The last surviving member of Coupeville’s original Clark family was feted on her 99th birthday last week.

Josephine Clark DeVries was serenaded at her home overlooking Penn Cove by a group of singers from the Oak Harbor Lutheran Church. She welcomed a continuous stream of guests and admirers, and showed off the 156 greeting cards decorating the walls of the impressive house she and her late husband built only a few years ago.

DeVries was particularly touched by the card signed by the members of the Naval Air Ambulance Detachment in Kuwait. She didn’t recognize any of the names, but appreciated that the young Navy men and women from NAS Whidbey would care about an elderly woman back home.

DeVries, who insists on being called Jo rather than her old fashioned first name, does not look or act her age. Straight-backed, bright-eyed and quick with the quip or caustic comment, she appears to be a cinch to breeze past the century mark.

Josephine Clark was born Feb. 12, 1908 at Fort Casey, an active Army base in those days, to Tom Clark and Annie Clark. There would eventually be five children, including Jo, Mickey, Tom, Shy and Kay.

Tom Clark arrived on Whidbey Island in 1904 to help build Fort Casey. After he saved $1,000, he went back east to get Annie and brought his new bride out to their island home.

An enterprising man, Clark operated Clark’s Grocery in Coupeville in the building that now houses Toby’s Tavern, and served as Island County engineer. His son Tom became a long-time Island County Sheriff, and Mickey is remembered to this day because the town football field is named in his honor.

Jo Clark spent her formative years in Coupeville and remembers it as a very poor place financially in the years before the Great Depression. But it was also fun, as the town had its own movie theater and popular dances in Oddfellows Hall every Saturday night. The whole town would come to kick up their heels. “They were good ones with local music,” she recalls. “We had cake, pie and cookies, nobody pulled a gun and we didn’t use bad language.” The Indian canoe races were the big event of the summer time.

As a girl she worked in her dad’s grocery store and delivered groceries to the fort. One of her lasting memories is of a well known character in town who would come to the store at noon when Tom Clark was out to lunch and his young daughter was working. “He’d buy a quart of vanilla and then go lay under the wood sidewalk, drink the bottle and get drunk as a loon,” she recalls with a chuckle. “Dad made me stop.”

A bit of a free-thinker, Jo Clark found the religion of her time stifling. Everyone but her went to church, as she remembers it. “I don’t go to church, but I say my prayers every night and I’ve had a pretty good Christian life.”

On the advice of the town doctor, who saw a lot of potential in the girl, Jo Clark left Coupeville when she was a junior in high school. She attended nursing school in Everett, and soon after that left for a nursing job in California. She didn’t return to the island to live for roughly 70 years.

A young man from Oak Harbor followed Jo Clark to California. Frances DeVries had met Jo on the steamship Atalanta. They were both 14 and were headed for the Island County Fair in Langley. “They called him Fruzer,” Jo said. “Doggone if I know why. The kids in Oak Harbor gave him that name.”

Jo and Frances had one daughter, Dellann, and lived long, productive lives in the San Jose area. They bought a huge, 13-room house and restored it. Jo kept nursing in the same hospital and Frances joined the California Highway Patrol. They had a large pear orchard and operated a fruit stand, and also had some rentals.

After retiring, the couple sold their California property and moved back to Whidbey Island. Frances and Jo built a 4,300 square foot house with a view of Penn Cove off Arnold Road. They finished it in 1997 and then he died in 2000.

“We didn’t fight, we got along fine,” Jo said of the couple’s 67-year marriage. “We had a wonderful life.” Jo now lives in the house with her daughter Dellann Blackstock.

Jo said her parents lived on Whidbey Island all their lives, as did her three brothers and sister. She’s the only one left, and all the friends and acquaintances she grew up with on Whidbey Island are gone too. Looking at a picture of her 1925 Coupeville High School basketball team she said, “Every soul in that picture is dead but me.”

But in a way, she keeps them all alive with her sharp memory and interesting stories. And at the sprightly age of 99, she’ll likely be telling those stories for some time to come.