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Virginia Cox celebrates a past birthday with her son, Jerry. She turns 100 on Saturday and plans to “just keep on keeping on.”
Andrews - Virginia Cox doesn’t feel like she’s 100 years old. As she approaches her 100th birthday Saturday, she still does whatever she can and doesn’t spend any time worrying about what she can’t do.
“I’ve been so fortunate,” she said. “I’m proud. I’m very proud I’m physically able to live alone and do my thing, so to speak. I do what I want and do what I can do.”
Each morning, she wakes up and prepares her own breakfast. Each evening, she enjoys typical breakfast food for supper.
“I always have my breakfast,” Cox said. “That’s one thing I don’t skip.”
One of her earliest memories is getting up every morning and helping her grandfather prepare breakfast, including cooking oatmeal and biscuits.
“I learned to cook when I was just a little tyke,” she said. “I lived with my grandparents, and my grandmother was very frail. Back then, we did what we had to do. Times have changed.”
She recalled having a little stool to stand on as she heated oatmeal on the stove.
Cox said her grandmother wasn’t able to get going easily in the morning because of arthritis.
“Now I understand why she couldn’t manage,” she said. “Back then, you lived it. You didn’t have pills.”
As a result, she had to learn to cook to survive.
“So I grew up in the kitchen,” Cox said.
She also learned how to kill a chicken when she was very young. Her grandfather had a chicken farm at their home in Sylva, and if they wanted chicken for dinner she remembers having to be careful about which chicken to kill. They wanted to keep the good laying hens.
There’s also something else she remembers from when she was very young.
“I remember the first loaf of bread I saw,” she said, recalling it was when she was about 6 years old. “That was something else.
“I was before loaf bread. That’s one good way of putting it. Can you believe that?”
Cox’s first job was in high school at a funeral home. She would come there every day after school and do secretarial work. She never went past that office door, except for one day.
“I had a scary experience while I was there,” she said.
A man who died had been placed in the embalming room. Soon, the wife came down to the funeral home, asking Cox, “Where is he?”
“I was trying to hold her back,” Cox said.
The next thing she knew, the woman broke through, and she and Cox were in the embalming room. Cox passed out at the sight of the dead body on the table.
“It was just too much,” Cox said. “Scary.”
She later worked as a nurse’s aide at District Memorial Hospital. She remembers that when the hospital first opened, she was on the ground floor.
“That’s been a long, long time ago,” Cox said.
She said there were courses they take, and she decided to take a nursing one. All she had to do was agree to work as a nurse for at least a month after taking the course.
“I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the nursing,” Cox said.
She stayed on longer as a nurse, working private duty.
Cox and her husband, Woodrow, also ran a business from their home, selling Tom’s Toasted Peanuts. Their son, Jerry, eventually joined them in the business, later buying it from them when they retired.
Woodrow passed away in 1980. Their son, who lives nearby, continues to visit her every day.
“She’s a very special person to a lot of people,” Jerry said.
“And he doesn’t mind at all,” Cox said of her son.
She also has others who visit her during the day to help her.
Cox advises people not to feel sorry about themselves. Once people get to a certain age, she said they start “moaning and groaning” about their problems.
“I don’t do much of that,” she said. “I just don’t think about getting old. I just get up and do what I do.”
Cox said everyone should “just keep on keeping on.”
“I’ve enjoyed life. I’m still enjoying life,” she said. “All in all, it’s been a good life.”
Samantha Sinclair is the Scouting Around columnist for the Cherokee Scout. You can reach her by phone, 837-5122, Ext. 24; or email, scoutingaround@cherokee-scout.com.