By Matt Gleckman

It’s not the average person who can say that, in less than a month, he will have lived through a part of three different centuries — but then, John Cody is not your average person.

"I don’t have a story to tell," says Cody, who celebrated his 100th birthday yesterday with help from Mrs. Herrick-Leroi’s 3rd-grade Mesa Elementary class, the Mesa honors choir as well as friends and family. "My life has gone up and down just like everybody else’s."

Well, John, that is the story and you have handled it better than most.

Born on December 5, 1899 in Moody, Texas, Cody has seen his world transformed from the leisurely horse-and-buggy culture of his youth to the fast-paced cyber-spaced information age that stands on the threshhold of a new millennium. Along the way he has learned the value of hard work, the price of love and the importance of a good laugh.

Although Mr. Cody’s hearing is somewhat impaired, his memory is not.

"When I was six or seven years old I got my first job mixing mud for flower pots," says Cody. "The dirt and water would sit in a big tank with a wheel in it. For 25 cents a day I would ride a mule around in circles turning the wheel and mixing up the mud."

Right around the same time Cody was mixing mud, he was also gaining a basic education. "I didn’t really go to school except for one-three month session of chart school where I learned to read — I had other things to do," he says.

Some of those "other things" included cutting hay and wheat with a binder for 50 cents a day, driving or "skinnin" horses as soon as he was old enough (which according to him was pretty young), hauling 100-pound blocks of ice (two at a time) for a refrigeration company, working in the Texas oil fields and for a mill in Rifle, Colo.

"One day I was working in the oil fields and me and a friend of mine were riding horses down a canyon road behind a 1916 or 1917 model-T ford touring car," he recalled, "and the driver got a little too close to the edge of the road. The car turned over into a ditch but nobody got hurt.

"I remember watching the family crawl up out of the ditch and when the man got to the top I asked him how much he wanted for the car," he added. "He told me 15 dollars and I told him ‘sold’.

"I had to tear the roof off of the car to get it out of the ditch, but I fixed it up and drove it until I got married in 1923 — never did put the roof back on."

With so much working all the time one might question whether Mr. Cody ever had time for fun. Ask him about a certain fishing trip however, and your question will soon be answered.

"I was fishing for bass down at Lake Powell," says Cody with a toothy grin. "I was casting my lure up against the bank and drifting into a canyon when all of a sudden I looked up and there was this group of four or five girls sun bathing in nothing but their birthday suits — naked as can be.

"I really surprised those girls and that just tickled me," he mused. "The fishing was pretty good down there too."

Naked girls aside, John married a fully garbed young woman named Pansy and the two moved to a number of different towns in Colorado where John worked for several different farm operations.

Then in 1929 the Codys settled down in Dove Creek and four years later came to live in Cortez and lived here ever since. After 71 years of marriage Pansy passed away in 1994.