Sivertsen celebrates 100th birthday,

looks back at a century of change

Jessica Wacker

On January 29, long time resident Goldie Sivertsen turned 100. It is an event that is enjoyed by a small fraction of the population. The 2000 US census counted just over 50,000 centurions. For Sivertson, who was born in 1910, it signified nothing noteworthy.

Born in Newport, Oregon to an immigrant father from Germany, Sivertsen came to Petersburg at 10 years old, where she attended and graduated high school.

“My father had the one and only ferry on the Elly Bay,” said Goldie, recalling her childhood before coming up to Alaska.

“We lived on a floating cannery in the bay. I was about 10 or 11 years old when they moved the cannery to Petersburg. I went to grade school and high school in Petersburg, graduated, got married, had my children, and that’s it.”

Her husband and her two children, a boy and a girl, survived off the land, occasionally taking the boat to go into town.

Sivertsen recalled raising two eagles with the children that they had taken in, and having “nothing but time” braving the remote area of what was then America’s new Frontier.

To have such a compact story seems to leave out the details of what turns out to be an extraordinary historical legacy. Although, when asked what knowledge Sivertsen had gleaned coming through 100 years of experience, she noted that the question was a moot point.

By the time Sivertsen graduated from Petersburg High School in 1928, World War I had been over for eight years—it began when she was just four. Women’s voting was not legal until she was ten years old. Upon her graduation, Ford introduced their second car model to follow up on the Model T, the Model A. Electricity was finally beginning to crawl across America as an expanded grid was built. The roaring 20s brought in new areas for styles and music as Jazz erupted.

Just one year after tossing her hat and taking her diploma, America would plummet into the Great Depression lasting from 1929 to 1939 when World War II began.

“But I wasn’t in it,” noted Sivertsen, who would by then be living in a cabin, digging for clams on the beach, and in most ways be isolated from the vast changes that were shaping the US as we know it today.

Cable television came into use in 1948, in 1950s color TV became the standard. The Cold War pushed a shadow along the nation through the 50s as fear of communists and nuclear fall-out prompted students to practice “duck and cover.”

On July 20, 1969, when Sivertsen was 59 years old, the first man set foot on the moon.

And yet, as all this went by, Sivertsen’s days were marked mostly by taking care of the main tasks—getting water, stocking firewood, raising her children, and seeing her grandchildren grow, then her great-grandchildren, and now her great-great grandchildren, of which she has four.

“It’s too much to keep track of,” she noted.

As she sat enjoying carrot cake at the Diamond C with her great-grandaughter Annya Ritchie and great-great grandaughter it seemed that her main concern at that moment was whether or not anyone would care to split the cake with her.

The Annual Senior appreciation lunch was held Saturday with Sivertsen as the main guest of honor.

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