Centenarian celebrates her life
By Shari Kaplan
Los Gatan Reba Sprick doesn't keep any secrets when it comes to how she made it to her 100th year--"I just kept on breathing," she says with a laugh.
A resident at The Terraces of Los Gatos, Sprick celebrated her landmark birthday there on June 11, with a party, then spent the rest of the day with her relatives.
Reba Claire Martin was born in Arkansas and grew up in Indian territory that is now part of the state of Oklahoma. She turns to alliteration to sum up that part of her life: "cotton, cattle, corn and cowboys." The family later moved to Phoenix, Ariz., where a teacher shortage during World War I encouraged Sprick to take her place in the working world at the age of 17.
She decided teaching was not the profession for her, however, because she says she just couldn't connect with the children. In 1928, she joined a group of eight other women who traveled from town to town in a Plymouth coupe, writing business feature stories for newspapers. That was also the year she met Karl Sprick, an industrial engineer and native of Germany. The couple married in 1930 and soon found themselves struggling through the Great Depression.
Two years later, the couple moved to Germany, where Karl hoped he could get a better job. After Adolph Hitler was voted into power and various economical problems arose, the Spricks heard that South Africa was prospering and decided to move to Capetown. While living there, the couple had two sons, Charles and Martin.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Karl was considered an enemy alien in South Africa, so the young family moved back to the United States, bouncing soon again back to Germany because of Karl's difficulty in finding jobs in the United States.
Air raids, people trapped in burning homes and soldiers overtaking town after town were all part of Sprick's experiences while living in Berlin. Her own family was spared much of the horror simply because she was an American. One of her most vivid memories is of living in a three-story apartment complex in which the third floor was home to three Jewish women and the bottom floor was a German woman whose job it was to keep track of the activities of all occupants.
"I liked to visit the women," Sprick recalls, "but the stairs were so creaky I was afraid that the woman down below would report me."
She still remembers the day the three women were carted away by Nazis: "A young soldier came and took the women away. He stopped by my apartment to drop off the keys and he was very embarrassed. I'm sure he didn't have a heart for doing that," she says.
In 1949, the Spricks returned to the United States and settled in the Bay Area. Sprick has lived in Los Gatos for many years, most recently at The Terraces.
|
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
