106th birthday celebration showcases long, colorful life
By LINDA BROWN, The Herald Staff
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Merle Lewis
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When a girl turns 106 she can do anything she wants. Even leave her birthday party to go take a nap.
That’s exactly what Merle Lewis did Tuesday right after telling her family and friends, “Wait ’til you get to be 106. You’ll want to go to bed, too. I’m not as young as I used to be.”
Red Hull, Lewis’s youngest son who is 82, credits his mother’s longevity to her genes.
“She had three brothers and they all lived to their mid 90s and her mother lived 100 years and 3 months,” Hull said.
Life was different on May 6, 1902, the day Merle May Clark was born in Agricola. Coffee was 21 cents a pound, skilled labor wages were $2.75 a day and a house went for $4,000.
Hull said he saw very few changes in his mother over the years. She was content to be a homemaker and raise three sons.
“I remember when we lived over by the college. There were so many shirts hanging on the clothesline a college student asked her if she took in laundry. She told him, ‘No, I’ve got a husband and three boys. They need 28 shirts a week washed and ironed. That’s all I can handle, 28.’”
Lewis loves baseball thanks to her second husband. Hull said his stepfather, Ralph Lewis, loved the Royals but never got to see or hear more than one or two innings of a game. His wife started listening to the games so she could later tell her husband play-by-play what had happened.
“She had a notebook,” said Hull. “She wrote down everything. She could tell you how much money the players made, their batting averages, who was married to who and how many kids they had. It was really something.”
The Lewis marriage ended after 27 years when Ralph Lewis died in 1961. Lewis’s first husband, Earnest Hull, was killed in a train wreck.
After the death of her second husband, Merle Lewis took her first job outside the home, at 59, at a nursing home in Gardner. She worked until she turned 80.
Even though she never learned to drive, Lewis lived independently until she broke a hip at 102. Since then she has lived at Richmond Health Care and Rehabilitation Center, 340 E South St., Richmond.
Hull and his daughter, Leslie Hollifield, came from Fort Worth, Texas, to spend the day with Lewis and share memories that span across decades.
“I remember Mom and Dad were going to California to see my brother who worked for the Border Patrol,” Hull said. “They were supposed to be gone a month but at the end of a week they were back. I asked her why and she said she was so mad she couldn’t stay another minute. She said, ‘My little grandkids crawled up on my lap and didn’t speak a word of English. I told your brother I’d be back in a year and by then those babies better be talking in English.’
“Since my brother spoke Spanish on his job, he also spoke it at home. He didn’t realize his kids didn’t know how to speak English, but they learned after that.
“Guess that just goes to show you that no matter how old you get or your mother gets, you still want to please her.”
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