Marie Noonan with son Don at her 100th birthday party at St. Charles Parish.
Noonan family photo
For 70 years, Marie Noonan has lived in the increasing shade of a sequoia obtained in a trade with the Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother. The tree, now towering a good 70 feet, has grown aside the house where she moved when she was already a 30-year-old wife and mother. It was a seedling when her husband planted it.
“It’s been a good life. The Lord has been good to us,” says Marie, who celebrated her 100th birthday at her beloved St. Charles Parish in Northeast Portland.
Just as World War I was about to flare up in Europe, her parents left Switzerland for the New World. Young Marie Lemacher was 6. A friend who had already made the trip to Idaho sent exaggerated, glowing reports about the opportunity.
“He said the streets were paved with gold,” Marie says, smiling and waving a hand in the air.
After the transatlantic boat ride, the Lemacher family went through Ellis Island and eventually made it to Camas Prairie in Idaho, settling not far from the town of Cottonwood. Swiss and German Benedictine nuns from Mount Angel had established a monastery and school there not long before. Young Marie was enrolled at St. Gertrude Academy and became a favored student, learning German as well as English. She and her sisters walked or rode a horse to school and in the winter they were pulled in a sleigh.
One of the nuns suggested that it would be “lovely” if Marie were to stay at the monastery for awhile, getting a taste of the life.
“I said ‘Thank you, sister, but no thank you,’” recalls Marie, now a grandmother and great-grandmother.
Her father, skilled in the craft of curd and whey, bought cows and began making Swiss cheese, distributing it around the region, as far away as the Dakotas. Marie and her sisters helped rotate the large wheels of cheese in the cool cellar and gave them salt baths.
“Oh, that was good cheese,” says Marie, who must now settle for Tillamook cheddar, extra sharp — a pound a week or so.
Marie’s father also distilled special Swiss cherry brandy. When the influenza epidemic hit in 1918, the local doctor would purchase as much of the liquor as possible to treat the illness. No one who drank it perished, and Marie’s father gained hero status. Authorities even looked the other way when he continued making the drink during prohibition.
After a stint near Francis, Wash. — where they took a train to Mass each Sunday — the family came to Linnton, just northwest of Portland. It was 1924, when Marie was 16.
Her father used to push cheese and chocolate her way, alarmed at what he considered unhealthful slimness.
“He used to say to people, ‘She’ll never live to be 18,’” Marie recalls.
In her 20s, Marie moved to Portland to live with her aunt. One day, at the beauty parlor, the handsome young hairdresser chatted her up as he worked on her coiffure. He then bent over and kissed the pretty woman on the top of the head.
Larry Noonan used to tell their descendants, “I kissed her under the hair dryer and it’s been permanent ever since.”
The pair started going steady, going for walks and seeing the new talkie films. They wed in 1931 at St. Patrick Church.
They moved in with Larry’s parents, who lived not far from Washington Park. He worked with his mother at her beauty shop nearby. They had their sons, and spent fine days walking them in a buggy through the hilly park.
The young family got out on their own when a friend gave them a house on Northeast Going Street.
“Now that’s a good friend,” Marie recalls.
In the late 1930s, Larry built a house on his land in the Cully neighborhood.
Marie still lives in that house, sitting on a parcel Larry had purchased when he was 18. While his brothers were spending money on cars, he took his father’s advice and bought real estate.
When the boys were young, Marie heard some men on the lot behind, discussing a tax foreclosure. She found someone to watch the boys and hopped a bus downtown to the courthouse, where she put in a $750 bid on the half acre and got it.
Larry was thrilled and set off on a life of fruit and vegetable and flower gardening. It was then that he made a trade with the friars at the Grotto — a batch of flowering shrubs for a young sequoia.
The Noonans’ sons, Don and Ron, attended St. Rose School and went on to Central Catholic, graduating in the early 1950s.
