Straight shooter
Moran resident credits activity for century of living.
From left, Linda Bourret and Coco Suarez talk it up with Leonard Ross at a party in his honor. Neighbors Dale and Nancy LaVallee threw an early 100th birthday party for Ross, who becomes a centurian in January. NEWS&GUIDE PHOTO / PRICE CHAMBERSView our entire photo gallery >>
By Johanna Love, Jackson Hole, Wyo.
October 7, 2009
Leonard Ross is a realist.
A person doesn’t get to be 99 years old by eating bonbons and boozing it up. He knows that.
Ross is methodical and detailed when working on an oil painting of bighorns, baking an apple pie for a neighbor or getting his daily exercise by lapping the interior of his house 25 times. He walks through life clear-eyed, after that cataract surgery, and with an even gait, since having a knee replaced two years ago.
About once per week, he drives 37 miles to Jackson from his home near Pacific Creek. He gets groceries, has a haircut.
He misses his wife, Ruth, who died 18 years ago. He misses his siblings, his golf buddies. He’s outlived them all.
He fends off loneliness by painting, exercising, playing billiards and visiting with his neighbors, “some of the finest people in the world.”
When he was a boy growing up in Pine Bluffs, on the Wyoming/Nebraska border, his family got around by horse and buggy. Movies had no sound. He remembers staples being rationed in World War I, not being able to “borrow 15 cents” from a bank in the Great Depression, and trying to farm during the Dust Bowl.
About 60 years ago, he and Ruth bought a little gas station in Burns, raised their two children and worked there for 23 years before building a small home and retiring to Jackson Hole, where he had hunted as a young man.
Hunting trophies, trap-shooting trophies, a wolverine photo, family pictures and his oil paintings of wildlife adorn the walls of his well-kept home. He still has his Harvest Gold Kenmore appliances from when the house was built. He has a knife that he made out of scrap metal and dressed more than 40 elk with, although he’s done hunting now. He still cuts wood, golfs, paints and blows snow. He tells of the skill he used to have with a rifle: He could throw five pennies in the air and shoot two of them before they hit the ground.
Not having formal instruction in painting, baking or building never stopped him, he said.
“I figure if they can do it, I can do it.”
Ross doesn’t keep any alcohol in the house, but he sipped a Miller Genuine Draft on Sept. 26 during an early birthday party at Dale and Nancy LaVallee’s house. He’s never smoked or drunk coffee. His two children, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren live in Colorado, but they visit often enough. He can’t imagine anywhere else on earth he’d rather live than his little house, sandwiched between Grand Teton National Park and the Teton Wilderness of the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
He said he has no regrets.
On Jan. 11, Ross will be 100 years old. How did he do it?
“Everybody asks me that,” Ross said. “Being active.”
;)
