105 Years of Life: Anna Belle Trueblood Shares Her Story

It is common for people to live to be 75 years-old. It is also common for people to live to be 85, and 95 is not unheard of either. But 105 years-old? That is certainly a rarity.

A local Salem resident and former teacher achieved that tremendous milestone this past Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17, and her name is Anna Belle Trueblood.

Born in 1920, Anna Belle grew up on a 200 acre farm with nearly every animal imaginable. She had three younger brothers, and she did not hesitate to say that she was the boss.

“I had three brothers; I was the oldest, and I was the boss,” Anna Belle laughed. “I was also the babysitter, I guess. My parents had all four of us in five years, so I had my hands full. We had 200 acres at the time, and we would run over all of it. We had the total freedom to just be wherever we wanted. Neighbors would ask my dad, ‘aren’t you afraid they’ll get lost?’ My dad would just respond with ‘they’ll come out somewhere!’ I lived there for 27 years, and I loved every bit of it.”

Life was quite different back in the 1920s. One aspect that has changed drastically is education. When Anna Belle was growing up, she attended a one-room school approximately one mile from her house. School buses had only just begun to become mainstream, so like many - if not all - of her classmates, she walked to school everyday.

“We had a one-room school about a mile from where we lived, and I walked there and back everyday by myself. Can you imagine that? Just a scrawny, little six-year-old kid. The school was in a pasture field, and we’d have to climb over a stile to get over the fence,” said Anna Belle. “We didn’t get a school bus until I was in the sixth grade. It had two long seats down the sides, and one long seat in the middle, and we called that the horse because you had to straddle it to sit on it. No matter how many kids got on it, you had to just keep pushing backward. Also, those buses were cold!”

Anna Belle had no intention of going to college. It was something her family could not afford, and she knew that. However, an opportunity presented itself one day in her senior year of high school.

“We had this superintendent that my class hated, and he hated us! But we had one girl in our class that was his pet. We all knew it, and she knew it too. She had sat out of school for a while, so she was a bit older than the rest of us,” she said. “The superintendent sat down beside me one day toward the end of my senior year and put his arm around me. He would always do that whenever he wanted something. He said to me, ‘Indiana University is giving two scholarships to each county, and it depends on an intelligence test.’"

"He pointed at the girl that was his pet and continued by saying, ‘she would love to have that scholarship, and it would help her a lot if she had somebody to go and take it with her and be there for her.’ So, I agreed to go and take it as well. She really struggled with it, but I pretty much just breezed through it. Low and behold, when the paper came out next week, there I was! I won the scholarship! I think it was the first time my dad was proud of me,” she laughed.

Anna Belle went on to discuss her college years. While studying to become a teacher, she was assigned to go with a family to Spring Mill in order to practice her skills.

“Everybody was assigned to a family after school, and we all went to Spring Mill Park for a picnic and a chance to practice teaching,” she said. “The family I went with had a little girl in second grade, a four-year-old boy, and a little baby. While the mother was busy with the baby, I took the little girl and her little brother all over the place! When we got back to the car, they both sat on either side of me and laid their heads down in my lap for a nap during the drive home. That is really where I fell in love with little kids, and I knew that was the age group I wanted to teach. I liked the big kids too, but the little ones were my favorites.”

At the outset of her career upon graduating college, Anna Belle went through a period of many changes. Not only was she embarking on her journey as a new teacher, but it was also during this time that she met Harold Trueblood, the man who would eventually become her husband. However, it was not the smoothest start.

“My best friend from high school always liked to celebrate our birthdays together because hers was on March 16, and mine is March 17. For my 20th birthday, just a year into my teaching career, she decided we were going to go on a double date - a blind date. She was about to get married, but I was still single. I guess she thought I was going to become an old maid. I had gone through a hard day when the time came to go on the date. It was my first year teaching, and I was tired and short. Everything went wrong on the date. We were just crossways with each other, and we argued the whole evening. It was a miserable time, and we never wanted to see each other again. To my surprise, I ended up living with him for 45 years,” she laughed. “I got to thinking after the date, ‘I really should apologize because I was rude,’ but I didn’t even know his name. Six months later, I got a letter from him saying, ‘can we be friends?’”

And the rest, as they say, is history. They continued to date, enjoying each other's company far more than before, and eventually, they married.

Anna Belle taught at several different schools throughout her 32 year long career. She spent time at Aurora, Haleysburg and West Washington, and she substituted at Campbellsburg and Salem to name a few. However, she spent most of her time in a little schoolhouse in Pekin, much like the school she attended as a child. Needless to say, she had plenty of stories from her extensive teaching career.

“I had this one boy who ended up becoming Sheriff Clyde Nichols. He was so tiny; he was really too young to be in school. He would go to sleep just about every afternoon, and I would let him take his nap and would wake him up when it was time to go home - at least I thought I had him awake. One evening after I woke him up, he sleep-walked to the top of the concrete stairs that led to the basement, and he just walked right off and fell all the way down the stairs. I figured he was killed! I ran down there to pick him up, and sure enough, he seemed to be just fine,” said Anna Belle.

“The worst scare I had was when I had a class of mostly boys - kind of bad little boys. They would not sit still or stay in their seats. They just kept popping up; they needed something all the time. I finally told them if they got out of their seats again, they were going to be in big trouble. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I made some kind of threat. Then here came Jerry. Jerry was always coming to tell me something. This time, I was glad he did. He told me one of the kids was choking, and I looked back at him to see him turning black and blue! Of course we didn’t know what to do for a choking person back then other than to hit their back. So, that’s what I did, and he coughed up two pennies,” she laughed. “I had to go sit down after that!”

Upon retiring from teaching, she continued to embrace life. She loved to garden and mow the lawn, and she was very active in church. Her husband Harold would say, “give her a lawn mower to push, and she’d walk all day!”

“I taught a Sunday School class for 63 years. I originally taught the old ladies class and had 40 students when I started. I ended up with four left by the time I quit,” chuckling, she said, “that doesn’t sound very good for a teacher, does it? I just tell people they all got promoted to Heaven.”

It was a wonderful pleasure to be able to sit down with Anna Belle Trueblood and listen to her discuss her past. 105 years of life is quite an amazing accomplishment, and hers has been filled with great stories. She is certainly still sharp as a tack and is such a phenomenal individual to sit with. Happy birthday, Anna Belle.

Photos provided by Anna Belle Trueblood’s family.