Somers woman recalls 102 years of 'all kinds of experiences'

By LAURA BEHENNA

Bigfork Eagle

Life has been mostly good to Sara Fine of Somers — for 102 years now.

“I’ve had many good experiences and some that were very taxing,” Fine, who now lives in Kalispell, said Friday. “The world is full of all kinds of experiences.”

Born Dec. 9, 1904 on a farm between Somers and the Flathead River, Fine grew up in a family of “country people” who were content with the simple life on their farm.

“We had a marvelous beginning in a home that didn’t have money to spare,” she said. Her mother, Minnie Kleinhans, modeled a way of life based on love, hard work and kindness to others. Fine was the third of her seven children.

“We learned to work together, be thoughtful to other members of the family, and also how to be kind to our neighbors,” Fine said. “We got acquainted with all of our neighbors. My father and mother both always helped someone they could see was in need. They never failed to do that.”

“I’ve heard people who knew her say she was they kindest lady they had ever known,” Fine’s daughter, Kathy Babcock, said of her grandmother.

Fine’s mother had a quiet, gentle way of guiding her children toward good people and away from bad influences. When the family met up with people who stole from or spoke cruelly to others, “she had the kindest way of letting us know that was not the way to live,” Fine said. “My mother was a master at teaching us to avoid the wrong attitudes. She gave us marvelous training to be good human beings.

“Having grown up with a Christian mother and going to Sunday school and church, I’ve learned many things about relating to other people.”

For fun, Fine and her siblings made up simple games, swam in Flathead Lake, and held get-togethers with neighbor families and friends from church.

“Our cousins from Kalispell loved to come visit Aunt Minnie’s house,” Fine said, smiling. Her grandmother lived with the family part of the year, helping Fine’s mother with the endless tasks of washing, ironing, cooking, housekeeping and raising food. “During those years she just worked all the time,” Fine said.

“They were pretty self-sufficient as far as food was concerned,” Babcock added. “Her mother had a huge garden.”

The nearest high school was in Kalispell, so Fine and her sister Jeannette went to stay in town with their Aunt Sara, who arranged for them to live with families and do chores in exchange for room and board, a common arrangement in those days. Her father wanted her three brothers to work on the family farm and start earning money as soon as they were old enough, and not all of them finished high school. But Fine and her three sisters all graduated.

“When we graduated from high school we could apply for a teaching position, and boy, we got them as easy as anything,” Fine said. Teaching positions in rural schools, far from the excitements of town life, were hard to fill at that time.

“But we had grown up on a farm, so that was not a problem with us,” she said. “Back then they were crying for schoolteachers, and believe it or not, they were satisfied with us.”

Fine started teaching at Stillwater School northeast of Kalispell, and later taught at Lakeside and Somers after she married Will Fine, who worked as a machinist at Somers Lumber Company. The ongoing teacher shortage kept her in high demand even after she was married. It was frowned upon for married women to take paid jobs, but the Somers school frequently needed substitute teachers for its eight grades, and Fine had a good reputation. One of her substitute teaching jobs lasted three years.

“I enjoyed [teaching],” she said. “It was lots of work, but I did enjoy it. I never had any problem getting a school at all.

“I like boys and girls,” she added. “They’re not half as bad as some older people are. And they’re not as dirty. All the children I taught were good kids. If you don’t like kids, you have no business teaching.

“Kids are going to play tricks if they can. I just let them know, ‘If you have a good trick, you use it at recess time.’ They’re going to be mischievous at times; who isn’t? I know grownups who are sometimes.”

A typical misdeed for boys was to jerk on girls’ braids when they thought no adult was looking, Fine said. To one boy she caught in the act, she said, “‘If I had my hair braided, would you try to jerk mine too?’ He was dumbfounded at my asking that kind of a question. He looked down and said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Sometimes students would tell her, “‘Mrs. Fine, we’re so glad you’ve come to teach us.’ That really made me feel good.”

Fine had plenty to do when she wasn’t teaching, including raising three children of her own, making friends with other teachers and parents, and running a home in which her family had to provide for most of its own needs.

“Everybody had to have a garden to see to it that your family had the right things to eat,” she said. “We did scads of canning for the winter table. It was a busy life.”

After her husband died in the mid-1960s, Fine’s cousin Ramona, who was a dormitory housemother at the University of Montana, invited Fine to come to Missoula for a similar job. Fine was 62. She supervised the young adults on campus for two years before retiring.

Fine’s advice to young people is “don’t wait until you’re old” to have children. “Life isn’t life without young folks around. They’re lots of work and sometimes they’re a big worry, but a home isn’t a home without children.”