Clifton Clemens is 90

You can't tell many people they don't look a day over 70 and mean it as a compliment. Clifton Clemens doesn't, and he turned 90 on March 6.

What has he learned in 90 years?

"You learn how short 90 years can be, for one thing," Clifton replied. He paused, and in a more serious vein added, "The friends that you make are certainly important. They become a part of you."

Clifton, who owns the Sisters Airport, remembered the first time he saw an airplane, in Iowa. It was in 1912, four years after the Wright brothers flew. He was eight years old.

"I think it was built by Curtiss. It looked a lot like the Wright's plane. It was in a canvassed fence and you paid to look at it," said Clemens.

Clifton moved with his family from Iowa to Oregon in 1919 between Salem and Silverton, where his father had a small logging operation and mill.

Six weeks before he was to graduate from the eighth grade, Clifton's father pulled him out of school.

"My dad felt he got by with a second grade education, and we were busy with the little sawmill. He needed me at home."

They logged a timbered track in what Clifton called the Hazelgreen district. It was all old growth then. "We cut the logs and moved them into the mill with a team or small tractor, sawed them and sold them for $16 per thousand, delivered." Much of the 1 x 10 lumber they delivered was used for bleaching celery.

Poles and small timber they cut into firewood. "We would cut it and load it and pile it in the (customer's) basement for $12 a cord," Clifton said.

In 1931 Clifton married Dorothy, who had graduated from Willamette University. They lived in Hazelgreen in a tiny log house until they decided Clifton needed to go back to school.

They moved to Corvallis and "bought a shack on a lot on North 15th Street for $315." While Clifton attended OSU as a special student, Dorothy worked at Waldo Hall for $1 day.

Clifton took industrial arts, "which was as close as I could get to engineering without having taken any math."

He would go home on weekends and saw lumber. "By the time the four years were completed I had built a nice little house on that lot." Their sons were born in Corvallis.

After Clifton graduated with his degree, the family moved to Wasco, California near Bakersfield where Clifton had a job as a shop teacher. They spent the next 30 years in Wasco, where Clifton built a business leveling land, building subdivisions and in varied construction.

He also served on the school board, city council (he was mayor of Wasco for a couple of years), the board of trade and the Kern County Committee on School District Reorganization.

He learned to fly. "I got my pilot's license in 1970 when I was 64," Clifton said.

"That's when I discovered what kind of air I was living in." You could look down from 1,500 feet and see how smoke filled the valley, something not apparent from the ground.

"So we began to look for clean air and came back to Oregon," Clifton said.

Dorothy had a cousin, Fred Arpke, who was one of the developers of Indian Ford Ranch. The Clemens' came to Sisters and bought the airport and moved to Sisters in 1974. Clifton was 68.

"I thoroughly enjoyed that I was doing something that needed to be done (with the airport)," said Clifton. "I bought a new John Deere tractor in 1974. It now has 4,850 hours on it, most of that on the airport."

Clifton also spent 16 years on the Sisters School Board, where he has been a strong advocate for teaching youngsters the joys and responsibility of using their hands (forever the shop teacher) and the application of "common sense" to school district policy.

He has worked for his church and the Sisters Kiwanis.

These chores, worked on during what can only be termed a nonretirement, have kept Clifton active and involved.

"It is important to keep busy doing things that you like to do, at least part of the time," he explained.

He still has projects, one of which he won't talk about yet to The Nugget but that could keep him busy for another decade or so.

"We live in an age were you really don't own anything. You have it and you use it for a while, then you are gone. If you can put your effort into something that will carry on...if you cannot share, you can't really enjoy life," he said.