Still Keeping and Giving at 102
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his sounds a bit crazy, but Grandma Frieda is known as someone who gives everything away, and also as a person who keeps everything! Frieda Tanner was born 102 years ago in Greeley, Colorado. Her husband, Lew, is only 96. “One of my high school teachers was a Seventh-day Adventist,” she remembers. “I actually lived with them BY DICK DUERKSEN for a while and cleaned house for them. They were very kind and deepened my understanding of God and introduced me to Adventism. My parents didn’t believe that it was necessary for girls to go to school past eighth grade, so I had to plead to go to high school. After graduation the Adventist teacher convinced them it would be OK for me to go to Madison College in Tennessee to take nursing. I was baptized the summer after high school, the only one of my Lutheran family to become a Seventh-day Adventist.” After graduating with a bachelor’s degree, a rarity at the time, Frieda moved to Lynwood, California, to help her widowed sister care for her children. *** In 1908 Grandma Frieda’s parents had immigrated from Russia to Colorado, where they joined other German Russians as farmers. Frieda remembers all the hard work. “I spent a lot of time in the summer thinning beets and getting sunburned. I had 11 brothers and sisters.
“May I Tell You a Story?”
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February 2021 AdventistWorld.org
Three died as children, but the rest grew up and spread out to other states.” The family has maintained a close family connection, and cousins have gathered yearly for more than 30 years. Grandma Frieda’s family blessed her with a deep love for children. With her own children she practiced acceptance and love. As the children grew, she and Grandpa modeled a supportive and noncritical atmosphere about religion and politics. Central, always, was loving, “as God loves.” “We can talk all kinds of theology,” Grandma says, “but if we do not have a central core of love, it’s just empty words.” When Grandma Frieda talks about her husband, Lew, she smiles at him or reaches out and touches his hand. “When I met Lew, I really liked him. The first time he kissed me, he asked if it was nice, and I told him it would have been better if he didn’t smoke,” she laughs. That was the end of the cigarettes and the beginning of a 68-year marriage. Lew and Frieda have two daughters, Carol and Jeanne. “And a houseful of children and grandchildren,” says Grandpa Lew. *** In the 1950s, while volunteering in the children’s divisions at the White Memorial church in Los Angeles, Frieda discovered Bible Story felts—plain drawings of Bible characters, animals, and other nature subjects printed on large sheets of felt. Every drawing needed to be colored and cut out of the sheet, then assembled into sets to tell Bible stories. Frieda immediately saw how valuable Photos: Dick Duerksen
