Williams Lake resident not slowing down as she hits 100

Peggy McKinlay just turned 100 years young and has done a lot of living in that time.

She was born on a homestead near Bonaparte Lake southwest of 100 Mile House and when she was two-years-old her father left the family.

“My mother hitched up the two horses we owned and two buggies and my two older brothers, two aunts, my grandmother, my mother and I rode out of that little homestead and made our way up around through Merritt and then done through Lytton to Vancouver and I think it took a year to get there,” McKinlay recalled.

Even though they were dirt poor, she said she was motivated to be successful.

“When I first saw the Vancouver Library I fell to my knees, I was so impressed. I’m going to read them all I said to myself and I learned a lot by studying.”

Fast forward a few years, McKinlay said the first really important job she had was becoming an Engineering Liason Officer for Boeing Aircraft.

“And that was drawing third dimensional exploded drawings for the shop. I graduated from that to the pilots handbook making drawings for that,” McKinlay remembered.

“When the War was over I went right into the Hudson Bay Company as a layout artist in advertising and a model. At the end of that job I was quitting and they paid me full salary if I would stay on and teach a group of men from across Canada how to run an advertising office, so I stayed for awhile until my first child was born.”

Later on in her life, McKinlay returned to the Cariboo and spent 30-years in a log cabin house at Fletcher Lake in the Cariboo-Chilcotin Region.

Eight years ago, McKinlay came to be a resident at the Senior Village in Williams Lake where she still finds time to sing with the choir, writing poems and songs.

–Files by Pat Matthews, My Cariboo Now