Her great grandfather, George Canning, was Prime Minster of England, so you might expect Normandy Park resident Dora Bell Canning to be quite highbrow and run with the elite.

Ah, but the other side of the family comes from Cades Cove, a colony of primitives in the hills of Tennessee, of which you'll find a huge spread in the July 1962 issue of National Geographic.

"Dodie." as she was nicknamed, is a delightful combination of both her ancestors. She has the brilliant, creative mind and artistic flair of a royal artist, yet there's nothing pretentious about this little gal - especially when she shares her childhood adventures with that delightful Oklahoma twang.

"Both sides of my family did the Oklahoma Land Rush. My grandfather borrowed a horse and practiced going across the river to find the best crossing points. The government had it set up that after you staked your land claim, you'd start up a fire to signify that the land was no longer available.

"My grandfather sat up all night with his gun, so that no one could take it from him." Dodie had heard those stories directly from her grandfather. She was born, in 1924, on that land.

The family moved to Guthrie just a few months after she was born. "Our land was set up against a state park. I had a couple ponies and was given the job of gatherin' eggs and beatin' the rugs. We had this old Road Island Red rooster who used to just strut around the pen awaitin' for me to come for the eggs. He'd chase after me and flog me with his wings. One day I decided to take the rug beater with me and when that ol' rooster came after me, I beat him 'til his head and feathers were hangin' low. He never chased me, again, I tell ya," she laughed.

But the harrowing experiences of the chicken coop didn't end there. One day, twelve-year-old Dodie spotted a huge snake in the coop. "No wonder we weren't getting any eggs" her mother exclaimed. The snake tried to hide himself back in a hole, but her mother shot into the hole with her single-shot 410 rifle. The tail flopped out, Dodie grabbed it, yanked him out, but she fell back in a deep hole and the snake flopped in on top of her. "Mama dropped a hoe down to me and I scrambled up the handle," Dodie said with as much energy as if she were doing it all over, again.

She also remembered the Dust Bowl, where they had three to four years without rain. "It was so bad that folks would dip their sheets in water and hang 'em over the windows to keep from gettin' what they called dust pneumonia. It was so flat, we could see the dust storms a comin' from miles away. They'd pull the siren and everyone would head for home and hunker down, until it passed. Family was everything.

"When things were real bad, the farmers would slaughter their cattle, rather than let 'em die of thirst, and give out the meat. We all worked together and canned everything. I must've washed a thousand canning jars.

"Families were closer, back then. Dads all came home at night and your neighbors were your friends," she said very deliberately.

I said, "You can survive anything, now, can't you?" Dodie winked and replied, "You betcha!"
Dodie's childhood was so mesmerizing that I hardly wanted to leave it to come to the present. I never even got the story where her mother shot a chicken thief with a bullet that went clean through the garage and hit him on the other side!

Dodie married Eli Bunch and moved to Seattle in 1954. They had three children. Eli died in 2005, but she's never missed a beat of life.

At 87, she keeps herself busy with gardening, herb gathering, crocheting shirred rugs (stacks of them), making jewelry, carving wood, canning fruit from her trees and attending Bible studies.

I asked her what amazed her most about her life. She said, "That I ever learnt how to read. I'm dyslexic, you see. I don't hear vowels. I don't hear it as you hear it." And that never stopped her either. It I may borrow a line from Rhett Butler, "What a woman."