Gladys Richard has always stressed education, and it showed during her 100th-birthday celebration at the Garden Club in Bellevue on March 20.

Virtually everyone in attendance, including around 30 close relations, had at least one advanced degree.

Gladys, a former school teacher, could want for little more as she sat for dinner with a plastic crown atop her head, the matriarch to a family of professionals that includes a college professor, a U.S. Senate staffer, an accountant, and a retired naval officer.

“She always appreciated when we were learning,” said grandson Jeffrey Richard, an attorney who practices international law in Berlin. “She very much just kept being the school teacher.”

Gladys, born 100 years ago on March 19, grew up on a one-acre plot in Brush, Colo., where her father worked as a foreman at the local sugar factory.

She would end up caring for her parents and siblings at the age of nine after everyone else in her family got sick during the 1918 flu epidemic.

Gladys eventually went to college, where she met and later married Donald Richard. The couple ran a farm in Brush, raising crops and lambs.

The Depression era brought more hardship as the Richardses were living on the fringes of The Dust Bowl. The family stayed put, sharing what little food they had with those who passed through town on their way to the West Coast.

Gladys was forced to make a living on her own after Donald died in 1954. She went to the State Normal School of Colorado, now the University of Northern Colorado, to earn a masters degree in education.

“That was rare for a woman in those days,” Jeffrey noted.

Gladys worked as a house mom for one of the school’s sororities to make ends meet, and she learned to party with the best of them during that time, according to son, Al Richard.

“The girls were lots of fun,” Gladys said. “For the first time in a year, I was starting to smile.”

Gladys taught elementary school for 20 years before retiring and eventually moving to Washington, where she could be closer to family members living throughout the West Coast states.

She has three children and 10 grandchildren, most of whom were on hand for the March 20 dinner.

At a birthday celebration the night before, Gladys refused to make a wish before blowing out the candle on her cake.

“She said at this point she has everything she wants in the world,” Jeffrey said. “She told everyone else in the room to make a wish and she would blow out the candle.”

Joshua Adam Hicks can be reached at 425.453.4290.