Maybe it’s the traveling salesman in him, but Ed Stow has the gift of gab.

Blessed enough anecdotes, jokes and stories to keep the clerks at Farmhouse Market and any old friends he meets entertained, the 88-year-old Fall City resident isn’t shy about telling tales.

As the oldest living resident born in Fall City, he happens to have plenty.

“Well, when I say born, I was actually born in the old Weyerhaeuser hospital. But I feel I qualify because I spent my first nine months here,” he said.

Named grand marshals of the 2011 Fall City Days parade due to their local history and connection, Ed and his wife Anne haven’t spent their entire lives in Fall City; they widely traveled and lived in several other Northwest cities. But Ed still has a pretty good claim to the place.

“I’ve only owned five houses in Fall City,” he said. “You want to hear a story about inflation?”

Stow bought three acres and a three-story home on his block in 1972 for $29,000. He sold the house and two acres for more than $200,000 and the acre that was left was worth $200,000 in 2004. “Ain’t that something? I couldn’t believe it!”

In his retirement, Stow’s got something he thought he would never brag about.

“I’m 88 years old, and I don’t owe two cents to nobody,” he said.

In his pocket, he keeps a list of the dozens of jobs that he’s held in his life. Mostly, he was in hardware and sales, traveling the Northwest as the face of electric motor companies like Curtis Industries and Grainger.

But Stow also held down other gigs. He was a Safeway clerk, a railway agent running a station in Eastern Washington, a school bus driver in Oregon—a job that he remembers fondly.

“I never had a job in my life that I enjoyed so much,” Ed said. “I had over 150 kids on my bus. Everything that even looked like a holiday, every one of those kids gave me something. The other drivers would say, ‘What have you got that I haven’t got?”

When the Stows were newly married and just out of school, he worked at his family hardware store in Fall City. He had plenty of close family to help build his first home.

“I’ve always had a job. I never had to ask nobody for nothing,” Ed said. “My dad taught me that if you can’t afford something, you don’t need it.”

Stow proudly pulls out a T-shirt that reads ‘Class of 1942, Fall City High School.’ On the original 19, there are seven left.

During World War II, he was a motor messenger for the U.S. Army, running from Ike’s headquarters to Army posts in Belgium, Holland and France.

“I put 48,000 miles on two jeeps in Europe. I loved it,” he said. “We did troop movements, casualty reports, anything that couldn’t be sent over radio.”

The travel bug often bit the Stow family. For fun, the family traveled with camp trailers—after the kids left the nest, they had an RV.

As a traveling salesman for the electric motor companies, Stow roamed from the Columbia desert to the Yukon Territory.

“Every customer was different,” he said. “I treated them like they never made a mistake.”

He was trusted enough that one motel owner in Bellingham trusted him to run the front desk during a family emergency.

For Stow, all roads kept leading back to Fall City.

“I always liked Fall City, for one reason,” Stow said. “We never had any big shots to look up to.”

With no mayor, no council, “this town doesn’t seem that big to me,” he added.