Don Popham began the 102nd year of his life in September. He was born September 19, 1917. His most vivid childhood memory is of riding his Shetland pony, Nugget, in Emmett, Idaho where he grew up.

“That pony raised me,” he said. “I rode everywhere.”

Don also recalls working at age 12 to pay the family’s county taxes. “I remember my dad putting me on a (horse-powered) gravel wagon to haul gravel for the county. I was so small the road workers dumped it for me.”

Emmett, Idaho at the time had two industries: lumber and fruit trees. Don worked regularly driving a hay wagon for 10 cents an hour. “That was good pay,” he said in an interview this week in his room at Celebration Way Assisted Living in Shelbyville.

The decade-long Great Depression began 35 days after Don’s 12th birthday.

On October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed. That day became known as Black Thursday. The economy would stay in the doldrums for nearly 10 years.

Don graduated high school in 1935, halfway through the Depression. After graduation, Don went into the mountains of central Idaho, where he worked in a hard rock gold mine. That job, in a community named Stebnite, paid him $4 a day working seven days a week, 10 hours a day. Stebnite is now a ghost town. There was never anything there except a mining camp, Don said. “Back there in the mountains there wasn’t any place you could go so you might just as well be working.”

Don’s mining job didn’t pan out, the dampness of the underground mine got to him. “I guess you’d call it rheumatism,” he said. “You were wet from the time you went into the mine until you came out. I couldn’t take it.”

But there was a silver lining from Don’s time in the gold mine. “When I came out of the mine I had a little money. There was no way to spend it in the mountains,” he said. “I bought a Model A Ford Coupe for $10. I jumped in my Ford and went to cut wood.”

Don’s next job was helping one of his brothers fulfill a contract to cut 300 cords of wood for an Indian reservation near Pocatello, Idaho.

“We didn’t have chainsaws, we had to cut it all with handsaws,” he said. It took them five months, from December through April, to complete the work.

Fifteen days before Don turned 22, Germany invaded Poland, the start of World War II.

Once again, Don “jumped in his Model A Ford” and headed west to Portland, Oregon. He arrived in Portland and went to the city employment office looking for work.

He was told of an upcoming construction project, but it was probably fortunate for him that he didn’t take it. The job was to build a Navy base on Wake Island, an American territory that was subsequently captured by the Japanese in December 1941. The Japanese held the island until the end of the war in 1945. In 1943, the Japanese executed 98 American prisoners who were being held on the island. The Americans were blindfolded and machine-gunned.

Instead of heading off to the South Pacific, Don headed north to Seattle, having landed a job with Boeing. Until the end of the war, he worked building B-17 bombers, the “Flying Fortress.”

In 1942, Boeing built 60 B-17s a month. Two years later, Boeing was building 362 each month. The company produced 7,000 of the planes during the war.

During his time in Seattle, Don met and married Virginia. They were married in September of 1943.

When the war ended in 1945, Don again (this time with his wife) “jumped in my Model A Ford and drove to Wesson, Mississippi,” he said, to help care for Virginia’s aging parents.

In Mississippi, Don tried, unsuccessfully, to make a go of milling lumber and then cut cross-ties for the railroad.

Don did find success in Mississippi when he landed a job in charge of maintenance of a hospital.

After 68 years of marriage, Virginia died in 2011. His voice halted a little as he remembered her. “I sure do miss her,” he said. “She was a wonderful lady.”

When asked about the happiest times of his life, Don remembers the September day that Rev. Angus Matheson officiated his wedding to Virginia in the living room of a boarding house in Seattle where he lived.

“On our first anniversary, we took the ferry from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia,” Don recalled. “Those were happy times.”

When asked what historical memories come vividly to mind from his century of life, Don immediately recalls events surrounding World War II. “I remember when the government in Germany elected Hitler,” he said. “I remember when the Germans marched into Poland.”

Don remembers clearly what he was doing on December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “The morning of December 7 my wife and I were painting the dining room,” he said.

With Virginia’s health declining, Don moved to Shelbyville in 2011 to stay with his daughter, Ginene, and her husband, Fredrick Akers. His last “actual, useful work,” Don said, was helping his daughter and son-in-law build their home “up on top of a mountain” eight miles south of Shelbyville.

Don hesitates to offer advice. “Well I’m not much for giving advice,” he said, “but one thing I could say is get all the education you can, any way you can do it, get it. You’re not going to go anywhere without it.”

These days, Don spends a lot of his time reading. He is a lifelong fan of Mark Twain. “I try to keep good humor and to keep my mind active,” he said.