Coeur d'Alene's Cleo Perry marks a century on Earth

COEUR d'ALENE - The phone rings, and Cleo Perry snatches it up and holds it to her ear.

She listens for a moment, nods, smiles.

"Thank you, thank you," she says loudly, then adds, "believe it or not I have a man here interviewing me about my 100th birthday."

Relatives were knocking on the door of Perry's Coeur d'Alene apartment, and more were dialing to offer congratulations and best wishes on her birthday Monday.

Perry - her hair done, a necklace around her neck, and dressed elegantly for dinner with family - was feeling fine and looking sharp as she celebrated 100 years on Earth.

"I've got another 100 to go," she said, chuckling.

The mother of five children, 17 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren and 12 great-great-grandchildren said her life, spent mostly in Southern California, was "nothing spectacular."

"My dad liked to move, so we moved a great deal when I was a little girl," she said.

She produces a black and white picture taken in June 1920, when she was 8 years old. It shows Perry, younger brother Virgil, older sister Alena and father, Edgar Otto Renoe, posing with their Maxwell automobile at a campground.

It was taken during the family's travels from Long Beach, Calif., to Oregon. The car had a top speed, she recalled, of about 30 mph.

"We were going to my great aunt's place in Dallas, Ore. - not Dalles, Dallas," she adds, "and it took us two weeks."

Cleo would grow up and marry Manuel Perry. Their union would produce three girls, two boys and last 47 years before her husband passed away in 1983.

"We dated six years prior to the Depression, but we couldn't afford to get married because he was helping his folks live through the Depression and I was helping my folks live through it," she said. "So we had to wait."

Her children praised her as "the rock" of the family.

"She was always the person who kept us even," said son Del Perry of Coeur d'Alene. "You better do the right thing. If you didn't, she was an enforcer."

She was in the seats for her children's events, whether sports, choir or theater.

"I was in the orchestra. Every time, she was there," Del Perry said.

Cleo listened closely to questions and answers Monday afternoon.

When son Michael Perry of Post Falls was asked what kind of mom she was, Cleo cut in.

"Don't tell him," she said, as everyone laughed. "Don't tell him what kind of a mom I was."

But Michael did speak up. People need to know about his mother, he said.

"I could come home from school, I knew she'd be there," he said. "She was always there for me, always supporting me."

Cleo said one emphasis of child rearing was raising them equally. It wasn't that way in her childhood. Her brother Virgil sometimes received special treatment, she added.

"I adored my brother, who was four years younger than me. But I didn't like the idea of him being favored," she said.

She vowed young that when she married and had children, she would treat them "evenly and equally."

"And that's what I tried to do. I don't know how close I came to it, I tried," she said, her glance landing on her sons sitting in her living room. "When I see the results, I kind of pat myself on the back."

Perry, who today likes to read and work crossword puzzles, said she also tried to teach her children how to behave. When the family went to a nice restaurant, her children were respectful and quiet.

"We took them to theater. We took them to dances. We took them traveling, we took them to the beach. We taught them how to act," she said. "Because who knows what they're going to be when they grow up?"

When asked to share some wisdom she learned from a century of life, she shook her head.

"If someone would tell me something smart, I'd tell you all about it," she said, grinning.

But then, she thought for a few more seconds.

"The only thing I could say, try to live your life so that in the end, you feel better about where you may be going, which direction you're going, and be more proud of yourself because of the direction you pick.

"I think if people would live their lives more like that, there would be a lot of people living differently," she said.