By Kathy Cook Hunter
You’ve seen her, the lady in the hat. People know her by her hats, her merry smile and her twinkling eyes.
If you’ve attended a First Christian Church Community Dinner you’ve heard her music.
“I try to play the old songs everybody knows, like You are My Sunshine,” she says. “I used to play for dancing schools, that’s why my music is a little bouncy.”
The lady in the hat or at the keyboard is Silverton’s Wanda Casey, 91. She’s a woman about town, one could say. Casey plays for events often because she’s asked often. People think of her first when a pianist is needed, including before and during the Mother’s Day Tea at Silverton Senior Center.
Casey spends many of her days volunteering. She makes coffee daily for the 10 a.m. coffee hour at the clubhouse in the complex where she lives; she gives a piano concert for Marquis Care at Silver Gardens residents on Friday afternoons once a month; she lunches at the senior center on Tuesdays, followed by up to four hours of pinochle; and she is a regular at Trinity Lutheran Church where she helps obtain speakers for the seniors group. Before Silverton’s Eastern Star chapter left for Salem, she was its pianist.
Her trademark hats hang three deep on a living room hat rack by the door, handy as she goes out because she “just feels more comfortable with a hat on.”
Every day – “rain or shine, we live in Oregon…you have to be self-motivated” – Casey takes a one-mile walk around her neighborhood, even though she’s had a hip replacement and has a bad hip. She takes her phone and a cane, just in case. She drives a heavy pickup truck, by the way, because she feels safer in it.
Casey grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota. Coming from the extreme cold, she frets about the possibility of being left without heat and keeps a small woodstove in her living room. Part of her Swedish nature, probably, since, she said, “I yearn to be self-sufficient and not dependent on people.”
As a young woman she attended MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis and developed her musical skills, and afterwards she never lacked for a music-related job. She went on to college, married and had four children. When after 14 years of marriage her husband died in an auto accident, she did not remarry for a number of years.
“I didn’t want anybody to tell me how to raise my kids,” she chuckles.
Life with her second husband involved moves around the country, from California to Arkansas and ending in Oregon, where she’s lived in Silverton for 22 years. Her library science degree led to working in a number of high school libraries. Eventually she earned her master’s degree at the University of Oregon.
“God just blessed me,” Casey says frequently, citing marriage partners, her family, her career, finding jobs, and surviving a couple of heart attacks. She appreciates that her children all turned out “normal and a little smart,” and that she, who loves to travel, has been able to travel over most of the world.
She’s participated in Friendship Force, a travel organization that matches people for visits in their homes abroad, and she’s traveled to many countries where a son who worked for the U.S. State Department was stationed. She says she’s completed her bucket list of things she wants to do.
“God is the biggest part,” she said. “I feel like God has blessed me over and over again. I ask for these things, and I just get ’em.”
Asked why she volunteers, she said, “I don’t know, I just do. I like people and just do what I can. I think you have to do your part.”
She quotes John Wesley, the famous Methodist leader, as the inspiration for her philosophy of life.
“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
