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February, 1999. ********************************************************************** ********************************************************************** FROM THE ATLANTA JOURNAL Sunday, July 20, 1919 102 ½ YEARS OLD MRS. DEHART REACHES THAT AGE She lives quietly, is never worried, eats cucumbers. Mrs. Elizabeth Osborne DEHART will be 102 ½ Thursday. She had gotten up rather late in the morning – about 10 o’clock. I think it was, when I reached their little house at 125 Dill Avenue where she and her daughter, Mrs. Lydia Ann DEHART Price, age 72, live alone. I don’t know which is the more remarkable, the mother or the daughter. The former is one of the oldest women in the world; the latter is one of the youngest for her years. Unassisted, she cares for her mother day and night, lifts her up, assists her to her rocking chair, and pulls the chair any place Mrs. DEHART wants to go. Nimble, alert, with none of the slowness of age, the daughter of 72 is nurse and companion of the mother 102 ½. I wish you could see them together – Mrs. Price, full of sparkle and life, Mrs. DEHART quiet and impassive, at first, but breaking occasionally into quick, pointed words as she is questioned, or as her slow hearing catches fragments of the conversation. I think that they react on each other, that each adds to the other’s years. Undoubtedly it is Mrs. Price’s cheerfulness, and her wise management that have enabled her mother to live to the almost unequaled age of 102 ½ years; and perhaps it is the knowledge that she is the staff and support of her mother that has kept Mrs. Price so young. But, beyond this, there must be, in the family, a strength of life that gives them the gift of years. Mrs. DEHART’S mother lived to be over 90, and have seven children, all of whom attained a ripe old age except for one who died at 50. Mrs. DEHART, herself, had four children, three of them are living, the youngest 72 and the oldest 78. Mrs. DEHART has no chronic illness, suffers from no bodily ailment of any sort and has undergone little physical changes. “She’ll have her breakfast, now in a little while,” said Mrs. Price, as we drew chairs out on the porch for a chat, while Mrs. DEHART enjoyed her late morning sleep inside. “For one thing, she’ll want cucumbers with cream over them.” “Cucumbers!” Mrs. Price laughed in that jolly, happy way of hers. “Most people think they can’t eat them, don’t they?” she said, “But, mother has had cucumbers nearly every day since they cam in. They are what she likes the most.” What else does she like? “Everything. She likes everything everybody else does, and her digestion is fine. She eats two meals a day and sometimes a little something light at supper, but very often she takes nothing at all at supper time. She takes coffee and tea, and she likes desserts. Oh, she eats just like anybody else.” “How has she lived so long?” I asked. “Well, I hardly know.” said Mrs. Price. “I attribute it to her being quiet. There are just the two of us here and there is no clamor, no noise. None of the little worries of most households. I never tell mother anything that is depressing, and I give her all the bright, cheering news I can. I have an idea that her even disposition has a lot to do with her long life. She is always the same, never moody or downcast, and she doesn’t borrow trouble. That helps to keep you young.” We were having a little chat, the other day, and I told her she “had beat the Parsons’ shay.” She nodded and said she’d beat it by 2 ½ years. “You don’t know what the Parson’s shay is?” asked Mrs. Price, a little surprised at my ignorance. “The Parson is the man that noticed that shays were always breaking down, one way or another, and always having to be mended. So, he decided to build one, himself, that wouldn’t need a bit of repair for 100 years, and then fall to pieces all at once. And he did, but mother has lived longer than 100 years and is still sound.” The change in her has been so slow that unless you were with her constantly you couldn’t point out where she has altered. Her memory is still good. Her hearing is bad, but it has been for five years, and she lost all her teeth before the war.” The last war? “Oh, no, the Civil War. She used to sew a lot, but when she got to be 100 years old, her hands seemed to get tired, and she’s never finished the last quilt she started.” “She looks at the headlines in the newspapers now and again, but she says that after a while they blur before her eyes and she can’t read any more.” “Mother usually goes to bed about 8 o’clock, and she gets up about 11 the next morning, or sooner if she feels like it. She dresses, and I always serve her breakfast on a little tray in her room. After she’s sat up a few hours, she usually goes back to bed for a nap, as she calls it. She could sit up longer, but there is little for her to do. She can’t read and she can’t work and our chats don’t last the day through.” “One thing I lay to keeping her with us so long is the little medicine she takes. She catches cold occasionally, or gets bilious, then I give her homeopathic doses. Medicine has put as many under the ground as it keeps out. You can’t make her take calomel. She says it ruins a person.” Mrs. Price had two pictures in her lap, one of which slipped to the floor. It showed Mrs. DEHART with two little dogs. “They were pugs,” said Mrs. Price “and mother thought a lot of them. Then they died and we got a black and tan, which was like one of the family, and it got poisoned, which near broke mother’s heart. After that, I told her that we just wouldn’t have any more dogs. We got to think so much of them.” “Mother’s been wanting to go out in the garden lately, so last week, when my son was here, he pulled her out there in her chair so she could see the chickens, and the vegetables and the trees, but it was too bad. She’d hardly got there before it started raining.” “When you wrote about mother before, there was one mistake. She was born 102 ½ years ago at Asbury, New Jersey, not Asbury, New York.” Mrs. DEHART resided for years in New York City, but came to Atlanta nearly 20 years ago to live with her daughter. The two have made their home in the same little house on Dill Avenue in Capitol View. When I went to see Mrs. DEHART on her birthday, last January, she wore around her shoulders, a plush coat lined with fur. “I wore this to the opening of the Crystal Palace, in New York. I had on a green dress with blue plaids.” “Did you dance?” I asked. She shook her head. “I never danced a set in my life. I had cider on my birthday last year,” she suddenly observed. “You like cider? And beer, too. Some folks might be shocked at that, but the truth will be out.” “Mother,” continued Mrs. Price, resuming the details I sought, “must weigh about 145 pounds, and she is about 5 feet 6 inches in height. She was a fine-formed woman in her young days, but she has begun to stoop now. She can’t walk, of course, and when she wants to go from one room to another, I pull her in her rocking chair. Many people wonder how I can do that when she is so much larger than I am, but it is just a knack.” “Her other two children are Mrs. Mary E. Kees, age 74, and Isaac Newton DEHART, age 78 years, both of them live in Nashville. My sister is coming here for a visit next month and my mother is looking forward eagerly to that. My brother, though he is 78, has every tooth in his head, and the finest white teeth you ever saw, and he works very hard every day. Right now he is fixing up a machine shop just for himself.” Across the street, somebody was singing, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”. The breeze was cool where we sat on the porch in the old rocking chairs. “Yes,” Mrs. Price said, as she once again picked up the picture as it slipped to the floor a second time, “I’m sure mother has lived so long because she doesn’t worry, and we keep worries away from her. Many old people live in such clamor and confusion that it takes the life out of them.” Now,” she concluded, “I must go and fix mother’s cucumber for breakfast.” NOTE: Lydia Ann DEHART Price is the widow of William Henry Harrison Price, and the mother of William DEHART Price, Samuel Kees Price and Jesse Sheffield Price.