Alyssah Hall
San Bernardino County resident Barbara Bland turned 100-years-old on May 18, 2026 and celebrated with her loved ones at home.
In a recent interview with Black Voice News, Bland shared that she has lived a blessed life and continues to show gratitude for her family which is the most important thing to her. Bland and her husband Robert, have been married since 1950 and have two children, Rob and Lydia, in addition to grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live across the country. Bland also has one surviving sibling, her youngest sister Alice, who is about 97-years-old.
Bland, whose maiden name is Saville, was born in Hanford, California, six minutes before her twin sister Betty. Bland and Betty were third from the last of seven children and when the twins were two-years-old, their parents moved the family down to San Bernardino. The Saville family moved near what used to be the Black farming community known as Valley Truck Farms.
Bland’s father was a farmer, and the family grew up with a cow, horse, pigs, chickens and squabs. He also grew many different things in their yard such as beets, carrots, onions, greens, peaches, apricots, and “sweet, pink” pomegranates. In addition, he ran a little grocery store in the community that Bland and her siblings had to help supervise in the spring and summer due to shoplifting.
“My father sang, he had a beautiful voice, sung with the choir and everything,” Bland said.
“They used to tell us [when we misbehaved] , ‘be sure your sins will find you out’… My father was quiet. My mother talked to you in a nice way but my father just looked at you and you behaved,” Bland explained.
Bland’s mother was a teacher and had a “way of keeping an audience” and used to say different poems to her children. Bland recalls her mother’s storytelling being so captivating that they would picture the people she would speak of and shared that it was hilarious to listen to. Her mother would read and recite poetry by renowned Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to her children as they sat in front of their fireplace. To this day, Bland enjoys reading and reciting Dunbar with her sister Alice.
Among her favorite poems by Dunbar—known for his dialect verse—is “The Party”. She recited the opening lines from memory:
“Dey had a gread big pahty down to Tom’s de othah night; Was I dah? You bet! I nevah in my life see sich a sight; All de folks f’om fou’ plantations was invited, an’ dey come, Dey come troopin’ thick ez chillun when dey hyeahs a fife an’ drum…”
Reflecting on this memory, “I had a good coming up,” Bland emphasized with a smile..
The joys of being a twin
Growing up, Bland and her twin, Betty, would sometimes visit and stay with their grandparents in Lake Elsinore. They went to school there for a little while before coming back home to San Bernardino where they attended Sturges Junior High School and later San Bernardino High School. Growing up together Betty and Bland garnered a lot of attention and nicknames when walking together through their neighborhood to and from school. Barbara was more shy and not as readily trusting of others as her sister Betty who was more adventurous and friendly.
Bland remembers the two of them climbing up a eucalyptus tree in Lake Elsinore when living with her grandparents. She recalls milking the cow and taking the horse around with Betty, and feeling embarrassed when trying to get their stubborn cow to cross the street when the “young GI’s” were coming down the street in their big trucks.
“People were always looking at us because they didn’t see any Black twins, anyway here. ‘Oh, aren’t they cute,’ and stuff like that. And we weren’t cute, but she liked people, and I was always trying to avoid them,” Bland joked.
“I think with people looking at us so much, I was much more self-conscious. She was much more friendly. I was polite and nice.”
Bland recalled on their walks from school passing their reverend’s house where his wife would always come out on the porch when she saw the twins to give them a banana.
“She’d want to give us the bananas, and I’d say, ‘No, thank you, and my sister said, ‘Take the banana, and then give it to me’ cause she liked bananas. I didn’t like bananas,” Bland chuckled.
After high school graduation, Bland and Betty worked at the Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino during World War II. Because she and her twin were small, they were often assigned to work in the smaller places of the planes such as working with sheet metal and doing the inside lining up on the aircraft.
“As we got a little older, well, during that time too, there weren’t enough Black girls in San Bernardino for the GIs that were being stationed here. So they led us [go out] with a chaperone, which was Miss Luper,” Bland said. “Miss Luper was very strict. She and her sister came from Boston, and we always figured they were just too strict, but we did what she told us to do.”
Bland and Betty also enjoyed going to United Service Organization (USO) dances to dance with the GI’s with their chaperone or sometimes help fix sandwiches. Unfortunately, due to the time period and her job, Bland was made familiar with loss during World War II.
A number of GIs were killed aboard one of the ships torpedoed during the war. “We knew a lot of those servicemen,” she solemnly reflected.
Married life
Bland met her husband, Robert, when he moved from Kansas to California and recalls going to school with his sister who was eager to set the twins up on a double date with her brothers– who weren’t twins but looked alike. The two, however, didn’t end up getting together until later on in life.
“I don’t think he was quite ready for me, but he went through with it anyway,” Bland joked.
