She always cheers for a man. “If they’re all women, I don’t care which one wins,” she says.

Carrie doesn’t have anything against women. She thinks it’s fine for them to vote and work outside the home “if they don’t try to take the men’s jobs away from them,” she says. “They think they can take over the men.”

That’s her view, and it’s consistent, except when it comes to what may be the most important job in the country —the presidency. Carrie says she would vote for a woman if she knew and liked her.

“I like Mrs. Dole and I like her husband, Bob,” she says. “Wasn’t she running there for a while?”

At 102, Carrie has earned the right to strong opinions, and she proclaims them loudly. One concerns man’s historic walk on the moon.

“You will never make me believe they walked on the moon,” she says. “If God had wanted us to walk on the moon and sun, he would have made us a ladder or some way to get up there. They could just show us anything on television, and we’d believe it.”

Restricting the way teachers discipline students is something else Carrie disagrees with.

“That beats anything I ever heard tell of,” she says. “You ought to be able to take a hickory and wear them out.”

Another thing Carrie feels strongly about is shots. “I just hate those things,” she says.

Not long ago, when she cut her leg on her wheelchair and had to have stitches, the doctor picked up a syringe to give her a shot.

“I said, ‘Doctor, what are you going to do with that needle?’ ” she says. “I said, ‘I’d rather see you coming with a double-barrel shotgun.’ That tickled him so good.”

Carrie even has a few words to say about fashion. “They always say an older person should wear dark lipstick and fingernail polish,” she says, “but I like pretty pink.”

Her neatly manicured nails reflect that view.

Having lived in three centuries, Carrie has been blessed with good health. “God has been good to me,” she says.

Though she wears glasses and hearing aids, she takes no regular prescription medicine and is still able to walk at the Meadows Retirement Center in Rockwell by holding onto the back of her wheelchair.

If it wasn’t for her weak ankles, Carrie says she still might be living in her own house on U.S. Highway 52 a few miles from the retirement center.

She moved into the Meadows at age 99, after twisting her ankle in a fall. She was making her bed when the mattress slid, she says, “and my hand slipped off and down I went.”

After her ankle healed, she went back home. “And dad blame if I didn’t sprain it again,” she says.

Now, the Meadows is her permanent home. “It’s a place to live,” she says. “I’ll just put it that way.”

Carrie’s best friend in the retirement center, Gladys Fisher, died unexpectedly a few weeks ago, and she misses her terribly.

When she went to visit her friend in her room the day before she died, Carrie says she didn’t go in because Gladys was in bed and she thought she might be asleep. “I wish I had talked to her then, but I didn’t,” she says.

When you live to be 102, you see a lot of friends and family die. Carrie’s husband, John, was in his 70s when he died of Alzheimer’s disease.

She has also outlived two of her five children. Her daughter, Viola, died at age 51, and her son, Carr, died in his 60s.

Carrie’s father, mother and son all died during the month of September. “September’s our month to die,” she says. “If we can make it through September, I think we can make it a while.”

Born Aug. 14, 1898, in Richmond, Va., Carrie was the second of Theodore Sylvester and Salomie Irene Poole’s 10 children.

The family moved to Davidson County when she was six weeks old, and she has lived in North Carolina ever since.

Her father was a rent farmer, and even though he cut his arm off working at a sawmill around age 40, he continued on the job like he had before.

“He could still take an ax and chop wood,” she says. “How he could do it, I don’t know.”

Theodore Poole didn’t have many behavior problems with his children, she says, because they knew that when he said something, he meant it.

“He would never say he was going to whoop us,” Carrie says. “He was going to brush us. He didn’t have any trouble with his girls, but his boys would get in a scrap every once in a while and he had to spank them.”

Her mother loved the outdoors, she says, and as soon as her older sister, Margie, was old enough, she took over cooking for the family.

Salomie Poole used to ask Carrie to help her pick strawberries and blackberries because she didn’t eat any until after her buckets were full. “The rest of them would eat them as fast as they picked them,” she says.

Carrie and Margie, “two peas in a pod,” she says, came down with typhoid fever as teen-agers.

“None of us had ever been too sick,” she says. “I think we were in the bed about a week or two, and we weren’t allowed to eat nothing solid.”

Her sister didn’t listen and ate something she wasn’t supposed to. “I said, ‘OK, you’ll find out,’ ” Carrie says. “The next morning, they had to have a doctor with her. I told her, I said, ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ ”

The family raised much of their own food. Their mother canned, she says, and they took hens they raised to the store to trade for salt, pepper, rice and other items they weren’t able to grow.

They kept potatoes from rotting by putting them in a shelter made out of corn stalks and straw. When they moved to a house that had a bank, they dug out a root cellar to store them in.

“In the spring, they’d put out and we’d get Irish potatoes out of the cellar to eat,” Carrie says.

Life was rough growing up back then. “We had to work like dogs, but we got through,” she says. “We made it, thank God.”

Carrie and her sisters learned to quilt from their mother and over the years, she says she has made at least 1,000 quilts. “I’ve probably done every style of quilting there is to be pieced,” she says.

She was 18 when she married John Earnhardt. “We didn’t have no refrigerator and we didn’t have no TV and we didn’t have no radio,” she says.“I don’t know what we did, because we didn’t have none of those things.”

The family went to her sister’s house on Saturday nights because she had a radio, and they would all gather around it to listen to the Grand Ole Opry. “We’d go up there and we’d stay until 1 o’clock and then go home,” she says.

When Salisbury got its own radio station, Carrie and her daughters, Mary and Viola, calling themselves the Piedmont Yodelers, would play every day at 11 and 4.

Carrie says people used to tell her that they would come in from working in the field to listen to them for half an hour and then go back.

“I talked to I don’t know how many who told me that,” she says. “It didn’t hurt them because they had to rest anyhow.” Mary and Viola played guitars, and Carrie played an accordion. “Talk about picking a guitar, Viola could pick one,” she says. “She could make it talk almost.” Carrie worked at the Rowan and China Grove cotton mills for $10 a week to help support her family.

As her children grew up and married and had children of their own, Carrie’s family continued to grow.

“Honey, don’t ask me that,” she says, laughing, when asked how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she has. “I can’t count them all, but I have a bunch.”

Visits from family is what Carrie looks forward to the most. When her grandson, Bryant, and his wife, Kathy, drive down from Nashville, Tenn., she says they ride around all day, eating lunch and dinner out.

Though her poor hearing prevents her from participating in some of the social functions at the retirement center, she says she enjoys listening to a minister whose sister is a resident there.

“I can hear him say ‘Jesus,’ ” she says. “That’s about all I can understand.”

Carrie was raised a Lutheran, but changed her membership to Methodist when the family moved to Rockwell.

Her secret to a long life?