Sonoma Stories: Bud and Clair turn 100, celebrate 79 years of marriage

That Bud Hill still cherishes his Chico High School sweetheart Clair Lemm, couldn’t be more clear. Ditto how unmistakably sweet Clair remains on Bud.

“I couldn’t do without him,” she affirms.

The two of them don’t regard themselves as extraordinary, but just about everybody who knows or hears about them does. In recent weeks Clair and Bud both turned 100 years old, a rare achievement for a couple.

And early this month the longtime Santa Rosans celebrated 79 years of marriage. That number requires some time to sink in: When the Hills recited their vows Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, Adolf Hitler’s Germany had six months earlier occupied Austria, a gallon of gasoline cost a dime and the chocolate-chip cookie had just been invented at the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts.

Almost eight decades later Bud, a long-retired insurance broker whose sparkling blue eyes match his personality, confesses, “We have an illegal matrimony.”

Clair is one month his senior, and when they prepared to wed in Red Bluff on Sept. 4, 1938, she had turned 21 but he was still 20 and not able to marry without parental permission. So he had a buddy pen a note of approval and sign the name of Bud’s mom, Ida B. Hill.

After the simple ceremony, the newlyweds headed for Crater Lake in Oregon. Bud recalled, “we went on a six-day honeymoon with $34 in my pocket.”

He and Clair had three kids, all girls. They’re now 76, 71 and 70. When the Hills correctly count all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the total is 26.

Bud and Clair (his given name is Harold, hers Claribel) are trim and completely mobile, and with a little assistance from watchful, helpful neighbors continue to get along fine at the Rincon Valley home they moved into 60 years ago.

Two of their daughters live in Chico, and at age 100 the Hills contemplate possibly returning to their hometown to be closer to family. But, said Bud, “we hate like heck to think of leaving here.”

Though a piece of their heart resides in Chico, the Hills are deeply rooted in Sonoma County. Clair, an artist, created her portfolio and raised her daughters here.

The more outgoing Bud was for decades active in all sorts of community goings-on. For a dozen years, into his early 90s, he regularly picked up donated groceries at supermarkets and delivered them in his pickup to the F.I.S.H. food pantry. He also knows his way around many local golf courses.

He and Clair left Chico in 1955 because he desired a larger potential market for his chosen profession, insurance. He’d started out after graduating with the Chico High Class of ’34, in the automobile service industry.

“I went to work for the Dodge garage as a lubrication expert,” he said. “We didn’t like to call them grease monkeys.”

He’d eventually own a Hudson dealership in Chico, but prior to that served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and went off to help the Allies prevail in World War II. The military had him teach radar. He and Clair hadn’t been married long when his mother gave them a small house in Chico she owned as a rental.

“It was only 900 square feet,” Bud said. “But it had indoor plumbing!”

He and Clair lived in it and upgraded it, then sold it and bought a larger Chico house. The transaction demonstrated to the Hills the value of owning and selling property.

Said Bud, “We were in real estate investments for the rest of our lives.”

Keen to try a new profession with perhaps greater earning potential, he gave up the car business and went into selling insurance. “I was a life-insurance salesman, and a miserable one,” he said.

He decided to try another type of insurance and became an agent for Cal Farm Insurance, owned by the California Farm Bureau. Much better.

People in agriculture “opened the door for me,” Bud said. “I was with the Farm Bureau.”

That experience persuaded him to become an independent insurance broker. He and Clair pulled up stakes and moved, in 1956, to Santa Rosa.

Sharing an office space with the late Wilbur Gehrke’s real estate business, Bud hung his shingle.

He recalled, “one of Clair’s brothers gave me a slogan: ‘For insurance, look up Hill.’”

Bud worked and golfed and performed community service with the Exchange Club of Santa Rosa. Clair tended to daughters Patty, Janet and Susan, painted when she could and for a time rented handmade costumes.

For years, they were the first couple on the dance floor.

Every summer for decades, the entire family trekked to Humbug Valley, near Lake Almanor, for a grand reunion of kin, many from in and around Chico.

Bud and Clair traveled: Europe, Hong Kong, South America, Hawaii and many destinations in the U.S. Their girls grew up, went off and did well.

Bud’s hard work and investments allowed him to retire in 1980, when he was 63. A favorite activity became golfing with his grandkids.

He and Clair grew old together. Turning 100 was more of a surprise to Bud than to Clair; she has a sister in Chico, Beulah Balmer, who’s 110.

Asked to what they credit their longevity, Bud replied, “Clair thinks, probably rightly so, that it’s good nutrition.”

Clair said she learned healthful cooking in home-economics classes at Chico High and from her sister Beulah.

“I always avoided food that wasn’t good for us,” she said. A typical dinner includes a salad, vegetable, lean protein with very little red meat, and minimal salt and sugar.

Clair does like to bake oatmeal cookies, but they aren’t overly sweet.

Most days, right about 5:30 p.m., she and Bud sit together for what described as “just one little drink of wine,” which he said is about 4 ounces.

One sad aspect of the couple’s exceptionally long, happy and thriving life together is that they don’t any longer have the friends they did decades ago.

“We used to have so many friends,” Clair said. “They all died before reaching 100. That’s the worst part of getting old.”

But she and Bud quietly celebrate the many better parts.

“We’ve had a lot of good times,” Bud said with a smile and an eye on the love of a lifetime whom he first noticed when they were 17, in 1934.

The pair’s middle daughter, Janet Hill, who’s back living in Chico after retiring two years ago as an English professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, said she’s always admired the “sort of secret way” that her parents tease each other and communicate their mutual affection.

She said she’s noticed that for past 10 years or so, “They hold hands everywhere they go. I just love it.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.