Photo by Adam Vogler
Adam Vogler/Gazette Ethel Cade is pictured in her room at Emporia Rehab. Cade will be attending her 80th high school reunion on Saturday, May 10, in Pomona.
Reaching your high school class’ 80th anniversary reunion might seem like a big deal to everyone but the person who actually achieves it. Ethel Cade, a resident of the Emporia Rehabilitation Center, has no idea what her secret is in living to age 98.
“I never thought I did anything too special,” she said.
To others, being one of two known surviving members of Pomona High School’s graduating class of 1928 might seem special. Tonight at the reunion in Pomona, Cade will meet up with David Zimmerman, the other surviving member of the class, whom she’s met every year in recent years.
“I don’t feel much different than I did before,” Cade said. “Just a little slower. Eighty years is quite awhile, isn’t it?”
Cade grew up in Pomona as one of seven children in a farming family. She graduated with three other students in ’28 and married in 1930. Her husband, Harold, was a farmer, working on their spread outside Pomona. After filling in as a post office and drug store worker as a young lady, Cade didn’t work as a married woman until 1968, when she became a store manager for 10 years. They moved to Emporia in 1992.
Harold died in 1999. He and Ethel had one daughter, and she has two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Cade moved to Emporia Rehab two and a half years ago after a fall in her home left her seriously injured. The facility’s social service director, Kathy Schultz, said Cade is the oldest current resident. She said Cade is loved by all residents and staff members.
“She loves to visit about the past,” Schultz said. “When I take her to doctor’s appointments and stuff, we’ll visit a lot. She’ll tell me a lot about her past.”
Despite a number of medical issues, including being legally blind and completely blind in one eye, Cade has stayed sharp.
“Names leave me, that’s one thing that leaves me,” she said. “But young people tell me they’re having that problem now, too. I think we’re living in too busy a world.”
Her daughter, Carol Bolen, visits her regularly.
“She don’t miss very many days,” Cade says.
Bolen and her husband, Dennis, will escort Cade to the reunion tonight to see Zimmerman, a lifetime bachelor who had a farm south of Pomona before retiring just last year.
“He never married, never had a girlfriend that I know of,” Cade said. “He was a real nice farmer guy.”
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