Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505060013
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They were born in an America the rest of us can hardly imagine. A country without radio, flush toilets or factory bread. Geronimo was still alive. So were Mark Twain, and Buffalo Bill. The youngest of them now is 95. They have traveled through the 20th century now from beginning almost to end - and seen more change along the way than anyone may ever see again.
Over the last few months we talked to several of them, to see what they had to say about their trip.
On his 100th birthday, William Johnson Mingo danced a little jig.
Now 102, the retired railroad worker has hung up his dancing shoes. But he can surely talk.
"I can't remember everything," Mingo said recently, "but what I tell you is true."
Mingo, who lives in a nursing home unit at the VA Medical Center in Salem, was born in Colorado County, Texas.
His father was a schoolteacher. His mother was half white - which wasn't white enough to change anything for a black boy living in the South at the turn of the century.
"Back in those days," Mingo recalls, "everybody had to pick cotton...They had Jim Crow [segregated] schools."
After his hard start in Texas, Mingo eventually went to live in Washington, D.C., where his father was teaching school.
There, he managed to get a degree from a business high school in 1912 and then become a Pullman car porter. He held the job until 1951, when new air conditioning on the trains adversely affected his lungs. Mingo spent some time in a sanitorium before recovering his health.
In his early days as a porter, he more than once served John D. Rockefeller on his trips to Florida, Mingo recalled. The rich industrialist never tipped more than a dime. Mingo learned to go instead to Rockefeller's secretary - who would tip him several dollars.
Mingo served in World War I as an assistant artillery chief with the Buffalo Soldiers - U.S. troops who carried on the name and tradition of the famed black fighters who served with Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War.
He still makes trips to local schools to talk about the Great War to students who're most of a century younger than him.
"I tell them how we suffered," Mingo said.
Mingo marvels that a relative of his in Texas now teaches white children and black children together.
"And I went to school in one room," he said. "God works in a peculiar way, you know that? And you can say what you want, but he's never asleep."
Mingo's several brothers and sisters are long since dead, he said. His second wife is still living, and visits occasionally.
Why has he lived so long?
"I don't know," Mingo said. "I just trust in God, I guess. I'm a firm believer in the creator."
Esther Alice Critchfield of Blacksburg remembers the day she decided to go to law school.
She was working for the Internal Revenue Service in Washington. A friend walked into her office, upended an empty trash can, sat down on it and told her she ought
to be taking law classes at night - just like him.
So she did.
"I used to sing in the choir at National City Christian Church," Critchfield recalled. "And I'd take my law book and put it under the seat at church. When the minister got up to do his thing, I'd get it out and read it."
Critchfield was awarded her law degree from Washington's Southeastern University in 1932 - the same year her son, John, was born.
It was another unusual achievement for a woman who already was the first member of her family to earn a college degree. Critchfield would go on to become the first woman lawyer certified to practice in District of Columbia courts - and, in 1939, the first woman certified to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court, said her grandson, Steven Critchfield of Blacksburg.
She rose to head of the IRS legal services branch before her retirement, he said, at a time when the presence of women in the federal bureaucracy was rare at any level.
Now 95, Critchfield received her first degree from Kent State University in Ohio and is the school's oldest living graduate. She credits the degree to "just plain determination, I guess." A local real estate executive - apparently seeing promise in the young farm girl - helped her with tuition.
Critchfield not only paid him back a few years later, but spends part of her pension putting young people through college here in Southwest Virginia, said her grandson. To date, she has helped five students who could not have gone to college any other way.
Critchfield moved to Blacksburg from Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, when her grandson was a student at Virginia Tech. She lived briefly in a retirement home before moving in with Steven Critchfield - now a local businessman - at his tree-shaded, mountainside home outside town.
Living in the countryside brings Critchfield full circle from her youth on a farm near Akron, Ohio. "It was a very, very interesting childhood," she said. "My mother was quite a musician. If she went to the movies and heard some music, she'd come home and play it on the piano. She was gifted that way."
