Premium ContentClick on Premium Content on the Featured navigation bar for information.
COUNCIL BLUFFS — Carmen Rutherford has a birthday coming on Wednesday — her 105th.
“I had a good life, had a wonderful father,” she said.
Rutherford, the baby in her family, has outlived her siblings but has a nephew who lives in Council Bluffs with his family.
“They come visit quite often,” said Abby Fliehs, marketing director at Primrose Retirement Community where Rutherford lives.
Rutherford was born in Italy but moved to Council Bluffs with her family as a young girl and doesn’t remember her native land. She grew up on a farm until she was about 7, when a tornado devastated the place.
“It took everything,” she said. “It took our home.”
They moved to a farm in Nebraska but later moved back to Council Bluffs so her father could work for the railroad.
Rutherford had three brothers and a sister.
“We children were together a lot,” she said. “I was the ornery one.”
Her mother taught her to help others, Rutherford said.
“My mother, she loved to cook and send to the neighbors, and there wasn’t a day when she didn’t do that,” she said. “My mom was a very good cooker.”
Her mother had her sew clothes for others in need, Rutherford said.
“It was always for somebody else,” she said.
As an adult, Rutherford worked as an operator for the telephone company — a job she enjoyed .
“It was always nice working there,” she said.
Rutherford got started making cloth dolls somewhere along the line and continued to sew them for more than 50 years. Many were sold to raise money for Mercy Hospital in Council Bluffs.
Rutherford and her husband, Marvin, who did not raise any children, moved to Mountain Home, Ark., in 1971. In 1980, Mercy staff contacted her and asked if she would make a special doll with room for internal organs, which the hospital staff installed. They used the doll to show children preparing for surgery what would be removed and where it was in the body.
She also crocheted and made rugs. She picked up the hobby of painting pictures in the mid-1970s. She stopped when her husband died in 1988.
“He was a wonderful, wonderful husband,” she said.
Rutherford moved back to Council Bluffs and into Primrose about a year ago.
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
