SPENCER — She’s lived through three centuries, six wars and 20 presidents and witnessed the evolution of communication technology from morse code and the telephone to radio and television, satellite and computers. Around her, women were liberated, schools were integrated, animals were genetically simulated.
Yet Esther Hewitt doesn’t recall when (or believe that) man has landed on the moon. Then again, that “giant leap for mankind” is just another wave in an ocean of 105 years worth of memories.
On Jan. 11, Hewitt celebrated her 105th birthday with family, friends and the staff of Spencer Healthcare, the facility into which she was admitted last July. The celebration was a joyous one, mostly because she believes she’s at a private hospital and not a nursing home.
“She said she’d rather die than go into a nursing home,”said her daughter, Edythe
Setzer. “She doesn’t want to have to depend on anybody.” Hewitt lived alone in an apartment after her husband, Charles Clinton, died in 1983 as a result of emphysema which turned into pneumonia. She was 88 then.
Severely impaired hearing and poor vision are the only health problems that warrant help from the nursing staff (who communicate with her with a dry-erase board and a lot of patience). And even though a fading memory often has her believing she’s 75, or 101, her daughter said she can remember days when her mother was able to relive the best times of her life.
Hewitt was born 1896 in the Trading Ford community to German- and English-born parents (she jokes that her father came over on the Mayflower). Setzer recalled hearing her mother talk about her mother, Esther Bankett, who was a great influence in her life.
Her parents’ relationship, Setzer recalled, was a “wonderful, loving” one.” The golden lady met her knight in shining armor in Spencer during the annual Labor Day parade. Setzer retold the story.
“The first time she saw my daddy, he was riding a big, white horse in the parade. They met, and he walked her home. He wanted to kiss her good night, but she wouldn’t let him, and he left. But he came back the next night and said, ‘If you had let me kiss you last night, Iwould not have come back.’”
Clinton continued to demonstrate that gallant behavior during their courtship and throughout their marriage, which was in 1913. Hewitt was only 16, but her father documented on the marriage certificate that his daughter was 18 so she could legally marry. Clinton was 21.
“Inever remember hearing my father call my mother by her first name,”Setzer remembered. “It was either, ‘Honey,’ ‘My wife’ or ‘Your mother.’ ”
Hewitt’s early maternal days with Setzer, her sister and late brother were pre-women’s lib, so she was the quintessential, pre-Martha Stewart stay-at-home mother and homemaker, often filling their house on South Main Street with the smell of kraut-and-dumplings or egg custard.
Those favorites became delicacies when the Great Depression hit. Clinton left for Virginia with his job at Southern Railways, leaving his wife and children home. To supplement their income, Hewitt took in boarders, and to those who were hungry, she gave food.
“She never turned away a hungry mouth,” Setzer said. “She wouldn’t let them in the house because we children were there, but she would have them sit on the back step and give them food outside.”
“Inever turned them away,”Hewitt said. “Not me.”
Her Samaritan’s spirit was fostered during a lifelong membership at Salisbury’s First United Methodist Church, where she was a faithful member of her Sunday School class. She can’t pick one Bible verse of which she is fondest, because all of them are favorites.
But Hewitt, who Activities Director Peggy Brown admitted is a bit impatient, can’t understand why “loving your neighbor as yourself” does not seem to thrive as it did when she was younger.
“You can’t help people like you used to,”Hewitt lamented. “They’re just all for themselves. It used to be that people helped each other, but not now.”
Even back then, when Hewitt was frustrated at the world, she would work in her garden, listen to FDR’s “Fireside Chats,” tend to her talking parrot or indulge in a favorite activity with her husband:watching “All My Children.”
With all the global changes she’s seen, it would seem that Hewitt might wear the weight of the world on her face. On the contrary, Brown said, she continues to be a “priss.”
“She always wants her clothing to be so and her hair done,” Brown said. “She still has her pride and her vanity, and Ithink that shows she’s always been a lady and she hasn’t lost that.”
Setzer said she remembers her mother applying facial cream and makeup every morning. “She never sat around the house in a housecoat.” Even today, she will not spend a day in bedclothes.
Hewitt said only “the good Lord knows”why she’s lived this long, that maybe it’s because she’s lived a good life and treated others well, or maybe it’s plain determination. Asked to ponder whether or not she’ll live to be, say, 111, she answered “Yeah!” without hesitation.
“At the rate she’s going, she probably will,”Brown said. “We’d like to have her around at least that long.”
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