At CPHM

It’s not every day you get to help celebrate a friend’s one hundredth birthday… but yesterday we did. Along with scores of other people, we gathered at the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum to honor our friend Betty Paxton, truly one of the most amazing women any of us know.

Her actual birthday was August 22^nd and on that very day Safeway in Astoria had a big birthday-and-retirement party for her. Yes! That was the day that she officially handed in her resignation after fifteen years with the company – the oldest of all their 250,000 employees in all of their 2,400 stores!

At yesterday’s gathering, Roger (the man responsible for hiring Betty back in 1999) told about that experience. Apparently, when Betty saw that they were hiring for courtesy clerks, she went for an interview, saying clearly that she’d like to give it a try and if Safeway didn’t like her work, they could let her go. Roger was impressed, recommended her to his boss, pointing out that she was “older”  — maybe late sixties or even 70 — but he thought she’d be great.

Betty-the-Birthday-Girl

“We couldn’t ask anyone their age during the interview process,” he said so it wasn’t until after he’d called and offered the job and she had come in to do the paperwork that he saw her birthdate.       “Holy crap!” was his reaction.

His boss said, “No way!” and a bit of a ‘discussion’ ensued. But Roger had met Betty and he held out and, eventually, he prevailed. Yesterday he said with a big grin, “So until a few days ago, Betty was still with us. That boss is long gone.”

There was a slide show with photographs of Betty during the years before most of us were born. There were stories from friends who have known Betty since a time many of the guests probably consider ‘historic.’ We met her amazing family and ate a scrumptious meal catered by Willie and Roberta Marsh. A group of Betty’s nun friends from Oregon sang her a blessing and she was presented with a framed poem based on her name.

It was a fabulous celebration – one for the ages, you might say. A birthday party like that just doesn’t happen every day!