Centenarian found joy in each day
In a lifetime spanning 100 years, Erla Shea found joy in her faith, family, career and interests from playing the organ and singing gospel songs to following sports and reading.
Erla Ercella Hovinen was born Jan. 4, 1921, in the town of Hancock in Michigan’s picturesque Upper Peninsula.
“I was the first one born in my hometown,” she said in telling stories about her childhood. “My birth record is No. 1 for that year.”
Erla was the sixth of seven children, with three brothers and three sisters. Her father, Victor, was born in Norway and immigrated to America with his family at age 3. Her mother, Naema, was born in the Upper Peninsula.
The area where Erla grew up was known as Copper Country, and her father was a miner who rose to foreman with the Quincy Mining Company. He was highly respected by the men who worked for him and hailed for organizing a rescue team and saving lives in a mine accident.
Erla’s mother was a homemaker who also worked outside the home cleaning houses, washing and ironing to make extra money.
“She always worked so hard,” Erla said about her mother. “She worked at home and took care of the family and worked outside the home when she could. Inside the home, my mother did everything — cooking cleaning, washing, ironing — she did it all.
“She was a great cook and a great baker. Everybody used to love the sweet rolls and coffeecake she made. My cousin Ruth would bring her girlfriend down from Calumet just to have her baked goods. Her donuts were so good, and you never tasted hot chocolate like my mother could make.”
Erla would emulate her mother’s work ethic and devotion to family as an adult with her own family and career.
School days
Erla reminisced recently about the fun she had in kindergarten at Edward Ryan Elementary School, with the vibrant, stylish Miss Vervile as her teacher. It was the mid-1920s, and Miss Vervile made learning exciting. Erla remembers her first teacher for giving her a good start in school, and for her trendy fashion choice of spiked-heel shoes that she managed to walk in gracefully.
While Erla loved school, it could be scary for a tiny girl walking alone when snowbanks on the path were taller than her. The winters in the Upper Peninsula were long and unforgiving, with major snowstorms and temperatures sometimes reaching 20 below zero.
Despite the harsh winter conditions, Erla spent much of what she described as an idyllic childhood outdoors, especially in the summer. She talked of berry picking, swimming, diving, and running races and playing baseball against the boys and beating them. In winter, she went ice skating and sledding.
She enjoyed spending time at her grandparents’ farm. As a teenager, she and her younger sister,
Lavern, were singing gospel songs while doing the dishes when a bear walked by the kitchen window. Erla and Lavern harmonized when singing together a cappella, and they had beautiful singing voices. Apparently, the bear thought so, too.
Erla loved to read, and she found a quiet spot in the bustling family home to digest book after book.
“I used to go up to the attic to read,” she said. “We had a light green table and chairs with ivory trim. They were made for little kids, but they were sturdy. We had them by the back window, and I used to sit there and read.”
Her family lived in housing provided by the mining company. Executives surmised that if they built spacious homes with indoor plumbing and electricity and rented them to employees at a reasonable rate, the miners would stay and raise families. They were right, and the company housing provided stability and comfort for Erla’s family.
They had their share of hardship, however.
They were touched by tragedy when Erla’s brother Glen died as a teenager after being stabbed by a local boy. Erla’s mother went to the cemetery every day and brought Erla with her.
The mine where her father worked closed at the start of the Great Depression, and her father lost his job. Fortunately, he got work as a foreman on a WPA road construction crew. Erla stood in food lines with her mother for several hours a couple times a month for rations of beans and rice, sugar, flour and a pound of oleo (margarine).
Erla’s father went back to the mine when it reopened but had to quit working after he began losing his eyesight to glaucoma. He went blind at 59.
Erla graduated in 1939 from Hancock High School, where she took business courses. She went to work at the Douglass House, a hotel in nearby Houghton that’s now on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Erla was coming out of church on a Sunday morning when she heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The next day my brother Doug went downtown to enlist [in the military],” she said.
