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By Elmer Smith

Philadelphia Daily News

Daily News Opinion Columnist

VIOLA WALKER pushed her wire-rim glasses off the bridge of her nose to dab her eyes with one of the wadded-up tissues she had piled in front of her.

She was surrounded by some of the other elderly residents at the Opportunities Tower retirement complex, at 55th Street and Haverford Avenue. But she was transfixed by the images on a TV screen.

Barack Obama was taking the oath of office.

“My Lord! My Lord!” she said, as she shook her head slowly side to side. “What a day!”

“It’s overwhelming.”

Not easy to overwhelm a woman who had endured depressions, pandemics, world wars and more hardships than she cared to recall in her 103 years.

She had seen America grow from a time when black people gave their lives for the right to vote to a time when a black man could be elected president.

On her 103d birthday, she cast an absentee ballot for Obama in the Pennsylvania primary. She voted again in November as she had in every national election since the second term of Calvin Coolidge.

“No, no, never,” she said when I asked if she had ever envisioned that day. “This is what we prayed for all these years.”

“All these years” ended peacefully Tuesday, when Viola Walker died in her sleep, five weeks short of her 105th birthday.

In a sense, everything that followed the Obama election was kind of an anticlimax for her. She had lived to witness and take part in something that a century of living hadn’t prepared her for.

“Last week she fell and fractured her c2 vertebra,” her son Terrence told me. “She had been in pain for a week.

“Tuesday, we were going to transfer her to a rehab facility. God just decided to move her to a place where she won’t have any pain.

“It’s funny, but she didn’t know how to scream. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her scream.

“The pain was intense. But she just made this weird squeak. She just wasn’t one to complain.

“But she had told me in the weeks before the accident that she was ready to go.”

I have interviewed three people who had lived for more than a century. What they all had in common was an uncanny calm despite lives marked by deprivation and suffering.

Viola Walker lived through the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the earth when the flu pandemic of 1918-20 killed more than 50 million people worldwide. She saw friends and loved ones march off to foreign wars and never return.

She had lost both her parents before her teen years and survived numerous loved ones, including the husband she built her life with.

But she chose not to dwell on those things.

“Her memory was better about the old days,” her son said. “She remembers going to the river to get baptized or working at the armory during World War ll, making bombs that were bigger than me, she used to say.”

When we talked last year, she was almost as surprised by Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as Barack Obama’s. She said that she had been amazed when women won the right to vote in 1920.

But if she had any lasting scars, she chose not to talk about them.

She had never spent a day in a hospital until she was 90 and a venetian blind she was cleaning fell and cut her scalp. She lived independently for the most part until her fall last week.

I wondered if her longevity had anything to do with her ability to find peace even when the world around her was in crisis. I asked her about that two years ago.

“She never smoked or drank,” her son offered. “And she kept her nose out of other people’s business.”

She nodded in agreement. But she wasn’t willing to say that those were the secrets to long life.

“I don’t have any secrets,” she said laughing. “People ask me that all the time.

“I just tell them to hold onto God’s unchanging

hand.”

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512.

For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith

 

Witness to a century of marvels, Viola Walker died just short of her 105th birthday.
ALEJANDRO A. ALVAREZ / Staff photographe
Witness to a century of marvels, Viola Walker died just short of her 105th birthday.

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