Published Caption: Cathleen Allison/Nevada Appeal
After living what her granddaughter described as a "hard but happy" life for more than a century, Alberta Huckaba died last week at the Evergreen Mountain View nursing home.
"She went very peacefully," her granddaughter Lisa McCoy said Monday. "She wasn't ill or anything. She was just tired."
Tired from a life that began in Mississippi in 1908 as one of seven children, and included a marriage at 14. She raised three sons and lived to see 14 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren. She also lived to see the death of two of her three sons.
"Life for Alberta was long," said granddaughter Deborah Snyder. "Some of it was hard, but much of it was happy, too. She was born in a time and place with no electricity or plumbing and lived to see computers, cell phones, and man walk on the moon."
Although Huckaba would have turned 101 at the end of this month, she only celebrated 25 actual birthdays " every four years on Leap Day.
"She just loved life," McCoy said. "She always had something to say, a story to tell about what she had seen in her life."
She spent the first 30 years of her marriage raising children, animals, flowers and working the land alongside her husband, Vick, who was 19 when they married.
In the 1950s, she went to work planning meals and cooking for a hospital. However, when all of her children moved out West, she reluctantly followed.
"She just didn't want to leave the hospital, her friends, her church and other family behind," Snyder said.
Vick died of a heart attack shortly after the move.
In 1993, the family moved to Minden where the grandchildren often stopped by for "a game of war, pick a flower, check on how her latest quilt was going, or eat one of Grandma's fry pies," Snyder said.
After a bad fall, Huckaba moved into the Evergreen Mountain View Rehabilitation Center in 1998.
"The people who worked there loved Alberta," Snyder said. "She was a sweet little old Southern lady who was completely lucid and could carry on a good conversation."
Last year, for her 100th birthday, the staff at the center made a poster chronicling her life. The Nevada Appeal and two Reno news stations featured her story.
"She was famous," Snyder recalled.
A service will be held for Huckaba at 9:30 this morning at the Evergreen Mountain View Health and Rehabilitation Center, 201 Koontz Lane.
- Contact reporter Teri Vance at tvan
ce@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1272.