KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – So, Ruby Glebe, what do you do in your spare time?
Lake County’s newest centenarian might answer that question by saying, what spare time?
Glebe turned 100 on Wednesday, July 23.
What she’s done and continues to do for a number of organizations and causes, along with her many personal pursuits, leaves her no idle time.
She participated in launching a handful of organizations. She is a charter member of the Lake County Historical Society (organized in 1944) and a former historian for the county, the Native Daughters of the Golden West (founded in 1972) and, more recently, the Lioness Club and Vikings of Lake Lodge.
She became a member of the Big Valley Grange 66 years ago and on Sundays she attends Kelseyville Presbyterian, which was the first church that she walked into 74 years ago when she came to Lake County because she liked the music she heard coming from it.
Nobody chauffeurs her to all these locations.
“I’ve had a driver's license for 84 years,” she said. “When I was 96 I had good enough eyesight so they gave me a license, which is good till I’m 101. Then, depending what shape I’m in, I will try to get a license that’s good for five more years. “
That is not a foreseeable problem.
“They had me take off my glasses for distance and I can see a long way,” Glebe said.
Despite her vintage, Ruby Glebe is no candidate for assisted living. She lives quite alone in the same house in Kelseyville that has been her home for 36 years. Her son, a Vietnam veteran, visits her often to check on her.
She is of solid second-generation American stock whose parents came from Germany.
From her earliest years – spent in various places, including Alaska and Vacaville – she has been a model of independence.
She was the only girl on her country school baseball team.
“I had to play on the baseball team; they didn’t have enough players for a team if I didn’t,” she said.
Handy with a gun, she was better at taking down a deer for the dinner table than her three brothers, one of them her twin who in his 90s fell victim to a disease diagnosed as supranuclear palsy.
Glebe became a good shooter at a family hunting camp in the Mayacamas mountain range. For a number of years she drove to the camp in her four-wheel-drive vehicle to hunt deer for the humans and rabbits for the dogs.
“I was a good shot because I pestered my brothers all the time and got their .22 (caliber rifle) and used it,” she asserted.
She rode her horse bareback for a number of years – out of necessity.
“I was on a horse when I was 6 years old,” said Glebe. “I finally worked up enough courage to ask my father if I could have a saddle and he said, 'I have to feed this horse, I have to put shoes on it. You can ride it bareback.' So I never had a saddle.”
Above all she is one tough – make that indestructible – lady who in her lifetime admits to having had 12 surgeries.
“Nothing more than gall bladder, tonsils, adenoids, and a few odds and ends,” she explained.
During one eight-year stage she could not eat solid foods unless they were turned to grain by a ricer.
But all this was as nothing when compared to a March night seven years ago when Glebe, 93 at the time, was run over by her own SUV, which slipped into gear and pinned her while she was opening a gate.
After regaining consciousness, she was able to extract her hand from under a wheel. And when “nothing rattled” she found her way to her front door and called for help.
Doctors and x-ray technicians were stunned when they discovered the bones of neither of her legs were broken after being run over by a heavy vehicle. She pulled up her pant legs to show this reporter purplish discolorations left from the accident.
A three-ring binder that provides glimpses of much of Glebe’s life was presented to her at an open house in her honor at Big Valley Grange last Sunday.
Among the tales included in the portfolio was one that occurred after her parents bought her an “upright” piano when she was 11.
“Learning to play was an adventure in many ways,” Glebe wrote, and then went on to describe one of them involving a teacher whom she said was a “marvelous musician and an excellent teacher – when she was not drinking lemon or vanilla extract.”
She found it curious when she observed that the windows and the windshield of a car owned by the teacher’s husband had been smashed. Worse yet, it was the teacher who broke them during a pique of temper.
“I never knew quite what to expect,” Glebe recalled. Certainly didn’t expect what occurred when the teacher looked out window and spotted a neighbor’s half-grown cat on her property.
“For some reason this upset her terribly,” Glebe wrote. “She jumped up, grabbed a butcher knife ... and proceeded to finish off the cat, all the while explaining to whomever happened to be near what she thought about the neighbor or their cat.”
At that point she got a new piano teacher.
In 1937 Glebe moved from Los Angeles to Lake County, where she saw and rode out the worst of the Great Depression.
Among her first experiences in Lake County was driving herself to a dentist, whose office was on Lakeport’s Main Street.
The office was above a drug store. While mounting a dark staircase to it Glebe needed to step around a dead bird.
She had further misgivings about the dentist when, after entering his office, she observed a jumble of patient records, a stubby pencil and an ashtray for the dentist’s cigar butt on top of a bureau and a plethora of tools, various papers and tubes of paste jutting out from the bureau drawers.
What manner of practitioner would operate in in such disarray?
Glebe soon found out. The dentist, whom she remembers only as Dr. Fruchtnicht, was a tall, slim man in rumpled clothing, combat boots and a bloodied apron.
Despite all this the oral procedure that followed was successful with one exception: The anesthetic that Dr. Fruchtnicht administered left Glebe too woozy to drive home.
The dentist knew exactly what to do under such circumstances. He led Glebe back down the staircase to a city park bench where she could sleep off the effects of the drug.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I can easily watch out for you from my window across the street. But you won’t have any difficulty and soon you’ll be right as rain and can drive.”
And indeed she did.
Two days later when Glebe went back to Dr. Fruchtnicht for a checkup she found the dead bird was still on the staircase.
Perhaps some people are like wine. Some simply age and some get better with age.
So it isn’t too much of a stretch to see Glebe turn her dreams for the future into substance.
She wants to travel.
No, not to China. She did that in February 1973 – taking in the Terracotta Army in the process – just months after then-President Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit the country since 1949.
No, not to Siberia. She’s had a train trip over that forsaken terrain.
And, no, not to the Amazon. She’s been down that river and seen the rain forest people.
Asked for a recommendation for living a long life, Glebe said, “A lot of it is your attitude. You need to keep your mind active. When you get into trouble get on your feet and don’t stand around and moan about it.”
Email John Lindblom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
