{"id":76735,"date":"2018-02-14T19:25:50","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T02:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/you-may-never-have-the-opportunity-again\/"},"modified":"2018-02-15T02:25:50","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T02:25:50","slug":"you-may-never-have-the-opportunity-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/you-may-never-have-the-opportunity-again\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018You may never have the opportunity again\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><figure class=\"wp-block-image naviga-inline-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/imengine.public.prod.dur.navigacloud.com\/?uuid=1382dda4-053c-4611-adbc-9cf5e4722648&amp;function=cover&amp;type=preview&amp;source=false&amp;width=2000\" width=\"1531\" height=\"1013\" alt=\"Lewis Hurst, who will turn 100 years old on Sunday, talks on Feb. 7 about growing up on a farm when manual labor was the only way to do the job.\" class=\"naviga-image\" loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">Lewis Hurst, who will turn 100 years old on Sunday, talks on Feb. 7 about growing up on a farm when manual labor was the only way to do the job.<\/span><span class=\"credit\">Emily Rice\/The Journal<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video wp-block-embed-youtube naviga-video-embed\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ukC_JmbZz_U\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/p><p>Lewis Hurst grew up in a different time, one of horse-drawn carriages and one-room schoolhouses.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you got old enough to do anything, you were up at four in the morning feeding the chickens or slopping the hogs. And when you got big enough to milk, you would be milking cows and in the field by the time the sun came up,\u201d Hurst said.<\/p>\n<p>He will celebrate his 100th birthday Sunday at Madison House Assisted Living in Cortez.<\/p>\n<p>He was born on a farm in Woodward County, Oklahoma, on Feb. 18, 1918.<\/p>\n<p>All the work done on his family\u2019s farm was with manual tools because there was no such thing as \u201cautomatic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cKids today do not know what work is, they just do not realize. They think mowing the lawn is really hard work, but everything was manual then,\u201d Hurst said. \u201cYou had to have a weak mind and a strong back.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hurst attended a one-room schoolhouse that taught first through eighth grades.<\/p>\n<p>He and his siblings would walk the 3\u00bc miles to school every morning and night until their parents bought a farm closer to the schoolhouse.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThen I got to ride a horse, and I started a fire for the schoolteacher every morning so it would be warm when she got there,\u201d Hurst said.<\/p>\n<p>Hurst and his late wife, Marie, were married on a \u201cbluff\u201d made by friends in an ice cream parlor.<\/p>\n<p>This was after he had courted Marie\u2019s friend to get to spend time with her. Marie was only allowed to visit that friend in the evenings, so Hurst courted her to spend time with Marie.<\/p>\n<p>The night they were married, Lewis and Marie and another couple woke the clerk up in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n<p>The preacher tried to marry them from memory and kept forgetting what to say, so he had to get his Bible out and \u201cdo it up proper,\u201d Hurst said.<\/p>\n<p>The couples witnessed each other\u2019s nuptials.<\/p>\n<p>Hurst started out at a job at the highway department for 35 cents an hour, a good wage for the era.<\/p>\n<p>He worked in the oil industry in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico for 36\u00bd years.<\/p>\n<p>Lewis and Marie had three children and a \u201cmultitude\u201d of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.<\/p>\n<p>Marie passed away after having two strokes. The couple was married for 58 years, 10 days and about three hours, according to Hurst.<\/p>\n<p>Hurst moved to Cortez in 1998 to his daughter\u2019s property after his wife passed away.<\/p>\n<p>He moved into Madison House Assisted Living when his daughter and son-in-law decided they wanted to travel and were afraid to leave him alone.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you can\u2019t be at home, this is the next best place,\u201d Hurst said.<\/p>\n<p>Hurst said if he had it to do over again, he would have taken the time to stop along the highway on his travels.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you travel, and you see something you want to see, pull off and see it because you may never have the opportunity again,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>resident offers a little advice and shares memories as his 100th birthday approaches<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,13,28,29,316],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-76735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter","tag-video"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76735"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=76735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}