Florence Massey, 93, arrived at the Oct. 26 meeting of the Bonney Lake City Council full of vinegar. She had recently been told by Bonney Lake Senior Center staff that the council was planning to slash funding for the institution. As a longtime volunteer and member, she planned to use public comment time to argue against the cuts.

So when the council opened the meeting by calling her before the council, she thought she was getting an early chance to give them a piece of her mind.

Instead, she walked away with a street named after her.

“It was a surprise,” Massey said. “I thought I was going to faint.”

The spending cuts had been a total ruse to lure Massey in for the council’s real purpose: to honor her years of service as a senior center cashier and greeter, and present her with a street sign reading Massey Way, to be mounted on the side road to the immediate west of the senior center.

“Because the only way is the Massey way,” she said, chuckling.

Massey has lived in Prairie Ridge since 1976, but was born in Emporia, Kan., in 1917. She lived on a farm outside the city from the time she was a small girl until she was raising her own children. She performed all the duties needed to keep the farm running.

“I did a little bit of everything,” she said. “Milking, feeding chickens, anything that needed to be done. I had driven horses and machinery. I also did the bookkeeping for a loan business in the area.”

She married Clifford Massey, a hired hand on the farm, at the age of 15. She raised three children, two boys and a girl, all of whom learned how to milk a cow when they were able, she said.

In 1946, a series of crop failures caused by drought and Chintz bug infestation forced the Massey family to leave their rented farm and move into the city.

For work, she answered an advertisement in the local paper requesting cooks at the local Catholic Hospital. Instead, a nun at the hospital talked her into becoming a nurse’s aide.

“I said ‘Oooh no,’ but she said ‘You get one uniform and show up for work in the morning,'” Massey said. “I wasn’t expecting to get into the nursing field at all.”

Massey thrived in the position. She worked as an aide for two years before entering classes to become a licensed practical nurse, working days and going to school at night. Her husband’s schedule allowed them to get by without hiring a sitter for their kids.

By 1950, she graduated LPN training and the hospital staff was pushing her to become a surgical nurse, something that would require more training.

“Once again, a nun talked me into it,” she said.

Massey expanded into surgical nursing training from within the hospital. She did well in the position, she said, but it could be difficult to live with on some days.

“The biggest problem is you’re seeing (surgeries) and you think ‘What would happen if this was my family or me,'” she said. “Back in the day, they didn’t have cancer treatments, so that could be hard to watch. Some nights I would come home and say ‘I won’t go back.'”

She went on to work as a surgical nurse for 25 years, transferring to the Enumclaw hospital when she and her husband moved to Prairie Ridge in 1976. She continued working in the operating theater until she retired at 68.

“It was an interesting type of work,” she said. “It was different every day. You were pretty sure of a job. And you felt like you were doing something worthwhile.”

Massey came to the Bonney Lake Senior Center for the first time in 1978, and she’s been a member ever since. In 2002, she began volunteering as a cashier and greeter.

She still lives in the house she bought with her husband in Prairie Ridge, though he died in 1993. She still drives, and drives well, she pointed out. And she still works her post at the senior center, five days a week, three hours a day.

Now her role as a permanent fixture of the center will be cemented. When her street sign is mounted, it will be a plain fact to anyone driving through what members of the senior center have known all along: the only way is the Massey Way.