Fulfilling work
Erla moved to Detroit and got a job in the debit department of the Maccabees Life Insurance Company, where she worked from 1943-1958. The job appealed to her because she had significant responsibility and freedom to mold her role at a time when women in the workforce rarely got that level of autonomy.
“I liked it because it was my own job,” she said.
Erla also liked life in the big city. She enjoyed going to church, sporting events and spending time with friends and her family, who moved down from the Upper Peninsula.
When asked what advice she remembered from her family, she said, “This is a piece of advice my father gave me when I was all grown up: He said, ‘Never buy a car because you will always be broke.’”
While he may have been right, Erla chose not to follow the advice. Around 1950, she bought a new Chrysler DeSoto for $3,000, when it was uncommon for women to own a car. “It had chair high seats, which was good for me,” said Erla, who was 5 feet at her tallest.
A family of her own
One day, as Erla walked through the lobby of her office building, a handsome salesman approached her about buying a pair of shoes. She liked stylish shoes, especially if they were comfortable, and bought a pair from him. The salesman was charming, and the two talked easily. She accepted his invitation to join him for a cup of coffee. The chance meeting changed the course of both their lives.
Ambrose Shea had been working as a salesman in the home improvement industry in St. Louis when he was granted a patent pending on a hotel luggage cart he designed. He went to Detroit because a factory there had agreed to build a prototype. He sold shoes to earn money while he waited for the prototype. He wasn’t able to raise enough money to finish it, but he met the love of his life in Detroit.
Erla quit her job and moved to St. Louis, where she married Ambrose on Jan. 10, 1959. She was 38 and he was 46.
Sadly, their first child, a girl, was stillborn. A daughter, Loretta, was born in 1961.
Erla balanced family and career as she worked outside the home for most of Loretta’s childhood and beyond, until her retirement at 65. While she never found a job that she liked as much as her first professional role, she utilized her skills in typing, shorthand and general administrative support at various companies in St. Louis.
Erla and Ambrose passed their love of learning and sports to their daughter, who went to college on a partial academic scholarship. Besides baseball, football, hockey and college basketball, the family enjoyed horse racing at the old Cahokia Downs and Fairmount Park tracks across the Mississippi River in Illinois.
A devoted grandmother
One of the great joys of Erla’s life was becoming a grandmother. Allison Shea Kline was born to Loretta and Robert Kline in 1990, and Karen Shea Kline was born in 1992.
Erla and Ambrose were devoted grandparents. Once, after an ice storm when Karen was just a few months old and Loretta had a broken arm, they refused to stay home even though most residential streets were covered in ice. To navigate icy conditions outside Loretta’s home, they crawled on the sidewalk and steps to safely reach the house so they could help care for their granddaughters.
Loss and starting anew
Erla and Ambrose managed to stay active even after her eyesight began to fail and she gave up driving. They walked from their apartment in south St. Louis every day for coffee and a hamburger at White Castle or McDonald’s.
Ambrose passed away in 2006 at age 93, just one day before he and Erla would have celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary. At 85, Erla moved to Liberty, Missouri, to be near Loretta and her family, who had moved to the Kansas City area in 1996.
In Liberty, Erla rekindled her love of playing the organ, singing traditional hymns and reading. She went to the library on the Liberty Access Bus and checked out 10 books on a weekly basis. She attended St. James Catholic Church with Loretta and her family, and she became an avid fan of the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs. She never missed an orchestra concert, dance recital or school event of Allison’s and Karen’s, and she traveled to Springfield for events when they attended college at Missouri State University.
The final chapter
While Erla lost most of her eyesight and had to curtail her activities in her late 90s, she was proud to reach her 100th birthday. She found something to look forward to each day. She enjoyed listening to religious programs and sports on the radio, especially in the pandemic when she couldn’t go out.
After turning 100 in January, Erla said she was ready to go to her “heavenly home.” She died on April 6, 2021, leaving a legacy of faith, love, hard work and embracing the everyday joys of life.
Erla is survived by her immediate family — Loretta, Robert, Allison and Karen, all of Liberty, nephews Daniel Emmett of Nevada and Timothy Emmett of Michigan, along with extended family and friends.
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