LIVED TO BE 112 YEARS AND 340 DAYS OLD
Lately I’ve been thinking about my Great-Aunt Olive A. James Alleshouse.
I don’t know why. She lived to the ripe old age of 112 years and 340 days, making
her a verified supercentanarian. I looked her up on the internet and noticed
she died on May 13th, 1995. Monday is May 13th, 2013.
Maybe I’m getting a message from the great beyond telling me to write down my
few memories of Aunt Olive.
Olive A. James was born on June 7, 1882 in Iowa. The computer
records say she was born in Texas. That is a mistake. She lived much of her
life in Texas, but she was born in Liberty Center, Iowa. She was my
grandmother, Florence Edna James’ sister. My grandmother was two years older,
having been born in 1880.
Aunt Olive married Martin L. Alleshouse and they lived most of
their married life in Texas. They did not have children. Aunt Olive worked as a
teacher and as a librarian for the Houston library. In my search, I found an
interesting tidbit. She’d done work on a historical project at the library and
on file is an article she’d written on the Florence Crittenton Home in Houston.
(The interesting part to me is I volunteered for several years at the Florence
Crittenton Home in Fullerton, California. Just a little cosmic connection I
suppose.)
My grandmother, Florence Edna James, married my grandfather, Ira
Judkins. They had 10 children, 9 of them lived into adulthood. According to my
mother, Kathryn Kimzey Judkins, whenever Aunt Olive visited her sister
Florence, she would give her a good tongue lashing for having so many children.
Maybe that was Olive’s secret to longevity. No children. She lived to be almost
113 years old. Florence died when she was 57 years old.
As a widow, Aunt Olive moved to a retirement village in Peoria,
Illinois. She was around 60 at the time. She turned over all her worldly goods
to the retirement home on the condition that they cared for her the rest of her
life. I guess she got the better end of that deal!
Aunt Olive took up painting in her later years. I remember when
she sent 9 of her paintings to Iowa for all of my Judkins aunts and uncles. We
gathered at Uncle Theo and Aunt Iris Judkins' home in Winterset, Iowa, and they
placed numbers on each of the paintings, then drew numbers to see who got what.
That was certainly fair, but my dad ended up with one of the not very pretty
paintings. It was of the Washington monument. I don’t know what happened to
that painting, but I do know my parents weren’t terribly fond of it. (Another
coincidence is that I’ve recently taken up painting.)
When my parents, Bert and Kathryn Judkins, and my Uncle Joe and
Aunt Atha Judkins, were in their late 60’s they made a visit to Aunt Olive in
Peoria. Mom told me that Aunt Olive called them “you kids” the whole time they
were there. She was over 100 years old at the time, so I suppose to her, they
were kids.
Maybe I should set a goal to break Aunt Olive’s longevity
record? We all need goals, right?
