had a very good life. I really did,” she reflected, just days before hitting the century mark on Dec. 1.

Although she’s now a resident of Garden View Place in Monona, Eunice grew up and lived most of her life in the Eastman, Wis. area. She was born in 1925, the youngest of five children to Mike and Millie O’Brien. 

“I had three brothers and one sister. My sister was the oldest and three brothers in between,” Eunice shared.

The family was close-knit, she said, and often sported the color green in honor of her father’s Irish heritage. 

On their farm on Swatek Ridge, the O’Briens milked cows and raised chickens.

“I always liked when we got the little baby chickens. They were so cute,” Eunice recalled.

The family also had many pets: dogs and a “whole barn full of cats.” Eunice said her mother was even gracious enough to allow some of the animals inside their home. 

“In fact, we had a cook stove and it had a reservoir and underneath the reservoir was the cat’s bed,” she said.

All the children had chores on the farm. One of Eunice’s least favorite was driving the horses on the hay fork. Her brothers, often keen to finish their duties early for an evening out, would build large piles. 

“The horses would just about have to get down and almost dig up the dirt in order to pull up the amount of stuff they would put in. My dad would get after them if he thought they were abusing the horses by making them carry too much, so then they’d have to put on smaller amounts,” Eunice explained.

Sometimes Eunice didn’t go the field in order to avoid the dreaded work, leaving her family hollering after her.

“My mother would say, ‘They’re waiting for you. Get out there.’” 

Eunice said kids would pass the time then playing hide and seek, Andy Over and various ball games. One of her favorite Christmas gifts growing up was a doll.

“I still have the doll,” she said. “It had a metal head, and if you dropped it, it would knock the paint off it. I was kind of careless with it, you know.”

The family didn’t have electricity. Entertainment included piano music and listening to a battery-operated radio. 

“If one of the batteries would go dead, then you wouldn’t have any music until you took the battery into town and got it charged up again,” Eunice remarked.

“Rubbering,” or listening in on others’ conversations, on the telephone was another form of entertainment, she joked. Each family had their own ring. 

“Long and two shorts was ours. But then they had long and one short and two longs and three shorts. You knew what everybody’s was,” she said. 

Eunice recalled her mother shooing the kids from the home when the phone would ring, then covering the receiver with her hand so others on the line couldn’t hear her.

Back then, said Eunice, “If something happened or somebody died, you actually heard it over the telephone. It wasn’t you talking to anybody, but you listening to somebody else’s phone call. You had to be careful when you talked to somebody that you didn’t say something about your neighbor or something that you wouldn’t want them to know you said.” 

“You had so many people on your line, and everybody rubbered,” she added.

Those weren’t the only humorous moments Eunice remembered. Once, after grocery shopping with her mother, the two got into someone else’s car. Luckily, they realized it before driving away.

All cars looked similar then, Eunice noted. “Maybe three people owned the same kind of car, you know? So you always had to have a reason to know which was your car.”

Growing up, the O’Briens always had a big garden. Eunice’s grandfather—her mother’s father—would often come and help with it.

“I don’t know if he couldn’t see very good or what, but [my mother] would plant something and he wouldn’t know it was there, and he’d hoe it out. She used to be kind of perturbed with him,” Eunice said with a smile.

As Eunice got older, dances became a fun part of her life. They were held in Eastman nearly every weekend, above the tavern with reinforced floors to prevent anyone from falling through. 

“Oh, you didn’t miss a dance,” she said, detailing how the boys would stand near the door and the girls by the windows to see who was down below. “You’d wait for the next boy to come and ask you to dance, and they were usually pretty good about it.

“When you first started to dance, you weren’t very good. The boys never were very good,” she quipped. “Boys just were not good dancers, but they’d always come and you didn’t turn them down. You went and danced.”

School was another integral part of Eunice’s life. She attended a rural Eastman school through eighth grade. Outside the occasional car ride from their father, the kids walked to school.

There was no running water, so students would fill pails of water from an outbuilding at the home across the road, then store it in the cooler. Students were also responsible for manning the round, black stove. 

“If you happened to go in there in the evening, it was so hot you couldn’t even stand it. But by the time the teacher got there the next morning, it was cooled off. She’d have to start the fire or get it going,” Eunice said.

After eighth grade, Eunice attended two years of high school in Eastman, then bus transportation allowed her to finish high school in Wauzeka. Traveling the rural roads was interesting.

“There were graveled roads, but the gravel got so it was almost like a cement highway, you know,” she said. 

Eunice graduated in 1942, in the midst of World War II, when the rationing of food and tires were vivid in her mind. She then went to the normal school in Viroqua and finished her teaching degree in Platteville. Later, she obtained a master’s degree from Madison.

According to Eunice, it was her older sister Hazel who inspired her to become a teacher.

“When you have a grown up sister for a teacher, you want to be just like her,” she said.

Eunice originally taught in one-room schools, with students of varying ages. She was later one of the first special education teachers at Prairie du Chien. Her career spanned 48 years.

When asked if she was a strict or lenient teacher, Eunice replied, “I think I was pretty lenient. They were all good kids.”

Eunice married twice. After her first husband passed away, she found love again with Jack. Along with her work, she found fulfillment in being creative—including hand lettering and ceramics—as well as hosting gatherings, traveling and recording local history. She documented many Eastman families and one-room schools and assisted international rodeo star Elaine M. Kramer with her memoir.

For Eunice, living to 100 wasn’t a surprise.

“Most of the women in our family really lived to be pretty old. Grandma was old and I expected I’d be as old as grandma was,” she said. “But I never worried too much about dying, and I still don’t.”

When it comes to advice, Eunice admitted, “I don’t have anything to really offer. I guess I was just lucky.” 

Eating chocolate doesn’t hurt: “I loved chocolate. Still do.”