“It was a great neighborhood to grow up in,” says Don Noonan, who has survived his brother. Don recalls riding his bicycle to school and the kindly neighbors who purchased corn and flowers grown in the Noonan yard. Once, when he was playing cowboy, his small campfire flared out of control. His mother leapt a tall fence to get him and then, with the help of neighbors, doused the blaze.
Marie’s husband Larry was the first male west of the Mississippi to attend beauty school and become a specialist in the marcel hairdo – the rave of the day. He took up that career after being injured during work at a foundry. He would return to work on the docks as a longshoreman for decades. An artist in shrubbery and fruit trees, and a gifted singer, he died in 1986.
“I had the best husband,” Marie says. “I still miss him.”
The marriage thrived for 65 years, she said, because she and Larry realized that everyone is bound to make mistakes.
Larry taught Marie to drive. As a teacher, he operated on the trial-by-fire method. She once stalled the car on busy Sandy Boulevard in front of the Hollywood Theater. He refused to take over, saying she would just have to learn not to worry about all the honking and yelling going on behind her.
After that, she almost always did the driving, except one day when she wanted to do some sightseeing at the Columbia River Gorge.
Years later, when trying to clear the carbon out of her car’s system so it would pass an emissions test, she revved up her vehicle in the driveway so hard that it blew a piston. The mechanic who fixed it made a point of coming out of the grease pit and into the waiting room because he wanted to meet the 95-year-old woman who had driven her car so exuberantly.
Marie drove up until the time she was 97 and never had an accident.
She raised her boys — Ron and Don — and stepped forward as a leader at church, joining the altar society and becoming a parish and state official in the Catholic Daughters of the Americas.
The group helped clergy in post-war Europe and organized regular breakfasts to support the school, among many other good deeds. It was at Marie’s invitation in the 1960s that the first African American woman joined Catholic Daughters. Etolia Cox became one of her close friends. She and other women gathered for racially-integrated card parties and other social events.
Marie has been a member of St. Charles for more than 50 years and was a member of St. Rose Parish for decades before that.
After 100 years, faith is so deeply melded in her that it is no longer a distinct virtue. It is her and she is it.
Above her front door hangs a humble crucifix. On the wall is a drawing of a graceful friar. Her favorite saints are the Blessed Mother and St. Anthony of Padua, who intervenes to help her find lost items.
For years, it had been Marie giving elders rides to Mass, but now, she gracefully accepts a lift from friends most weekdays and on Sundays.
Her 100th birthday, celebrated at the parish, thrilled her. During Mass, Father John McGrann used her tale as part of his homily. She took the microphone and thanked the people for years of friendship. Then came a party in the parish hall.
Most of her longtime friends have died. That phenomenon once prompted her to quip, “I guess I need to find some younger friends.” She started making acquaintance with octogenarians, but has been outlasting them, too.
One friend, a third grader, painted Marie a watercolor birthday card — roses filling a watering can. The image is fitting because for decades, Marie’s home-grown flowers have decorated St. Charles Church for Mass.
“There are such good people there,” Marie says, her tone of voice showing that she is being utterly genuine.
During Communion time at St. Charles, parishioners often stop to give Marie an embrace, since she sits near the end of a pew.
“Larry and Marie Noonan have been the finest neighbors imaginable,” says Margaret Brandes, a St. Charles parishioner who has lived next door since 1956. “In all the time we lived together, there was not one word of discord. It was all love.”
Brandes recalls Marie noting how much her husband Jack liked cherries. So Marie once pointed to her large cherry tree and said, “Jack, that’s yours.”
Marie uses a 40-year-old rotary dial phone, balances her own checkbook to the penny, and cooks for herself, consuming about a pound of butter per week.
She gets frequent help from son Don and his wife Mary K., the kindergarten teacher at All Saints School.
In 1993, when she’d been a widow for seven years, Marie went with Don and Mary K. to her ancestral homeland in Switzerland. She reveled in seeing many relatives. She’d like to go back one more time, but says she fears few family will be left.
That’s the worst part of being 100, she admits.
“Be patient, loving and kind,” Marie says by way of advice on life. “Always remember you are not the only one on this earth.”
