Approaching a century: Lee County resident reflects on 100 years lived

LEESBURG – The year 1924 saw the first Winter Olympics held in France, the deaths of former President Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union; Calvin Coolidge signed legislation making all Native Americans U.S. citizens and declared the Statue of Liberty a national monument; Adolf Hitler was sentenced to prison for the Nazi Party’s failed coup attempt, and in November of that year the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in New York City.

It was also the year that the 39th President, Jimmy Carter, was born in Sumter County.

For Elsie Harrell Stewart, born on May 5 of that year in Florida, it was a relatively normal Southern childhood for the time. Her father worked in logging after the family moved to Grady County. Church services at a Primitive Baptist Church were a little different than other denominations, featuring no musical instruments but enthusiastic singing and sometimes daylong services with picnic lunches held outdoors.

It was a much different world, for sure, with no instant connection to news from all over the world. During a time when the only images people had of a president were black-and-white photos in newspapers, a president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not be shown in the wheelchair in which he spent most of his time.

“There was no TV,” Harrell said. “Radio was all we had. I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Calvary, Georgia, when we heard about Pearl Harbor (in 1941). That was sort of unbelievable.”

World War II was a major event for Harrell and her family, with two of her brothers fighting in the global conflict.

Harrell has so far resisted watching the “Band of Brothers” miniseries that tells the story of Easy Company in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division due to fear of the gory depiction of war, but after watching the “Masters of the Air” miniseries about the air war in Europe during World War II, she said she is reconsidering.

One of Harrell’s brothers, who was taken prisoner after the Japanese capture of the Philippines and was part of the infamous forced Bataan Death March, died during the war when the ship on which he and fellow service members were being transported was sunk by Allied forces.

She and her late husband, John, visited Hawaii, a trip that included the memorial of the battleship Arizona still sunk in the water.

“What is amazing is you can still see the oil that comes up in little droplets” from the ship, she said. “What was good back then was the country came together.

“It was pretty awesome. We won the war on both sides, the European Theater and the other side (Pacific) in three years.”

The near-centenarian recalled the coupon books of the war years, when individuals were issued ration cards allowing for the purchase of small amounts of gasoline, sugar, flour and other staples.

“Everybody came together and worked, building ships over in Brunswick,” she said. “Several of my husband’s family worked on ships.”

After moving to Cairo at about age 5, Stewart attended grade school through graduation, playing basketball for the Syrupmakers.

“I was one of nine,” she said. “I was the baby. We learned to play basketball on a dirt court. Mother had a garden. She grew flowers and stuff in her garden. Daddy, he and his brother had a logging (and) lumber operation. Daddy had the ability to look at what they were cutting and what they could get, how many feet, out of a group of trees. Daddy was good at that.”

After graduating high school, at a time when a typical education was 11 grades, Harrell went to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta from 1942 through 1945 for nurse training and work as a registered nurse. While it may seem that violent crime is a modern phenomenon, that was not the case.

“Saturday nights at Grady were pretty rough,” she said. “It was mostly drunks who had gotten into fights or accidents, shootings, stabbings. We had interns from Emory, and we had Emory student nurses come to Grady to get certain parts of their education because we had it all.”

The war ended before Stewart was sent to work as a nurse for the military, and she and other nurses worked to move to hospitals in south Georgia.

“I was trying to get as close as possible to my parents,” she said. “We ended up in Ware County, Waycross. John was in a lab.”

After marrying in 1947 and moving to Albany in 1955, Stewart worked at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital for a short time before making a career change and landing a job at the Marine Corps Logistics Base. Starting on the lowest rung of the ladder as a GSL clerk/typist, she retired at 60 and was the first female to climb to the GS-12 rating at the base.

“Let me tell you what I made when I started: $1,960 a year,” she said. “They work on every piece of equipment the Marines have and some of the Navy. They rebuild it. The base gets it all shot up. The repair division, paint, sheet metal shop, they do everything it takes to totally rebuild equipment.”

It was while she was working at the base that the first computer arrived, a machine that was the size of a room.

The advances in technology she has seen are some of the biggest changes that Stewart noted, including the telephone.

“The first telephone I remember at home was on the wall, with a party line,” she said. “You might have three or four parties, and they could hear you. We didn’t see any airplanes in Cairo. I saw those at Grady. The nurses’ home was adjacent to the hospital. We would go up on the roof to sunbathe and planes would come over.

“My first plane ride for business was on a two-propeller (model) to Atlanta, and I swear we didn’t get over the treetops.”

While Stewart has had a couple of falls, once in the shower and another outdoors in an incident that resulted in three pelvic fractures, she said she feels in relatively good health. When she spoke with The Albany Herald this week, she had recently returned from driving to see her daughter, Marti, in Atlanta.

“It’s just a number to me,” she said. “I don’t feel old. I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel at a hundred. I’ve experienced a lot of different things that do have an effect on the way I am now.”

Stewart was diagnosed with COVID-19 when she went into the hospital after her second fall, which delayed her rehab when she was placed in isolation for 10 days at Phoebe.

“I had to learn to walk again,” she said. “That was not easy. That hurt.”

After going through the stages of life that included the death of John Stewart Jr. and the departure of daughters Marti Wright and Diane Izard, then the death of her spouse, Stewart said it’s difficult to cook healthy as a single.

“I eat right,” she said. “You know, it’s not easy for one person. It’s hard to adjust, but I worked so long at the Lord’s Pantry. It got me up and going. I worked at the church. I kept busy. That’s the thing, I didn’t sit around. I have a pity party every now and then, but they’re not long.”

Stewart gave up mowing her lawn herself a year ago, but she still keeps active with her flower beds and grows vegetables in buckets. She also keeps various seeds in several bird feeders, hangs food out for hummingbirds, and provides a bird bath for her avian friends and watches them as they dine in her backyard.

Plans are to celebrate her big day during the Stewart family reunion next month.

“We’ll have a big birthday party at the reunion,” she said.

Staff Photo: Alan MauldinAlanMauldin[email protected]
Staff Photo: Alan MauldinAlanMauldin[email protected]