HOLTS SUMMIT, Mo. - Ruby Sundermeyer Nichols turned 100 years old Thursday - and said so much has happened through all the years, it's hard to pick out just one thing.
But if pinned down, she said her daughter is her proudest achievement.
"My happiest thing is my beautiful daughter," Nichols said. "And I had a pretty nice husband, too."
Nichols' birthday will be celebrated 1-4:30 p.m. Sunday at the Holts Summit Civic Center, 282 S. Greenway Drive. People are welcome to stop by for a piece of cake and a conversation, she said.
Nichols remembers going to school as a tiny girl.
"I was born in Callaway County alongside the railroad tracks near where the Katy Trail is now," she said of her 1916 birth. "I had 11 siblings. I was number six. I had a twin, and she was number seven."
They went to Halifax School, near Holts Summit.
"I was 5 years old on Nov. 2, and that's when I started school," Nichols said, adding she went through eight grades. "I walked 21/2 miles one way to school, up through the hills, hollers and cow pastures and barbed wire, and that's how I got my education."
She remembers smarting off to her teacher, James Doherty, in the first grade. She tried to run away, but he caught her.
"He ran after me, grabbed me and dragged me back," she said. "It was a one-room school house, and he took me right up to the front."
She married at age 25 and had one child, a daughter, Virginia Belle. Nichols and her husband, Deuard, dated for several years.
"When I was about 19, 20, we were riding on a sled being pulled by a car by a rope, just out on a country road," she said. "The rope broke by a big white house, and we got off the sled and were talking about what we were going to do. He heard us speaking and came out and asked if he could help."
Their first date was to a Governor's Ball in Jefferson City. She thinks the statesman was Gov. Lloyd Stark.
"It was the governor's inauguration," she said. "We were up in the Rotunda. We just watched over it and heard the music they played."
Nichols worked in various shoe factories for 40 years, including the former Tweedie Footwear Corporation in Jefferson City.
"I worked there 21 years," she said. "I made shoes for the Queen of England and Miss America. I made 64 pairs of shoes for the wedding of Henry Ford's granddaughter. They were white slipper satin."
She worked in shoe factories until she was 66 and later on did in-home health care for invalids.
"I quit when I was 80," she said.
Although she spent time traveling and sometimes living in other places with relatives, Nichols has spent most of her life in Callaway County, according to Susan Sundermeyer, whose husband is her great nephew.
"She still remembers so much history," she said.
For example, Nichols said she remembers plowing with a team of mules at age 12 down in the river bottoms.
"The last time I mounted a horse, I was 95 years old," she said. "If I get one more opportunity, I'm going to try."
