At 103, Elizabeth Rice recalls her experiences with the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and more recent conflicts in the Middle East. Her family has long ties to American history; one of her relatives fought in the Revolutionary War, and her grandfather was a drummer boy during the Civil War.
Rice was born in 1923 in British Columbia, where her father was in the timber industry. When Rice was around nine months old, her family moved back to the U.S., making their home in Oregon.
“My mother’s cousin was visiting us at Klamath Falls and she said, ’Well, why don’t you just move over to Springfield?’ And that’s what we did,” Rice says. She started at Springfield High School as a freshman. “That’s when Springfield was small; it was very small.”
Rice says during the Great Depression her family struggled to find jobs. “The Depression lasted a long time — it was everywhere,” Rice says. During this time, Rice’s father, the primary breadwinner of the house, made around $60 a month. Rice’s family sold their car, leading her to walk almost a mile to the school bus station.
Springfield High offered standard courses, such as arithmetic, language arts and science. Rice’s favorite subjects were music related, as she was involved in the church choir. She says that she came from a musical family, her own mother was a singer in Chicago and her father took voice lessons.
“When we moved to the country, we had a little pump organ,” that they could play without electricity, “and we would be sitting with my mother and two of my older sisters. I grew up hearing music,” Rice says.
A lifelong Christian, she enjoyed singing hymns and pop tunes she heard on the radio. She also sang in Springfield High School’s glee club.
She met Steve Rice singing at church, officially connecting when they were asked to sing a duet together. She said for her first date Steve asked her out to the movie theater in downtown Springfield, but she can’t recall the movie she watched because she was “too giddy over the fact he was holding my hand.”
“It really was love at first sight,” Rice says.
Steve and Elizabeth dated through the beginnings of World War II. Soon after it started, Steve moved up to Seattle to work for Boeing.
“Then I remember Pearl Harbor,” Rice says. She was in church when she heard the news, and she realized WWII was going to have direct impacts on America. Steve left Boeing shortly after and began training to fly for the Air Force.
They were married soon after his first year of training. He was sent to England, where he flew 35 missions in a B-17 over Germany. While Steve was abroad, they wrote letters to each other almost every day.
The letters were censored by defense officials to make sure information about the war was not being leaked. Rice tried to develop a secret code to learn more about where her husband was stationed.
“We had a plan that when he was writing letters we would start it either as ‘my darling’ or ‘my wife’ depending on if he was going to England or the Pacific, but then we forgot all about it,” she says. “I was very afraid and lonely at the time, but I just trusted God to take care of him.”
Her longtime caregiver, Sandy Dove-Thomas, recalls a piece of advice Rice gave during one of their chats about politics and the general state of the world. “It’s been the same for a hundred years, Republican, Democrats, wars, no wars, recession, good economy, gas prices up and down and up and down. Just live your life and be blessed with your family. Life is good.”
Steve and Elizabeth had four boys. Three of them served in the military and one was a musician. One of her sons served in the Vietnam War and another flew missions in South Korea.
She has always kept art and music close to her heart, and she says one of her distant relatives was George Catlin, the famous painter of Native American portraits.
After her children established families and careers, she began watercolor painting. Her house in the Lakewood Vista manufactured home community has paintings of flowers as well as scenes painted from pictures and books of places abroad.
As she looks back at the wars over her lifetime and the current attacks in Iran, Rice says of the global wars,
“It’s a difficult time, and I hope we never have to go through that.”