Esteline "Estie" Moe is 103, and one of the centenarians honored this month.
Esteline "Estie" Moe, who has lived in Alaska since 1947, turned 103 this summer, celebrating her birthday with neighbors and family. When asked what the key to a long life is, she simply says, "You have to milk cows."
Estie was raised on a farm in northern Minnesota, the eldest daughter in her family, and did chores alongside her father and two brothers. With 40 cows on the farm, she would milk ten cows every morning before breakfast and every night after school, shovel manure, and stack hay.
Like other rural families in those days, her family used a "biffy," or outhouse, pumped their own water, and cooked on an oil stove. She says that upbringing prepared her well for life in Alaska. Later, while working as a waitress in Minneapolis, Moe met her husband Alvin. It didn't take him long to figure out that she was a keeper. Shortly after they were married, he was sent overseas for military service. She joked, "We had 40 days and 40 nights together, and then he was gone."
Alvin was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean for almost three years. During that time, Moe roomed with his female cousins and continued working. She lived on her earnings, saving her husband's monthly paychecks. Eventually those savings would pay for their first house in Anchorage. When Alvin returned, he asked his wife where she wanted to live. When she replied, "Anywhere but northern Minnesota!" He suggested, "How about Alaska?" and she agreed-"but only for two years."
The young couple found a small log cabin for $3,500 in what is now the Fairview neighborhood, then on the outskirts of town. Life on the farm had prepared them both for living in Anchorage in 1947. They had no indoor plumbing or running water, just an outdoor pump and buckets of water to carry inside, and no electricity, just drums of oil for lighting and heating. Every morning, Estie's first task was to turn up the heat; then she went back to bed to warm up again before starting the day.
Within their first month in Anchorage, Alvin and Estie Moe found a church home at Central Lutheran Church. Although they told the pastor they would stay for only two years, Estie Moe has now been a member for 78 years. For 40 of those years, Alvin was head usher and Estie made coffee for the congregation's coffee hour.
During the Alaska winter, the outdoors was the refrigerator and freezer, but in the summer, the old federal building downtown had a cold storage area where moose meat and other perishables could be kept. When Moe went there to retrieve meat for dinner, she could also pick up the family mail.
Moe worked as a checker at Northern Commercial Company before she and Alvin started their family. Later she opened a day care at home to supplement the family income, while caring for their own four little ones.
Alvin worked in construction with his two brothers, finishing concrete in the summer. Back then, you couldn't pour cement in the winter, so Alvin spent his winters building houses. Estie often helped and has not-so-fond memories of holding sheetrock in place while he fastened it. Together, they built the house she still lives in today, as well as four others in the neighborhood.
Her favorite place to volunteer was Bishop's Attic, where she sorted clothing in the back with wonderful friends and lively conversation. An avid reader, for years Moe read a book every day. She is also a master embroiderer. After the 1964 earthquake, she joined a pottery club whose instructor collected clay from Cook Inlet for their projects.
"It's been a very good life. It's what you make of it, of course," said Moe, who is a cancer survivor. "My parents taught me never to spend what you don't have. That was probably the best advice." When asked if she would have done anything different in life, she said, "I wouldn't have milked so many cows." But maybe it's a good thing she did.
Yasmin Radbod is the Rural Outreach Coordinator at Alaska Commission on Aging.
