Dolores Howard, a Castro Valley Centenarian

Longtime Castro Valley resident Dolores Howard turned 100 on Sunday, marking a century filled with art, people and family with a get-together at a local restaurant.

Howard, born in San Francisco in 1923, made and taught art to area adults and senior citizens for her whole adult life, until very recently.

Her son Dan said,”She worked until she was 96, and would still be teaching today if not for the COVID lockdown at the convalescent homes.”

She’d moved on to teaching art to seniors after retiring from the Hayward schools, he said.

After moving to farm country and then Oakland as a young girl, Dolores graduated from Roosevelt High School in Oakland. She attended what was then known as California State University, Hayward (Cal State East Bay today) and got her degree in Art from UC Berkeley. She went on to teach adults, mostly women as she remembers, at the Hayward Adult School for some 20 years.

“I always liked people,” she said. She added she’d always liked teaching, too.

Dolores Howard has lived in Castro Valley for 60 years, after moving with her husband John F. Howard to the town where her parents had lived since the 1940s. They raised two sons, Dan, who now lives in the Sierra foothills town of Pioneer, and Greg, who lives in San Diego. John Howard passed away 13 years ago.

“My dad worked at the Naval Air Station Alameda for 36 years, as a quality control manager on aircraft,” Dan Howard said.

“My parents met at a Navy dance right around Pearl Harbor,” he continued. “He was on a ship in the Pacific scheduled to dock there the morning of the attack, but they had decided to go straight home instead. They had no idea an attack was coming.”  

Dan, for one, is very glad that his dad's ship continued toward home.

Dolores Howard remembers, “I painted a lot of pictures. Teachers always liked them and took them for display, but for some reason I never got most of them back.”

She painted at least 150 pictures, she said. 

Dolores said she never did anything unusual to live a long life, except that she always kept busy and avoided paying to get others’ attention.

Dan Howard said his mother was actually a more prolific artist than she let on.

“Mom was always very modest about her art,” Dan Howard said. “She really painted almost 500 pictures.”