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more photosMarjorie Smith pauses to reflect on Bend’s past, much of which she witnessed during her many years spent living on Wall Street.
Rob Kerr / The Bulletin
Bend’s first
First to be born in Bend’s first hospital, lifelong resident Marjorie Smith will turn 100 Sept. 14
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Published: August 25. 2009 4:00AM PSTAt 99, her hearing isn’t what it used to be, but ask Marjorie Smith what the secret is to living a long life and she’s quick to answer: “Climbing stairs.”
“You see, my apartment was over the store,” she explains. “And every time, we had to come down the stairs and up the stairs. I think it was climbing stairs.”
The store she refers to was Bend’s first hardware store, N.P. Smith Builders Supplies. It was built by her father, Nicholas Smith, in 1909, the same year Marjorie Smith was the first baby born in Bend’s first hospital by Dr. Urling C. Coe in a modest building on Oregon Avenue.
Smith has spent virtually her entire life in Bend and will turn 100 on Sept. 14. On Thursday, Trinity Episcopal Church in Bend will honor Smith and another Bend centenarian, Beatrice Williams, with a birthday party open to friends and acquaintances of the two.
Smith has been around almost as long as the city itself. Her father and mother, Cora, arrived in Central Oregon in 1902, two years before Bend’s incorporation in 1904.
Prior to Nicholas Smith opening Bend’s first hardware store, supplies had to be shipped in from Shaniko. Nicholas Smith is credited with helping to clear Wall Street, building its first wooden sidewalk — her mother was the first to walk on it — and even erecting the wall that gave Wall Street its name.
A series of fires between 1911 and 1914 destroyed the other wooden buildings on the block, and Smith will tell you the story of how her mother put wet blankets over the walls and roof during the downtown fire that burned surrounding buildings.
Hence, the original building built by her father still stands, at 937 N.W. Wall St. The downstairs has been home to a number of businesses, including the Brass Oak, Blue Teal and, since March, Bend Bungalow.
It’s Wall Street’s last wooden structure, says Kelly Cannon-Miller of the Des Chutes Historical Museum. After that fire, downtown buildings had to be constructed of fire-proof materials, she adds.
The building bears a plaque on its frame attesting to the fact that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and it’s also a stop on Bend’s Heritage Walk.
Acquaintances say her apartment looks much the same as it had in the 1930s, but Smith doesn’t live there anymore.
Things can’t stay as they are forever, and five years ago, unable to continue navigating those stairs safely, the retired school teacher moved out of the upstairs apartment in which she’d spent most of her life.
She now lives at High Desert Assisted Living Community on Bend’s east side, where there’s a folded cardboard placard atop the TV in her living room. It reads “Queen Marjorie,” and dates to 1989, the year Smith was crowned the Deschutes Pioneers’ Association queen.
These days, the queen holds court from a chair by the back window. She holds, not a scepter, but a tattered notebook with the numbers “1972-73-74” written on its torn face.
Those were the years when Smith began writing down her memories of Bend’s early days, and the childhood she spent sabotaging the nail bins and hiding in the rope room of her father’s long-ago hardware store.
“That was one place I always could go,” she says. “Dad had a full wall of bins of nails. And I used to go in there and I’d move them from one to another, and I’d get them all mixed up. One nail that I liked was a six-penny. And I thought you got six nails for a penny.”
Smith, who will proudly tell you that she’s never lived in a house, notes the tremendous growth and changes in Bend since the days when, as a young girl, she wasn’t allowed to go over to Bond Street.
“Farmers’ helpers would come to town on Saturday and have their paycheck with them. They would spend it in the Downing Hotel. They were all drunk and silly people. So we were not allowed on Bond Street. It still bothers me to go down Bond. It was pretty wild. They were all cussing and swearing and dancing and drinking.”
Her father’s store closed in 1931, a victim of the Depression. Smith earned a degree in education from Portland State College and taught for 22 years at Pilot Butte and other elementary schools. She never married or had children, and she outlived her two older brothers, Elmer and Lester. Her parents died within a few days of each other in 1955.
A serious woman who makes strong eye contact with an interviewer, Smith clowns briefly while having her picture taken by holding her notebook in front of her face. When she gets a few laughs from the assembled, she smirks.
As the photographer prepares to leave, Smith asks him, “Don’t you want any more?” A beat later, she adds, “I’m just full of it.”
Smith says she traveled all over the world, her favorite destination being London, and she still corresponds with a friend there. But she never called anywhere but Bend home.
As she told The Bulletin in 1991, “I don’t want to live anywhere else.”
Some things do remain the same.
“You have the fact that I never lived in a house, right?” she asks. “I think that is so unusual. They took me from the hospital to the upstairs apartment where my folks lived, and I lived there. You never have that.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.
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