Mrs. Critchfield's husband, Emil, was injured in France in World War I and never completely recovered. He ran a gas station in Washington - "For Richfield," an advertisement read, "see Critchfield" - but stomach problems eventually turned to cancer. Disabled for years, he died in 1957.
Critchfield saw many close to her die young.
Her mother died at 38. Her father lived to be 52 - but had long since lost his sanity, she said.
"Poor dear, we had to put him in a home because he wasn't responsible for what he was doing," Critchfield said. "It was pathetic to see, that this strong man should lose his mind."
Why has she lived so much longer than the others?
A rigid schedule, Critchfield believes.
"When you go to college and law school and have a baby, you have to run things on a schedule," she said. "I suppose that's why I lived so long."
Was it hard for women to succeed in her day?
"Not particularly," Critchfield said. "I guess it depended on the individual."
Was it hard for her?
"Seemingly not," she says - following her words with the flicker of a smile.
Critchfield finds the world at present superior to the one in which she grew up. "We're not fighting any wars right now," she noted.
She still looks ahead. Critchfield will celebrate her 96th birthday June 3 - and in October, she is to serve as grand marshall of Kent State University's homecoming parade.
Meet William Howard Kennett, 96, Mr. Congeniality at last year's VA Hospital Wheelchair Olympics.
Not that he uses a wheelchair.
In fact, the last quarter century seem to have touched him lightly. Kennett converses easily with strangers, summons up details from his lengthy past without apparent effort and remains light on his feet. He had to leave an interview at the VA Medical Center early to join a card game; he later left the card game to give a departing (female) photographer a sturdy hug.
Kennett was a long-time employee of the Kroger Co. in Roanoke.
His father, Silas Garrett Reese Kennett, was postmaster at Kennett, Va. - a place the younger Kennett says remains on the map today.
It's about the only thing that hasn't changed in his lifetime.
"Oh, my goodness," said Kennett, when asked if things were different now than when he grew up. "Smith Mountain dam has come in. The population has grown so fast."
Kennett believes the world has gotten better in his lifetime - "to a certain extent. There's a whole lot of things that have improved. We've gone to the moon."
People, too. "I think they're better," Kennett said. "They should be. They've got so much more to be thankful for."
As a native of Franklin County - famed for generations for its illicit homemade liquor - Kennett admits he's seen his share of moonshine.
"They used to make it next door, in the barn, all around. I can remember six or seven (stills) near my home. I've had a few drinks. And that's about all, too. I can't really say I had any taste for it at all. Thank the Lord for that."
Kennett's father died of a heart attack at 63 - but his mother lived to be older than he is now.
Barely.
"If I live past May 18," he said, "I'll be a little older than she was."
In addition to working at Kroger, Kennett ran Kennett's Processing Plant at Burnt Chimney, a store on the City Market in Roanoke in the 1960s, and one in Martinsville.
He has never watched his diet. He believes all the fresh farm food he's eaten may have something to do with his longevity - surely a welcome theory to all who love dairy products, Southern fried chicken and beef steaks.
"I ate everything that came along, I guess," Kennett said.
Still does. "I have no desire for anything special. It's all special by now."
At one time, after being gassed in France in World War 1, Kennett's prospects for long life did not look good.
He spent 18 days in the hospital. "After that it seemed like I couldn't get well," he recalled. He caught diphtheria, then the flu. "They came in one morning and thought I was dead, but I recovered some way."
The gas, meanwhile, had stripped the enamel from his teeth. Kennett can remember sitting in a dentist's chair and getting 26 fillings.
He was married in 1926 to a woman he met in Florida, where he had gone to work in a butcher shop after the war.
She came into the shop a few times and "We caught each other's eye," Kennett recalled of his wife, Frances. They were married for 65 years and 22 days, until her death at 93.
"You want to see her picture?" Kennett said. In fact, he has two, both of a thin, pretty, blond girl with a flirtatious smile.
