The 20th Century belongs to Ida Plocher as it belongs to few others.  Born April 6th, 1902, she lived through 98% of it, including the biggies such as World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II. 
There are other significant events of the century.   For example, in the year of Ida's birth, the teddy bear was created by a Russian immigrant to the USA.  When Ida was beginning to take her first steps in 1903, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  When she began speaking in complete sentences in 1904, ice cream cones were introduced at the St. Louis World's Fair.
Ida Plocher knows life before rural electricity and indoor plumbing, before radio and television, before rocket science and the cures of advanced medicine.
"My baby brother Albert died from whooping cough," said Ida. "I don't know just how old he was, but he couldn't walk yet.  That's when whoop-ing cough choked him off.  My mother would bathe him in warm water and that would help.  But that time it didn't help.  My mother laid him on a bed and said, 'I think he's gone this time.'"
Whooping cough vaccine was developed in 1903, but mass production was not immediate and distribution depended on the horse and buggy.  Penicillin arrived in 1908.
Half of Ida's brother and sisters were born in the 19th Century, half in the 20th.  Ida was Number Six.  She tells about them this way:  "There were nine living:  Carl, Lena, Gustie, William, Ann, me, Clara, Fred, Esther, and Albert.  Albert died, and I think another one before Lena died."
At the age of 98, Ida's mind remains sharp and her eyes clear.  Her expression is kind, her countenance lovely.  Her hands are soft, her touch gentle.  She lives alone, cooks her meals, and grows scads of African Violets.
She comments on current events, especially noting the Blom case.  "How could they have let that scoundrel out of jail in the first place, to go and kill that girl?  There is stuff wrong in this world!"
How have you been, Ida?  "I've been feeling pretty good," she says.  "I'm glad the way the good Lord let me live.  I've worked hard but I'm not sorry.  Work never killed nobody."

Ida and all of her brothers and sisters were born in Laketown Town-ship in the same house on the same farm to Carl and Auguste Moldenhaur.  All are gone now except Ida and her youngest sister Esther, 92, who lives in St. Louis Park today.
"My parents came from Germany and married over here," said the tiny lady after she finished putting some new baby potatoes in a kettle of water to cook for lunch.   "My mother had a lot of family that came over with her, especially her sister.  My mother couldn't speak very good English.  We'd tell her things in English and she'd answer in German."
Immigration to the United States peaked at 1.2 million in 1907, with most immigrants coming from southern or eastern Europe like Ida's parents.
Did they farm?  "We milked cows and plowed land," she said.  "Women worked harder than men.  We didn't have no push buttons like today.  We wore many a washboard out.  We had cistern pumps and wood stoves and one of them big kettles.  We boiled our wash, but not the colored clothes.  We boiled the dish towels and bed sheets and pillow sheets and diapers."
When Ida was a child, the family home was moved across the road.   "I said to my dad, 'Are we going to move the trees too?'  I was pretty little.  This house what we moved was pretty nice.  My dad was pretty good in carpenter-ing and he added onto that house too.  We were a family of twelve!"
As Ida began attending country school in 1908, Henry Ford was introducing his Model T automobile, but it hadn't reached Carver County so, of course, she and her siblings walked to school.  The country school was only a short distance from the family farm, but the Lutheran school in Chaska was not so near.
"We had to go two years to get confirmed," stated Ida.  "That was the law!  I was confirmed when I was thirteen.  Every morning I walked six miles down and six miles back until December, and then my mother and dad rented a room in Chaska where we ate and slept.  When Friday came, my mother would pick us up with a horse and sled.  On Sunday night or Monday morning, my mother would bring us back to Chaska with some food that we could eat during the week."
Current events during this early part of Ida's century included the sinking of the Titantic after it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage (1912), the opening of the Panama Canal (1913), and the first transatlantic radio-telephone call between Arlington, Virginia, and Paris, France (1915).
Back in these days when entertain-ment meant visiting friends and rela-tives at their homes or going out for ice cream, Ida met her future husband, Walter Plocher.  "My husband was married once before," she explained.  "He was married to my brother Bill's wife's sister, who died of that bad flu after World War I.  They had a daughter Vernice who grew up to marry James Randell.  We used to go by my brother.  That's how we met."   Click here to continue.