“Photo: At 101 years of age, Langley’s Everett Stockholm will entere his third century of life at midnight on Jan 1, 2000.Matt Johnson / staff photoIf Everett Stockholm were a history book, his title would be “Three Centuries in America.”Just weeks away from his 102nd birthday, the Lone Lake area resident is one of a rare breed. Born in 1898, he arrived in the third century of his life on Saturday, Jan. 1, 2000.He has lived through so many years and times that it typically takes several people to equal his experience. Born two years before the turn of this century, Stockholm grew up driving a horse and buggy, was eligible for the World War I draft, went through middle age during World War II, and started collecting Social Security checks the year John F. Kennedy won the presidency.Still a big man, able to walk on his own and live in his own home, Stockholm fools most of the people he meets. Few who meet him for the first time believe he was born in 1898. Sometimes, he doesn’t believe it himself.“It doesn’t feel that old,” he said.But he acknowledges that he has done something few people are able to accomplish.“Three centuries. There aren’t too many who make that.”Stockholm said he never thought he would live long enough to see three separate centuries. His father died at 56; his mother in her 90s. None of his six brothers and sisters even reached their mid-90s, so he had no reason to believe he would make 102.Stockholm grew up a Nebraska farmer, working the family farm until he was almost 40. He was the last of seven siblings to get traveling feet, finally leaving home in 1937.Stockholm chose Whidbey Island in 1938 after sampling California life for about a year. But the wet, temperate weather in the Northwest convinced him to set up a farm on this remote island after farming all his life in the breadbasket of America.“Because we dried out and hailed out so much in Nebraska that I’d had enough of it,” he said.Stockholm’s life on his Maxwelton Road chicken and dairy farm was far different than that he left in Nebraska. For starters, at age 40, he finally got married shortly after arriving on the island. Not that this eventuality surprised him — he had known Nina all his life and figured it was time to get married when she traveled from Nebraska to his South Whidbey farm in 1938.“She followed me out here,” Stockholm said.Shortly thereafter, the couple had a daughter, Kay Stockholm. The little girl spent many a day with her father as he drove cars, tractors, and trucks on and off the farm. Together, they watched the island change from a ferry-bound rural backwater into a desirable resort and bedroom community.The traffic, Stockholm said, told the tale.“When Kay was little and we met three cars in a row, she’d say ‘Ferry’s in,’” he said. He came to South Whidbey during busy times. The Deception Pass bridge had opened three years earlier. A road linking North and South Whidbey had been completed a year later. An ever-increasing stream of cars was rapidly changed the look of the Southend. It was because of the automobile that the winding, narrow highway that ran the length of the island in 1938 was paved and widened into Highway 525 in the 1960s. The same goes for the businesses that cropped up at Kens Korner and Whidbey City. Before island grocers ever thought of building stores in those locations, Stockholm and his neighbors were perfectly happy shopping at Langley’s Star Store and at the old general store on Midvale Road.Automobiles even changed the look of the treeline. Diesel trucks and the Clinton ferry were transporting the last of the old-growth trees off the Southend in the 1930s, leaving the land much more bare than it is today.Once the trees were gone, cars brought another industry to South Whidbey that encouraged growing more. That industry was tourism.“It wasn’t like now, but the trees are getting short again,” Stockholm said.Cars, too, evolved with the people who drove them. The first car Stockholm ever drove was a Model T Ford his father purchased in 1914. Though he no longer drives, he still keeps his last car — a 1984 Dodge — in the garage. Neither that first car, nor the last one, compares with the best car he ever owned — a 1920s Buick.“That was the best of all of them.”But even that old Model T made the world much smaller for Stockholm. A 30-mile journey to the next town that took a teenage Stockholm the better part of a day to make with horse and buggy now takes no more than a half hour out a person’s life. That is why Whidbey Island living is now so much more appealing to so many people, he said.Making the world even smaller is television. Although he has watched television since its beginnings, Stockholm has hardly become a video junkie. He said he still watches the news in the evening as well as the occasional baseball game, but he has little interest for other programs, as he did in the past.“It’s altogether different,” he said.Not that the changes on the tube or in any other part of his life surprised him. His journey from an economy based on agriculture to one trying to make all its money off electronic commerce marched to the regular beat of progress.“Things change so slow you don’t know it,” he said.The rapid changes in recent years do, however, leave Stockholm wondering if there is room for many more. He said he cannot imagine what might happen in the coming century and millennium.“I don’t know how they could think of anything else,” he said.”