The couple had no children. An adopted son died several years ago in a house fire. A grandson died years before that.
"I wish I had 16 [children] sometimes," Kennett said.
Brantley Williams stIll tells the story of the day he saw Theodore Roosevelt.
The president had come to Richmond to give a Fourth of July speech. Williams - then a boy of five or six - watched him ride by in a mule-drawn carriage.
"It was hot - ooh, mercy," recalled Williams. "I remember he gave the (Fourth of July) address at Capital Square Park, but it was just too hot. My family didn't stay."
"Richmond was just like all places," he said of those days. "Mostly everybody either was walking or they were riding a mule."
Williams - who is named for a Baltimore preacher - was born in King and Queen County, Virginia on Sept. 4, 1899.
"I was just at the right age for the abolition of everything that was old," he said. "Mechanically speaking, I saw a lot of changes."
Williams has five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. He has a sister in Richmond who is four years younger than him.
Harry S. Truman is his favorite president.
"He was the only one who had any backbone or stamina," Williams said. "When he told you something, he would do it."
Williams doesn't mince words when talking about how things used to be.
"I taught school for 41 hard years," said Williams. "They treated us in the early days like a dog. You could hold what they gave you in your hand. And they expected you to live on that."
Williams had gone to Scott County on a lark.
"I wanted to see the world, I guess."
He ended up marrying a Scott County farmer's daughter and staying to teach algebra and history. His wife, Nannie, died a decade ago..
Williams currently lives in Rocky Mount with his daughter, Peggie Santrock, and her husband, Charles Santrock.
He has a bed in the dining nook and spends much of his day watching the traffic go by outside. Except for doctor's appointments, said his daughter, he has not been out of the house in three years.
Maybe this is because Williams, for one, isn't convinced the world is getting any better. Family life is not as important as it once was, he believes. And people aren't as trustworthy.
"We all want more money," he says. "Money, money, more money. Money isn't going to get you into heaven.
"It'll get you into hell."
Mabel Colwell says the first automobile she ever saw ever saw was a Maxwell.
She was a girl in Lynchburg. A boyfriend brought it by. O Was he rich?
Colwell was asked.
"Rich?" she scoffed. "He was poor as Job's turkey." The cars were cheap, she explained.
Wiitty and a little tart at times, Mabel Colwell lives in The Park - Oak Grove Retirement Community in Roanoke.
She went for a ride in the Maxwell. It's a pleasant memory from a childhood that did not produce many of them.
Her father, an electrician for a railroad, died young. At 14, she was forced to go to work in a shoe factory.
"I don't have nothing good to say about my childhood, really," Colwell said.
Colwell worked for wages until she married and became a housewife in her 20s.
"I didn't stop working then," she adds, pointedly, "because I worked at home."
Prior to moving to Roanoke, Colwell lived in Lynchburg, Richmond, Newport News and Scranton, Pa. She has been a member of the Cave Spring Baptist Church for more than 50 years.
Her husband is deceased. Her daughter, Pat Shelton, lives in town.
At 95, Colwell has her aches and pains - "I just ain't no good," she despaired at one point during a recent interview - but longevity runs on the maternal side of her family. Her own mother died at age 981/2.
Colwell, who moved to Roanoke in the 1920s, remembers a city with streetcars and passenger trains.
She misses both.
"I think it's a shame that Roanoke doesn't have any trains going out of here. I hope they do come back. They've really left Roanoke out."
Sometimes she pines for times gone by.
"You could go anywhere you wanted to, by yourself, and nobody would bother you," Colwell said of the old days. "You never heard of all that stuff you got now...All this shooting and killing everybody. You can't go outdoors."
On the other hand, she marks the invention of store-bought bread as a great step forward for mankind. Or rather, womankind.
"I used to have to make biscuits for breakfast," Colwell said.
And in the old days, she admits, you could never get everything you needed in the stores.
"I guess you could call some things better," she said.
by CNB