Longtime Santa Barbara residents Ernestine Toma, Owen Aylesworth and Jean McDermott Ferguson have 309 years of life experience among them.
As the Wood Glen Senior Living community’s oldest residents, the three belong to the Wood Glen 100 Club.
Toma, 106, immigrated from Italy to Santa Barbara when she was only 8 years old.
“My dad came ahead,” Toma said. “Back in those days, the man would come and start.”
Toma was supposed to travel with her mother and her sister, but a few days before they were supposed to leave, her mom passed away.
Toma and her sister made the 10-day boat trip to Ellis Island by themselves. From there, they took a five-day train ride to Santa Barbara.
She has been here ever since.
“When I came, it wasn’t much,” Toma said of Santa Barbara.
Once she settled off of Milpas Street on Santa Barbara’s Eastside, Toma attended Franklin Elementary School, Santa Barbara Junior High and then Santa Barbara High School.
She worked at Vandenberg during World War II when it was an army base. After that, she was employed by the Santa Barbara Unified School District for 38 years before retiring at age 65.
When asked about her experience living in Santa Barbara, Toma kept her response simple.
“It’s been good,” she said. “I can’t complain.”
At age 100, Aylesworth is the youngest of the group, but he’s also Santa Barbara’s oldest surviving firefighter.
He was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and moved to Santa Barbara with his parents and three siblings when he was 10 years old.
He served with the Santa Barbara City Fire Department for more than 29 years, making his way up the ranks to captain, training officer and then acting battalion chief.
“It was a good department. They’re well-trained. I should know, because I did part of that,” Aylesworth said. “The fire service is different than any other service. It is what we call a family organization. No other job is that way.”
To pass the probationary exam and join the department, Aylesworth had to memorize all 340 streets in Santa Barbara — where they started, ended, what streets were in between, and all the addresses of public buildings and schools.
“I learned them all,” Aylesworth said. “It took awhile. I spent a lot on gasoline running around trying to identify where the streets were.”
After he retired in 1979, he trained the city’s first female firefighter, he said.
“It was a trying situation, because (there was) too much ego in the department at the time,” Aylesworth said.
Even at 100, Aylesworth has strong opinions about the state of Santa Barbara, calling it “monetized.”
“It keeps getting worse,” he said. “Santa Barbara used to be a friendly, family-type community.”
Even though he’s traveled to 14 countries and 96 islands throughout his life, he said he still thinks Santa Barbara is the best place in the world to live.
However, his favorite place to visit is Fiji, which he has been to nine times.
McDermott Ferguson, 103, has called the South Coast home most of her life.
As the daughter of a rancher, she grew up on Campbell Ranch, which today is the site of Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health near Isla Vista.
She graduated from Dolores Girls High School, now Bishop Garcia Diego High School, in 1940. While in high school, she rode on a float in the Pasadena Rose Parade.
One of her favorite memories of living in Santa Barbara is going to the Old Spanish Days Fiesta. She even once rode a horse in the parade along State Street.
“We thought that was heaven,” McDermott Ferguson said. “You could dance, you could do everything. It was just a wonderful time of year.”
During World War II, McDermott Ferguson met her husband, Jack, a U.S. Army tank officer. They had six children, and now she has more grandkids and great-grandkids than she can count, she said.
Even after traveling as a military wife, McDermott Ferguson said, you just can’t beat Santa Barbara.
“I just love it — its climate, and the people are friendly,” she said.
