Clara Clark celebrated her 100th birthday Thursday, despite contracting the flu during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and suffering several strokes over the last few years.

"I was very sick," she said about contracting the Spanish flu. "When I woke up, I remember they were all sitting around my bed waiting for me to eat or die."

Clark didn't think she would live to see her 100th birthday, but she did because she worked hard all her life, she said. She worked as a nurse for 41 years and raised two sons.

Born in Lancaster on Sept. 17, 1909, Clark was the only child of Andrew Jackson and Mabel Flenard.

A lifelong member of St. Mary's Catholic Church, Clark attended Sacred Heart School from first grade — there was no kindergarten at that time — through two years of high school, graduating in 1926.

Clark took off a year to work at the former Hamilton Watch Co. before attending the former St. Joseph's School of Nursing, where she was an honor student.

Although this was the Prohibition era, she said her father, whose nickname was Mogie, was a bartender in Lancaster.

The speakeasies he worked at were like a regular barroom, she said.

"They had these little windows on the doors. When you knocked, they'd open the window and see who was there. I'd say I was Mogie's daughter, and I could get in anyplace," Clark said.

Her father was a character, she said. "I remember one time, the police raided the place. He took off his apron, threw it under the counter and sat down and they thought he was a customer. He never got arrested."

The day after Prohibition ended, she said she went to a bar to drink a beer and celebrate.

After Clark earned her registered nurse degree in 1930, she worked for two years in private-duty nursing.

Two years later, she was able to secure a job at the County Home on East King Street through the Depression and World War II.

She met her husband, Russel W. Clark, at the County Home, where he was one of the male attendants.

Only two weeks after they married on Nov. 21, 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed. Clark's husband decided to enlist in the U.S. Army before he was drafted.

Clark recalled she kept their car on blocks during the war and took a streetcar to work instead because gas stamps were scarce.

When her husband returned after the war, he worked at Lancaster Post Office. Clark stopped working to raise their two sons.

In 1959, they moved from Willow Street Pike to Lyndon West, where Clark still lives; however, she currently is at Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Community rehabbing from a stroke.

After her younger son started school, Clark returned to nursing at the former St. Joseph Hospital. When her husband became sick, she left her job to care for him. After he died in 1973, she went back to work for a while, but quit not long afterwards, she said.

Clark now enjoys reading mysteries, especially suspense novels by Mary Higgins Clark. She also enjoys following Tiger Woods' golf career.

E-mail: lvaningen@lnpnews.com