Grandma Hester Knight
Grandma Knight says she's having hard luck. She can't work as much as she used to...gets short of breath when she stoops over.
And it's a shame that one so young shouldn't be able to do productive labor. You see, Grandma is only 106.
With the exception of her self-diagnosed "asthma" Mrs. Hesterline Knight is in perfect health. And if she isn't the oldest person in Ohio it's sure thing she can out-cook, out-talk, and out-run any other centenarian.
Grandma's condition--and there's no question of her age--is so good as to be a near-phenomenon.
She walks without aid of a cane, has never owned a pair of glasses and can hear as well and talk as loudly and sensibly as anyone. Her left arm--broken three times--is a little stiff but she still is active enough to bake occasional cakes and pies and goes outdoors...without a coat...at least twice a day to feed the chickens and a pet duck.
MRS. KNIGHT lives in a three room farm home in Hay Hollow, northern Pike County, with her oldest son, Edgar (he's only 80), her youngest son , Charlie Jr., 54, a grandson, Tommy, 9, and Mrs. Edith Knight, wife of another grandson who is serving in Korea. Until Edith came to live with the family about a year ago, Grandma was the "women of the house" and did all the work including rearing Tommy and getting him off to school.
"Edith's been wonderful to me," Grandma says with pride, "but she'll be leaving soon and I'll have to take care of things myself. And I'm not as young as I used to be."
DOCTORS MIGHT attribute Grandma's long life to a toughening-up process of hard work, refusal to take life too seriously, and a will to remain useful.
She's done about everything in her life.
She's worked in a saw mill, plowed, worked as a housekeeper and helped in the delivery of "at least a million" babies. She delivered most of her own grandchildren without the aid of a doctor.
"Nobody knew what it was to call a doctor in the old days just because someone was going to have a baby."
The old days to Grandma Knight is the entire second half to the 19th century. A family Bible shows she was born Dec. 15, 1847 in Augusta county, Virginia.
A pleasant little woman with a perpetual smile, Grandma talks equally well about childhood remembrances of the civil war or the current high price of a pound of beef.
She was A grown girl when the Civil War broke out and vividly remembers Union soldiers marching past her family home and killing cattle and pigs and hauling them away.
"My family didn't have any slaves," she recalls, "but the neighbors did. I remember Old Man Mickey had one that was plowing up on a hill and got sick. The slave came down to rest under a tree and the old man beat it to death.
"There's been a lot of change in the world but I believe there's more in the last 30 years than in the first 76. There are automobiles and airplanes and electricity and now this here television. I still listen to the radio."
She raise a garden every year until last summer when her "boy" refused to plow it for her.
"He thinks I oughtn't to do anything," she says, "but I can't just sit around here all the time."
GRANDMA has been a widow for 35 years and still draws a $30 a month pension because her husband was killed in a West Virginia mine accident.
She was married only once and had 12 children. In addition she had a sister that died and left five children and Grandma reared them too.
Counting up her grandchildren, Mrs. Knight is pretty sure that 49 is correct. she knows she has at least 26 great-grandchildren and doesn't know whether or not there are any yet of the fifth generation. "I've just been in Ohio seven years," she says, "and all my family is still in Virginia or West Virginia."
Grandma Knight isn't at all concerned about living so long. Her mother lived to 103 and her grandmother to 115. In looks she could pass for 75, the most 85. Her flesh is full and although slightly stooped, she gets about with no trouble.
"There isn't but one thing I can't do," she says, "that's drive a car. I think I'm too nervous for that."
The Waverly Watchman
Feb 11, 1954
Copyright © 2007
Pike Co. Genealogy & Historical Society
P. O. Box 224, Waverly, Ohio 45690