100 YEARS OLD
Mom turned 100 Dec. 11 and we had a birthday celebration for long-time friends and neighbors at a local bed and breakfast on Sunday. It was quite a doin’s and was wonderful to see folks spanning a lifetime.
Known to everyone around here as “Grandma,” Mom earned a Masters Degree in Health and Physical Education at Indiana University, taught as the first girl’s health and physical education professor at Bob Jones College in Cleveland, Tennessee before it moved to Greenville, South Carolina and became Bob Jones University, went to South America for 10 years after marrying my dad, then after losing the farm there in a junta and returning stateside, taught at the local high school for more than 20 years before retiring.
Think about the folks you’ve met who were born before Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan Dec. 7, 1941. I always ask them “how old were you? 4? 5? 6? Do you remember anything about that day?” Folks, Mom was already 18 on that infamous day and all her graduation mates that were boys ended up in that great war.
In fact, I’ve always thrilled at her recollections about college during those years. She went off to college during the war years and no men were around. Men like my Dad were serving in the war effort so the campuses were nearly 100 percent female. Whenever she tells stories about those college days, she always lights up with smiles when remembering “then the boys came home.” I can’t imagine what that must have been like, but seeing her excitement and enthusiasm for that phrase is all you need to know about that period in history. “Then the boys came home” will live in my memory as a first person history lesson about WWII and “The Greatest Generation.” Many of them didn’t, of course, but that doesn’t dim the joy of “then the boys came home.”
My greatest blessing was growing up in a home that embraced mavericks. I’ve written more about Dad than Mom over the years because he was the one who truly had the farming love in his heart. But both of them embraced being different and I’ll forever be grateful. When Mom was at Bowling Green of Ohio in the undergraduate program, all the women’s sororities wanted her to pledge. Outgoing, beautiful, athletic, she was courted by all the sororities.
But growing up in a home with an alcoholic father who abandoned her mother, sister, and she extremely early, Mom had (and has) a deep disdain for alcohol. Growing up in the hardship and deprivation caused by alcoholism, and then watching her mother marry another alcoholic, Mom wanted nothing to do with these college women’s sororities that she viewed as social clubs to foster drinking—even in 1942.
She went to the dean and asked (almost demanded?) that the college offer an alcohol-free sorority for women. Offended, the dean noted in her resume that she was a rebellious troublemaker for this, since she wasn’t satisfied with what the college offered. In a great turn of events, that black mark is what landed her the professorship at Bob Jones College, where faculty who had maverick convictions were the order of the day. Maverick genetics run deep in my family.
She still has ALL of her teeth and skin looks like she’s 50. Thank you to all the folks who made the effort to come out and share our celebration of her life. As I greeted all these friends, I thought “this is like a funeral, except it’s being done before.” Perhaps we need to invert our recognition ceremonies and make sure we pay our tributes before the end.
She’s deteriorating dramatically on all fronts and we know our time left is limited, but for everyone associated with our farm and family, she has been a constant light, a social butterfly, to all who know her.
How many 100-year-olds have you met?