WENDELL - Well into his 80s, Worley Pace puttered around on his farm between Zebulon and Wendell, picking up sticks in the front yard of the house he built with his own hands off Earpsboro-Chamblee Road. He grew a big garden over in a patch between his house and the home his daughter built next door.

At his 100th birthday party on Saturday, friends and families celebrated a long life built on a foundation of hard work.

Pace is in relatively good health these days, though he focuses a lot on a few stories that stick out from the recesses of his mind.

He gets frustrated with doctors who want to run what he thinks are unnecessary tests or who give him medicine he doesn’t think he needs. But he accepts visitors with a welcoming hand and a smile. And, though he’s quiet by nature, once he starts talking, one story can roll into another almost seamlessly.

Born Jan. 7, 1912 to Susie Pace and John Eddards, Pace didn’t finish school, but he started a lifetime of work that taught him what books couldn’t.

“He has some kind of (ability) to see something in his mind and he can build it,” said his youngest son, Benjamin, who lives in Raleigh.

He took early work in construction, before he took out a loan in 1945 to buy the farm that was to be his home for the next 66 years.

Pace also worked in several grocery stores in Zebulon and Wendell to help supplement the farm income. He worked at Parrish Grocery in Zebulon and Brewer’s Red & White in Zebulon.

But farming was the career that marked his life.

Working with his five children – Worley Jr., Richard, Benjamin, Joan and Alberta – and a cousin, Pace raised tobacco, corn and soybeans along the very edge of Wake County.

In 1934, he married Aldonia Adams and he proudly points out that he was the only suitor who asked his father-in-law for his daughter’s hand.

“He brought us all around and told everybody. ‘I’ve got three daughters and all of them are married, but I’ve only got one son-in-law.’ and he pointed at me.” Pace remembered the other day. “One of the other fellas asked him why he wasn’t his son-in-law and he said, ‘Cause you stole her. You run off and got married and didn’t even ask. Worley asked.’”

His wife died in the late 90s.

Before her death, though, they were perfect partners. Worley Pace was the family breadwinner and Aldonia kept the books, even winning an award in the 1960s from the Farmer’s Home Administration for her bookkeeping.

Pace lived on the farm he loved until about six months ago, when he moved in to the Oliver House.

That farm, though, was a labor of love for Pace. Benjamin Pace recalls working every morning in the fields, then going fishing every afternoon they could.

“That was a way of life. We didn’t go just for pleasure, but that was our food sometimes,” Benjamin Pace recalls.

He says his father was the last area farmer he knew of to use mules.

“We had two mules, Kate and Julie. They were like family, they were so important,” Benjamin Pace said.

In fact, he says, the mules were the primary farm implement Worley Pace used until the mules died about 1973.

“He finally broke down and bought a tractor, then,” Pace recalls.

And though Worley Pace had little formal education, he knew the value of booklearning. He put all five of his children through college.

All with the money he earned on that farm.