A life of hard work and putting family first has led a local woman to her 100th birthday. Lucy Malmberg, who resides at Sandstone Lodge in Okotoks, turned 100 on Aug. 18. A celebration will be held Aug. 25 in the hall at St. James Catholic Church at 2 p.m. and Malmberg’s family invites anyone who knows their mother to attend. “Everyone’s welcome, anybody who wants to come and give her congratulations,” said daughter-in-law Loyia Malmberg. “We’re hoping quite a few people show up.” There will be a lot of family present. Malmberg has six children, 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, and most of them still live in the area. “She loves her family to pieces and she’s been the best mother-in-law I could have ever asked for,” said Loyia. Family has always been important to her, and Malmberg still enjoys get-togethers at Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, Easter and family reunions in the summertime. There are sometimes Sunday dinners too, a tradition she upheld for years. It was something special for the family. Malmberg would serve up a meal of roast beef, potatoes, veggies and all the fixings – with homemade dessert to follow. “Every once in a while I would make a batch of pastry up and I would make four or five pies at a time and freeze them so when we had Sunday dinners we could have pie,” said Malmberg. Baking was something she always enjoyed doing, and it was appreciated by all her family members. From fresh breads to a batch of cookies once a week, there was usually something tasty coming out of the kitchen. But not cakes – Malmberg said she doesn’t enjoy cake after it’s a day old, so she stuck to keeping dozens of cookies on-hand instead. Though she made all kinds, peanut butter was a family favourite, she said. In fact, it came to be expected by grandchildren that there would be cookies in Grandma’s kitchen. One day, a granddaughter visited and was shocked to find the cookie jar empty. “She stood and banged her head on the wall – ‘I don’t believe it, no cookies,’” said Malmberg with a laugh. Her daughter, Linda Rutland, recalls early days on the family farm east of Blackie, where she grew up with her five brothers – Duane, Ken, Rick, Kirk and Kevin. “Mom was always working,” said Rutland. “She worked so hard. I’ve never known anybody to work as hard as she did.” From baking and cooking to cleaning house and tending to the garden and yard work, there was always something to be done and Malmberg did it all, she said. Rutland credits the hard work with her mother’s longevity. “Her older sister passed away a couple of years ago, and she was going to be 101 before she passed away,” she said. “They both had big gardens and they were always just hard workers.” Malmberg also worked outside the home, but only before she was married. At one time she held a job in Picture Butte until she was convinced to head to Ontario by two aunts and a cousin who had come to Alberta for a visit in 1940. It took an entire afternoon, but by the end of the day the 20-year-old Malmberg’s visitors had convinced her to drive east with them. “We left on Sunday night about midnight and we drove,” she said. “We only stopped one night to sleep and that was Wednesday, the rest of the time we drove all through the night with the two drivers taking turns. “The two aunts sat in the back seat and made sandwiches for us to eat on the way. We’d stop once in a while and buy what we needed in the way of bread and stuff. I guess we lived on sandwiches for all that week.” Malmberg stayed in Ontario for two years, where she worked for Mutual Life. In 1942 she transferred to the Calgary office. During her time out east, she had written letters with Melvin Malmberg, who she had gone to high school with in Herronton. But they didn’t date during their school years. “This developed after school,” said Malmberg. “We were married in 1944.” They lived on the Blackie-area farm until 1987, and Mel died after having a stroke in 1989, she said. Life on the farm was difficult at first, as it was during wartime. She and Mel took up residence in a small house next to the big farmhouse on her family’s land. They couldn’t buy a car or a washing machine, so she and her sisters-in-law, who lived nearby, would all take their laundry to her mother’s house on Mondays and do all the laundry together with the only washing machine in the family. While they were there, the ladies would be put to work doing other things like canning, she said. Helping her mother was nothing new for Malmberg. “I lived in the yard so I had to go over and besides comb her hair every day pretty well I had to go over and wash and help her with her housework sometimes, and she looked after our kids sometimes,” said Malmberg. Of her 10 siblings, Malmberg and her older sister are the only two who lived to see 100 years, she said. As to how she got there, she said there’s not much to it. “I don’t think there’s a secret,” she said. “Just go and do everything. Do everything you can do.”
