Eva L. Meranda, 101, a talented seamstress who learned needlework by kerosene lamp growing up in the Dakotas of the early 20th century, died of cancer yesterday in the Elizabeth Scott Memorial Care Center, where she lived the last four years.

Mrs. Meranda, formerly of West Toledo, didn't work outside the home as her daughters were growing up. She took a modest view, the month of her 100th birthday, as she looked back on the decades.

"Just live day to day," she told The Blade.

She once worked in a Toledo dress shop. She sewed her daughters' clothes when they lived at home. When they married, she made their bridesmaids' and wedding dresses.

"She crocheted and knitted up until she had rheumatoid arthritis" in the 1970s, her daughter Janet Dame said.

"She had an ordinary life, but she just did everything extraordinarily," her daughter said.

Mrs. Meranda was born on a farm near Turton, S.D., the second of eight children. When she was 8, the family sold that farm - "everything had dried up," she told The Blade - and homesteaded land near Devils Lake, N.D. The children went to one-room schoolhouses.

The farms had no electricity. Kerosene lamps provided light after dark, and the girls in the family did needlework and crocheted, knitted, and quilted around the kitchen table. Clothes were washed atop a wood-burning stove, and everyone had chores aplenty.

Mrs. Meranda didn't think of conditions in the Dakotas as harsh. "It was a way of life," her daughter said.

Mrs. Meranda in 1925 moved to Toledo, where her sister Gleva had a job striping automobiles.

Mrs. Meranda moved back to North Dakota for a time to help her family after her brother Lester died. But she returned to Toledo and worked "because there was more money made there than in North Dakota," she told The Blade. On Jan. 1, 1930, she and Carl Meranda - a first cousin of Gleva's husband - married in the now-Historic Church of St. Patrick in downtown Toledo.

Mrs. Meranda formerly worked at a drugstore cosmetics counter.

She was a member since 1941 of Blessed Sacrament Church, where she belonged to the Altar-Rosary Society. She still thought of North Dakota as home and visited annually for many years. She and her husband had a mobile home in Goodland, Fla., in the late 1970s, and she collected seashells.

After she lost her sight to macular degeneration, she enjoyed books on tape.

Her husband died March 9, 1993.

Surviving are her daughters, Janet Dame, Yvonne Selz, and Nancy Williams; sister, Marie Dougherty; 13 grandchildren; 25 great-grandchildren, and a great-great-granddaughter.

The body will be in the Ansberg-West Mortuary after 2 p.m. Friday, where there will be a recitation of the Rosary at 7 p.m. Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. Saturday in Blessed Sacrament Church. The family suggests tributes to the Arthritis Foundation, the American Cancer Society, or the Blessed Sacrament building fund.

First Published November 17, 2004, 11:03 a.m.