Growing up in Ferdinand in the 1920s as part of a big Caltholic farming family wasn’t for the faint-hearted.

Life’s hardships — some hilarious, some harrowing — just might account for Ray Frei’s longevity. Now living in Lewiston with his wife, Carolyn Frei, the longtime Camas Prairie resident turns 100 today.

One of his funniest memories, if a bit off-color, regards the family outhouse. No paltry one-holer, the Frei farm was equipped with a deluxe privy that could accommodate derrieres of all sizes. And with 15 kids, plus Mom and Dad, that was a good thing.

“It had two holes,” Frei said recently from his Lewiston Orchards duplex. “Smaller, and a big size.”

And they didn’t have to worry about toilet paper shortages in those days, simply because it wasn’t widely available. Instead, most families resorted to the ubiquitous tomes that provided a practically endless source of paper: the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs.

But in a strongly Catholic community, not all the pages were considered suitable material for the delicate task of cleaning one’s nether regions.

“The priest had to have us tear out all of the pages that had women’s clothes and underwear,” Frei chuckled.

Some of the children’s trials were designed by their parents to toughen them up. In a memoir he wrote in the 1990s, Frei recalled being sent out just before bedtime into the knee-deep snow and freezing temperatures. If that wasn’t bad enough, they were required to do it in bare feet with pants rolled to the knees.

“This was to toughen our feet and prevent chilblains and frostbite,” he wrote. “We boys would make bets on how far we could go and how long we could stay out. My brother John won by making it to the barn.”

Milking time was in the morning, and Frei recalled being grateful to get his frozen hands on the warm cows. And even though the boys got to bury themselves in their sisters’ warm beds when the girls went out to parties or dances on those cold winter nights, they would get turned out into their own cold beds when they got home.

School seemed more of a nuisance than a necessity in those days. But the kids still went to St. Maurus Catholic School, where he recalled Father Wagner walking up and down the rows of students with his hand cocked behind his back.

“If the question wasn’t answered right, the pupil, whether a girl or a boy, was in for a pop in the back of the head,” he said.

Frei survived that and other tribulations to make it to Ferdinand High School.

“In those days we just didn’t have to go to high school,” he wrote. “We were all planning to be farmers and didn’t think we needed an education. Many parents sent their kids to school to get them out of the house during the winter.”

Frei enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, where he served stateside by employing his farm-kid skills to run and repair heavy equipment like an electric crane. He used his furloughs to head back to Ferdinand and help out on the farm. When World War II ended, he returned to farming, bought better tools and employed the knowhow he learned in the military to fabricate his own equipment, like a hay bale conveyor on two wheels.

Mixing the punch for weddings became one of Frei’s unofficial duties in the community, a task he approached strategically.

“The fun of it was to make the first batch weak to take care of the grandmas and other older people,” Frei wrote. “Every batch after that was spiked heavier until everyone was mixing, full of laughs and had the rust taken out of them.”

He made a few bucks on the side baling hay with the first automatic hay baler in Ferdinand. He was also the school district’s first bus driver. After his father died, Frei took up the duty of caring for his mother since he was unmarried. Plus, he got along with her best.

But bachelorhood was about to end. It was 1977, and he met a widowed Grangeville High School teacher named Carolyn Morris at the Woodshed Bar in Winchester.

“My sister asked me, ‘Would you like to go on a blind date, Ray?’ ” he recalled. “So that night when they all went over to Winchester, I thought I’d go over and see what I missed out on.”

He calls it the luckiest night of his life. He and Carolyn hit it off, and nine months later they were married. Frei was 47, and Carolyn was 40. His mother blessed the union.

“Boy, I stuck with (my mother) for 22 years and passed up lots of girls that I’d like to be with,” Frei said. “But Mom said, ‘Ray, Carolyn is the one for you.’ She had been afraid that if I found a woman, I would leave her. But she endorsed Carolyn.”

Carolyn Frei said that loyalty to his ailing mother helped secure her affections.

“He seemed like a steady guy,” Carolyn Frei said. “After all, he stuck around and took care of his mother for 22 years.”

The couple spent a lot of their time together traveling the country and the world, with Carolyn making the arrangements and Frei serving as porter. Carolyn’s daughter, Ellen McKenzie, of Moscow, recalled that in the latter phase of his long life, Frei resolved to attack everything with a positive attitude.

“He’s a person who has learned to work hard and really enjoy life,” McKenzie said. “At 90, he told me he was going to be happy every single day, no matter what’s bothering him.”

Frei confirmed her account of turning over a new leaf three decades ago.

“I said, ‘I’m 90 now.’ That’s a very good age,” he said. “There aren’t very many men that get to that. And I said I’m not going to do anything stupid or foolish or drink too much or chase women.”

Frei’s family had been planning a big bash to honor his century on Earth, but the coronavirus pandemic and social isolation has forced them to postpone for now.

“We’re still planning to have one,” Carolyn Frei said. “But not until it’s safe.”

Mills may be contacted at jmills@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2266.