12/24/2011
By GORDON D. FIEDLER JR.
Lynn Fleury said he’s never felt cheated by having his birthday on Christmas. When he was a youngster growing up on a farm south of Jamestown, the 95-year-old Salinan said Christmases - or birthdays for that matter - were never the consumerist bacchanalias they have become.
"If you got one or two toys, it was good," he said.
One of those toys proved a temporary undoing when he was a young teenager.
"My mom and dad got me a BB gun," Fleury recalled. "I decided to go hunting with it. I got on my old horse, old Nel, bareback, and took off cross country."
From his saddle-less perch, young Fleury spotted a coyote.
"I told Nel, let’s go get him," he said. "Old Nel and I took off for the coyote."
When the pair came to a ditch, Nel knew what to do and apparently assumed, wrongly as it turned out, her rider did, also.
"The horse jumped but I didn’t make it," said Fleury, who suffered a broken arm during his sudden and unexpected dismount.
"Nel was a pretty good horse," he said. "She stopped and allowed me to get back on again. We went back to the house and I ended up in Concordia in the hospital."
Fleury was born Dec. 25, 1916, the youngest of four children of Homer and Frances Fleury.
He was born at home, as were his siblings, delivered by Jamestown doctor G.H. Hartwell who arrived Christmas Eve in a horse-drawn buggy.



• To read the rest of this story, pick up a copy of Sunday's edition of the Journal.

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