Bland attributes the longevity of their marriage to not being able to get pregnant with their son for seven years, saying, “He didn’t come along for some time after, so that gave us the chance to get to know each other.”
Before getting married to her husband in 1950, who was in the army and then the navy, she hadn’t traveled much outside of California. While he worked for the Department of Defense, they traveled with their children to Topeka and Wichita Kansas, Cheyenne,Wyoming, Denver and Greely Colorado, Tucson Arizona, and Little Rock, Arkansas.
“He called it TDY. I called it travel duty. [Initially, he traveled alone], but when the kids were big enough, we went with him,” Bland explained. “He’d stay two to three months in one place, and then we’d up and move again. So it was my first chance, my first time to go any farther than Elsinore.”
Robert shared his appreciation for the effort that Bland put in for their family. While he was working a lot of the time, their son had just started school and their daughter wasn’t in school yet. They would have to rent a car and get a trailer to move their family about often.
“She was stuck with two kids, besides the working, and she’d had to stay there, two kids, and go here, and pack up, and move, and go there. She never complained,” Robert stated.
Bland and her husband recall thinking at one point they’d never have any kids, and once they did, they felt blessed to have their two children. The best time of Bland’s life was raising her children who she is proud of and grateful for.
“Take care of your family, let the rest go. After I was married, we were going with the family and everything. I wasn’t in one place long enough to get a job, so I was just taking care of the kids at home while he worked, while he was with the missile site, but I worried about him all the time,” Bland said.
In her 100 years of living, Bland said she has seen a century of history, technological advancements, and changes in San Bernardino County. Bland shared that she used to go out in her yard and look up at the moon when she was younger and wondered what was on the other side of it. She recalls watching with “both eyes” the first Black man, Victor Glover Jr., and first woman Christina Koch, to orbit the moon and splashdown in the ocean off the coast of San Diego, this year.
Bland also shared how she felt when 44th President Barack Obama was elected, saying she liked it and, “Even if it’s just a token, it was a good token and it’s something people can’t forget, he was there.” She also likes former first lady Michelle Obama.
Physical changes that Bland has noticed in San Bernardino over a century include architectural differences like the mall, more bank developments and the courthouse.
When it comes to the changes for Black folks in San Bernardino over the years, Bland said that it goes up and down and that for a while there weren’t any Black owned businesses. She noted that there seems to be more opportunities for Black women now because Black women are more outspoken. She stressed how when she was growing up there wasn’t a place for most Black women to go out and get a job or to start their own businesses, especially if they couldn’t afford it.
“I worked for a man that had a Black newspaper [the Precinct Reporter est. 1965]. He sent us to a shop in Rialto, and they showed you how to set the type for the print in the newspaper, and of course I hadn’t ever seen anything like that,” said Bland.
She worked many jobs in her lifetime including at a place where she made pottery for Sears; working on airplanes at the Norton Air Force Base; working at March Air Base, briefly working at a hospital, and finally retiring in the 1980s from Bourns where she worked for about 20 years.
“I started on the relay line and then the supervisor came and said he had another job he’d like me to do,” According to Bland he assigned her to do invoicing. “I don’t know if that was better or not, because I was always the last one…the last freight truck that would come in, you had to have the stuff ready. But I liked it,” Bland explained.
Bland’s son took her and her husband on a road trip last year and has continued this new tradition after her 100th birthday this year. The family hit Arkansas and Texas so that their grandkids and great grandchildren can get to know them more. They also keep in touch with their relatives who are spread out across the country via scheduled Zoom meetings every first Sunday of the month.
Celebrating 100 years of life
Bland’s late sister Lucille, used to send a printed family newsletter out to their extended family to keep everyone updated. Now, Lucille’s daughter Pam has followed in her footsteps by conducting the family Zoom meetings. About 33 family members showed up via Zoom, specifically for Bland’s 100th birthday celebration, “On my birthday, they had the Zoom meeting, and the room was just full of all the grandkids,” Bland said.
Also on Bland’s 100th birthday, her niece Debbie brought over a home made sheet cake for her and family members visited her in small groups throughout the day from morning to 8:30pm.
“I had a happy birthday, and my great grandchild-she was my first great grandchild, she came. I just have a wonderful family,” Bland beamed.
Bland attributes her kind relatives, kids, and her husband who is “pretty nice,” to her longevity. “I don’t know, we’re just hanging in there and no real sicknesses, just hard work. We’ve just been blessed,” Bland stated.
She encouraged that everyone should be good to one another and treat people how they would want to be treated. Growing up in a large family, Bland said they learned how to live with each other, but it also helped that they didn’t have anyone around them that they didn’t wish to be around. Bland believes they have truly been blessed in life.