Even Marguerite Hendrickson’s doctor asks her what she eats.
“I’ve got to attribute it to mum’s mush,” Hendrickson’s son Gary says as the two eye golf being played on a muted TV. “She always made sure that we ate mush [oatmeal] in the morning.”
On June 24, Marguerite is celebrating her 100th birthday. She has called Squamish home for most of that time. Marguerite took a ferry to the windy community at the head of Howe Sound the day the Second World War came to an end. Her Norwegian husband, Al, had come up a month earlier to begin working in the logging industry.
“It was pouring rain,” Marguerite recalls. “The roads were a stream of mud. It was a terrible day. I got a room at the Newport Hotel. There was a [drunk] fellow in the ditch. I didn’t know if I wanted to move up here.”
With time, the family set down roots in Squamish. Marguerite and Al had three boys — Gary, the oldest, Keith and Lefty, the youngest — all born within three years of each other. And Squamish slowly grew to a town of 600 people.
“You know pretty much everyone after a while,” Marguerite says. “You couldn’t talk about anyone. Everyone was pretty much related.”
The Hendricksons’ house was always packed with boys. Besides her own sons, two more teenaged boys decided to move in with the family. Marguerite added mattresses to the attic in case kids needed a place to crash. The youth had found a way to climb over the patio and underneath the roof into the attic, she notes.
The mass of teenagers gathering at the Hendricksons’ home became too much, Marguerite says. She would find a sea of legs in the sitting room as the boys watched the Friday night fights on the black-and-white television and the chairs would continually be covered in jackets — jackets she continually threw on the lawn in a never-ending lesson. Marguerite needed an escape. That came in the form of a job, a position at the Mackenzie Store.
“I wanted to get out of the kitchen,” she says.
The Hendrickson family helped shape Squamish. Al was one of the instigators behind Squamish’s Loggers Sports. He also helped create the community’s first swimming pool.
Marguerite was heavily involved with the Royal Purple, the female division of the Elks of Canada. She sat as the first honour lady for two years.
“We held a lot of dances,” she says.
At the age of 58, Marguerite picked up a golf club. She competed in 15 B.C. Seniors Games, bringing home a medal from each one she entered — seven golds for her age bracket, five silvers and three bronzes.
“She threw the bronze away,” Gary says. “She said, ‘I can’t stand them.’”
On Saturday, June 21, Hendrickson and the community will host a birthday celebration for Marguerite at the Squamish Valley Golf and Country Club.
The party starts at 2 p.m. and the public is welcome to attend.
While there won’t be any of Marguerite’s famous oatmeal at the event, there will be cake.
“She is special to a lot of people,” Gary says. “She’s mum to a lot of people.”
