Happy 100th birthday, Fay Ziegele

Over cake, Fay shared details of her long life and her many accomplishments. She grew up the youngest of four children and the only girl in eastern Montana, where her family had a retail dairy. She remembers working hard on the dairy and getting good grades in school. However, playing competitive basketball in high school was her favorite memory — she was “short but fast,” she said, and fondly remembered how she was fastest on the court. She was also proud to have been made team captain in her senior year.

In 1940, Fay married husband Walt. He worked in the sales industry, which sent them traveling. When they ended up coming through Hood River on business, she fell in love with the area, immediately telling her husband she preferred apples and pears to the sagebrush in Montana.

They decided Hood River would be their home. They later built a house on Belmont, which Fay designed herself and had built, and where they raised their two children. Her husband worked in logging industry in the Dee area for Winan’s Brothers; he passed away at age 38 after a tragic accident.

This left Fay at home with two teenagers and no income. She decided she wanted to go to business school. She traveled to Portland and earned her associates in business, later getting a job in the office at Diamond Fruit in Odell, where she worked for 23 years.

Additionally, Fay was an International Pathfinder leader for ages 10-15 and founded the Mid-Columbia Pathfinder group to include kids from throughout the Gorge. She went on Pathfinder camping trips into her 90s, including sleeping in the campground. In 2014, she made her last camping trip — a broken hip ended this volunteer position after nearly 350 camping trips, she said.

Fay’s advice for young people is to choose their parents well. What she means is that she considered her parents both very hard workers, and to this day she appreciates their character — what they did and how it made her what she is today.

One example: Her father was blind, losing his eyesight completely in his early 20s. But even with this impairment, he continued to work and milk cows on the dairy. Fay said she never remembered her father or her mother ever complaining about life — that even with no electricity and no running water, they always managed to make it work and had a successful dairy delivering to stores and homes in their Montana town. Fay’s father’s blindness caused him to never see his youngest two children, including Faye, but she talked fondly about all he taught her in his lifetime.