Matteucci has lived in Great Falls for 100 years

Bernice Stainsby Matteucci remembers when 10th Avenue South was a one-lane gravel road and 9th Street was on the edge of town.

Matteucci has seen it all. She turns 100 on Saturday.

"When my son was about 2 years old, we were living on 10th Avenue South in a one room with a kitchenette," Matteucci said. "I would take him in his stroller, it was a one-lane gravel road. I'd take him up and then back down again. There were hardly any cars at all."

That was in the early 1940s, but she also still remembers when her father got the family's first vehicle some time before 1912 — "one of the first in Cascade County," she says proudly. "It had gas lamps up in the front."

The family owned a coal mine in the Sand Coulee-Centerville area and eventually her father, William Stainsby, moved the family to Great Falls and opened a store by the First Avenue North bridge close to the railroad tracks as a base for delivering the mine's coal around town.

"Dad kind of had a hand in building up Great Falls," Matteucci said.

She said her father instantly joined the Masons when moving into town, and he picked out the spot for the Masonic Temple when it was time to build it. He picked out the spot on 9th Street because it had plenty of room for members to park their horses and buggies.

It wasn't popular with everybody.

"Most of the members were up in arms; it was too far out of town," she said, laughing at the thought.

She said eventually there was a boardwalk in front of it, and she remembers putting gobs of gum at the end of sticks and fishing for pennies and nickels that dropped in the cracks.

The family's path to the Great Falls area was a circuitous one.

Matteucci said her father stowed away on a ship in Liverpool, England, that was bound for Philadelphia, where an older brother lived. It was around 1880, and William was 12.

"At that time in England when a boy became 12 years old, they went to work in the coal mines, and Dad didn't want to do that, so he stowed away on a ship," she said.

At first, Stainsby and his brother, who were both musicians, opened a music studio where they taught all of the brass instruments, but the pull of the mines became too much and Stainsby got a mining degree in Scranton, Pa.

The mining life brought him first to British Columbia and then Sand Coulee area, where he opened a mine with the Lathams. Eventually, the 31-year-old Stainsby married Mary Ellen Latham, 17, in 1899.

"It was an arranged marriage," Matteucci said.

The Stainsbys had seven children, with Matteucci the second to the youngest. Only Matteucci and her 94-year-old brother, Donald, survive.

She was born April 25, 1915, in the family home in Great Falls at 712 4th Ave. S.

She remembers watching Charlie Russell's funeral procession go by and started at Great Falls High when it was at the current Paris Gibson Square.

"There were so many kids, we had to go in shifts," Matteucci said. "The upperclassmen would go in the morning and the freshmen in the afternoon."

Her sophomore year, she started at the current Great Falls High, and she graduated in 1933.

"It was the big Depression, and I wanted to be a teacher, but we didn't even have enough money to buy food let alone college," she said.

Instead, she took the sewing skills from her mother and started making draperies at a department store "and that's what I did for the rest of my life. Making draperies and slip covers," she said.

Her starting pay?

"65 cents an hour," she said.

She married John Vickoren and had a son, Bill, in 1939. The couple divorced in 1948.

In 1952, she married Louis Matteucci and they eventually bought a home in the Riverview area in 1959. Louis died in 1974 "and I've been living here all by myself ever since," she said from that same home.

Now, with her son deceased, she has two granddaughters — Chris and Duke Deshner and Susan and Steve Bryant — in Belgrade who look after her.

In Great Falls, Dotty Walker, who has been cleaning her house for about 30 years, looks after her, and Meals on Wheels and others also assist Matteucci, who is now blind after first being diagnosed with glaucoma in 1969.

"I love hearing her stories," Walker said.

Matteucci has plenty of stories of Great Falls after a century of living nowhere else but the Electric City.

"I never lived anywhere else but Great Falls," she said. "I was here and my family was here and my home is here. I wouldn't live anywhere else. … I'll stay in good, old Montana."