Benjie Sanders / arizona daily star

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She's waited tables in cafes and nightclubs, owned a chicken ranch and a reflexology business.

A few years ago, she and her second husband went scuba diving off Fiji on their honeymoon.

Oh, did we mention she'll be 95 on Wednesday?

The wonder is that she lived at all.

Born prematurely on July 23, 1913, Pearl Johnson was kept alive for a time in a warming oven.

Her father was in hotel management on the East Coast. But in 1918, he died of the influenza epidemic gripping the globe, leaving Pearl, her younger brother, Herbert, and their mother, Claire, alone.

After going to beauty school, Claire opened a string of beauty shops in Detroit but eventually gave it all up.

"She was having a nervous breakdown," says Pearl, who at 16 moved with the family to Niles, Mich. There, she soon found herself engaged to Jack Heater, an older man who owned a casino in Chicago.

"I liked him but I didn't love him," says Pearl. "I thought I was being pushed into the situation by my mother and by Jack."

Instead, she married Bob Johnson, who turned out to have a drinking problem. Work also turned out to be problematic for Bob, who did perform in several plays around Tucson back in the 1940s.

The couple came to town for Bob's asthma in 1940, and Pearl went to work at the French Cafe, west of the Fox Theatre Downtown.

The town was jumpin' with pre-war jitters and all its ensuing activity, and it was nothing for Pearl to make 100 bucks a night in tips.

"Everybody came Downtown on Saturday nights," says Pearl, who was also a whiz at ringing up war-bonds sales.

"I had a police dog. I would say, 'Lady, go find somebody that has $18,' the cost of a war bond. That dog would go and stand in front of someone and, of course, they would have to give me the $18."

In 1942, Pearl went to work at La Jolla, a nightclub on South Sixth Avenue. "That's really where I made the money. A $20 tip was not unusual."

Around that same time, she paid $1,500 for three acres on West Grant Road near Silverbell Road. There she and Bob added onto an existing house and also added three units to rent out.

Then they got into chickens. "I decided to start a chicken ranch so that I could get my husband to work," says Pearl, whose marriage can best be described as stormy.

"We raised 500 chickens at a time. They arrived from one month to the next. They'd get a certain age and we'd kill 'em. I had one rooster, Confucius. He would sit there and pull the pin feathers out. But a coyote got him."

Customers for Pearl's chickens included the Manhattan Club, La Jolla, El Corral and Hymie Myerson at Myerson's White House.

Meanwhile, Pearl left La Jolla for El Rio Country Club. "It was a man's club. They even had sawdust on the floor," says Pearl, who was asked to make the club appealing to the ladies.

"I got the place cleaned up, put in tablecloths and napkins and made it a beautiful club. The wives just flew there."

In 1946, the chicken ranch died a natural death. The following year, Bob died at age 39. Not long after, Pearl went to work for the Old Pueblo Club, home to just about every mover and shaker in town.

The guests weren't too bad either. "John Wayne, he was a gentleman," remembers Pearl. Same for Clark Gable. "He kissed my hand."

For 10 years she oversaw the dining room and men's grill and planned the club's special events. Then she left to work in reflexology — the practice of compressing parts of the feet, and sometimes hands and ears, to benefit other parts of the body.

Though this holistic treatment has been called pseudoscientific, Pearl swears she's saved lives with it.

An auto accident in 1955 that left her with terrible toe pain led her to learn more about reflexology — a practice she had briefly studied back in the 1930s.

After training in Oregon, she went into business at one of the rentals on her property, moving to a new location at 1955 W. Grant Road in the early '80s, not far from the three-acre ranch she's since sold.

In 2002, Pearl married another Bob, Bob Dilione. They honeymooned in Fiji, even scuba diving in its waters.

Bob died last February. About that same time, Pearl broke her wrist and hasn't been back to work, though she still practices on friends and family members.

In the meantime, good friend Robin Valdez now runs the business. But Pearl still drops in from time to time. To visit. And remember.

Founded in 1907, the Old Pueblo Club counted Col. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody as one of its members. Wyatt Earp also lunched there. It closed in 1992.