Sunday’s feature package about retiring Post photographer Wayne Hinshaw included a photo with the cutline, “An unidentified woman sits on her porch.”
The woman is unidentified no longer, thanks to her family. She was 84-year-old Annie Shulenberger, mother of Dolly Shaver and grandmother of Linda Bowyer of Salisbury.
Here is the feature about Annie Shulenberger ó “Walkin’ Annie,” the headline writer dubbed her ó that appeared in the Post on Aug. 24, 1975.
Mrs. Shulenberger died July 11, 1978.By Joe Junod
news@salisburypost.com
The old woman in tennis shoes shuffles from the darkness of her home at 716 N. Green St.
“Yeah, I’m Annie Shulenberger,” she says. “What’s left of her.”
What’s left is an 84-year-old woman who wears her arthritis comfortably and without complaint, a woman who chops wood, wears gold-rimmed bi-focals, eats potato salad and walks everywhere she needs or wants to go.
“I walk right smart every day. I chop wood and I do my own washing ’cause I ain’t got nobody to do it for me.” she says after settling into an old, rusted chair on her front porch.
“I walk. I get out and walk and mess around. I don’t sit here all the time. But I don’t creep none in this heat ’cause it’s too tough out there. And I walk so my knees don’t get stiff,” she says.
Her longest walk is a weekly trek of two miles to the Rowan County Courthouse, where she pays $17.50 for a relative’s child support. “I didn’t think I’d ever get back ’cause I can’t take the heat. The doctor says I got a leaky heart and can’t walk fast and when it gets hot, I can’t hardly make it. I was going to mow today, but it was so hot, I said shucks.”
Annie has lived at 716 North Green since “the time of the first war.” Her husband Linn died in 1957.
“I done my share. Worked at Cannon, the night shift from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. About 75 cents a day,” she remembers. “Then I got married and my old man wouldn’t let me work the mill no more.”
Before her marriage and mill work, there was farm work. “Worked all day below St. Matthew’s Church, down towards the river, for 25 cents a day.
“Now that wasn’t much pay and I had to save that to buy shoes and clothes ’cause Mother was dead and Father was dead and it was just us kids,” she says.
Today, Annie Shulenberger lives on her late husband’s Social Security.
“It’s all I got. Well, I got a part of a garden but the grass got it. I was sickly this spring and couldn’t work it none. I got one row of tomatoes and they ain’t done nothing. I got a notion to take my hoe and turn ’em under.”
Her diet consists of “Arish taters” and vegetables.
“I don’t live on no high foods. I don’t take no meats neither. I eat taters and beans and such stuff like that. I’m going to make me some tater salad today. I ain’t had none in a long time and I’ve got the eggs and the taters in the house and I’m going to fix it.”