Lela Sloan celebrates her 102nd birthday at her John Day home on June 24, 2024. 

JOHN DAY — Lela Sloan celebrated her birthday by sleeping in. 

Then she got her hair fixed. She thought she might have some pie later.

When a visitor asked how old she was, she leaned forward in her armchair and hollered, “A hundred and two!”

Then it was her turn to ask a question.

“How do I look? Do I look like a mud fence?”

The big smile on her face tells you she’s having fun. And for someone who passed the century mark a couple of years ago, she looks a whole lot better than a mud fence.

Lela Sloan was born June 24, 1922, in Grant County.

“I was born in John Day,” she said decisively, then added an amendment: “As far as I know. I might’ve been born in Monument. My folks had a ranch in Monument, and I was raised there.”

She had 11 brothers and sisters, she said, and there also were three cousins who were part of the household.

“We never had any trouble,” she said. “We just had fun.”

She attended grade school in Monument and high school in John Day. Then, in 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States went to war.

“I moved to Portland and worked in the shipyards,” Sloan recalled.

After a few years in Portland, she said, she and her husband, the late Ford Sloan, moved to Pendleton and went to work for the Pendleton Grain Growers agricultural co-op.

The couple moved back to Grant County, and Sloan got a job working for the state welfare office, where she worked for 30-plus years. 

“I’ve worked a long time,” she said. “But I liked it.”

She especially enjoyed her co-workers at the welfare office.

“I’ve had a lot of friends — one called this morning that I worked with,” she said.

“We were all happy people,” she added. “We did our work, but we had fun doing it.”

There were other jobs as well — “I worked all the time,” Sloan said — but she gets the details mixed up now.

One thing she doesn’t have trouble remembering is family. 

She and her husband had four children, all of them still living. Sloan lists them all by name. There are two daughter, Cynthia Landreth in Vancouver and Julie Anna Swaggert, who splits her time between a house in Boise and another in Mexico. And here are two sons, Michael Sloan in Long Creek and Andy Sloan in Elgin.

There’s also a whole flock of grandkids and great-grandkids. She can’t tell you off the top of her head how many there are, but she can tell you their names, where they live, who they’re married to and what they do for a living.

“I’ve got four pilots,” she announced with pride.

And they all keep in touch, by phone and by mail.

“I hear from all of them,” Sloan said.

Her caregiver, Jessie Elliott, confirmed that statement.

“They call her all the time,” Elliott said. “And she still writes people cards and letters.”

Sloan, who still lives in the same house in John Day she’s had since 1970 or so, doesn’t get out much anymore. But she’s OK with that. 

She still gets regular phone calls from friends and family, cards and letters in the mail, and sometimes — especially for special occasions like her birthday — people come to visit. These are the things she looks forward to.

“They keep me entertained,” she said.

AGE: 102

RESIDENCE: John Day

OCCUPATION: Retired after holding a number of jobs, including 30-plus years with the Oregon Department of Human Services