101-year-old remembers her Model T

      By Debra Ann Vance, Post staff reporter

At age 3, Maude McNamee got sick and wasn't expected to live.

''I was a very delicate child,'' she recalls.

''We all had whooping cough. The doctor told my father I was a goner. The doctor used to come at 5 every day and milk the mare and feed me mare's milk. He brought me out.''

Mrs. McNamee has outlived three husbands, three brothers, a sister and a daughter.

She will turn 101 Wednesday.

Family and friends gathered Monday at the Florence Park Care Center for an early birthday celebration.

Mrs. McNamee's daughter, Ruth Ann Black, 74, who lives at the care center, planned the surprise party for her mother.

''She's a very wonderful mother,'' Mrs. Black said. ''She is special. She always loved being around people.''

Among the family and friends who gathered at the party for cake and ice cream was Mrs. McNamee's great-granddaughter, Madison Ann Black. Their age difference is 100 years.

Besides mare's milk, Mrs. McNamee credits eating bacon and treating people right for her longevity.

''I was always good to everybody,'' she said. ''If they done me a dirty trick, I didn't do them one ... that was my attitude toward everything.''

Mrs. McNamee was born on a 270-acre farm in Shaw, Miss. Her family raised horses and grew cotton and pecans. She remembers her brothers riding horses without a saddle or bridle; she recalls picking cotton and fishing.

As a teen-ager, she would sneak away and smoke ''rabbit tobacco'' - a weed that grew wild - and cornsilk.

''That's when I was in my prime,'' she said.

Mrs. McNamee graduated from Clinton High School in 1918.

''I still got my class school ring - wore the initials off twice,'' she said.

After high school, she got a job working for a company in Chicago. She traveled the Midwest demonstrating baking powder. Mostly she went to schools, showing home-economics teachers how to use the product.

She moved to Kentucky with her husband in the early 1900s, and they settled in Covington.

''It was slow and easy, just like it is now,'' she said of Kentucky.

For years, she worked as a buyer for McAlpin's department stores.

Mrs. McNamee, who lives in Woodspoint Health Care Center in Florence, is in good health and has an excellent memory.

She remembers her first car, a Model T, with no heater, and her first television set - an RCA. Everybody had an RCA, she said. She used like to watch game shows.

Mrs. McNamee lived on her own until she was well in her 90s. Then she moved in with her daughter and her daughter's husband, Fred Black.

Mrs. McNamee has always been quite active, her relative report, playing cards, going to dinner with friends. She also knitted and crocheted.

''It was hard to keep up with her,'' said a grandson, Rodger Black, 41. ''She was always on the move.''

Mrs. McNamee also was a fine cook, said her son-in-law, Fred Black. She was known for her homemade biscuits and pecan pies.

''She could fry the best chicken,'' Black said. ''Her chicken would make Kentucky Fried Chicken sick.''

Mrs. McNamee loves talking to people and hearing about relatives. At her birthday party, she was trying to set up a great-grandaughter with someone her grandson knows.

And what did Mrs. McNamee think about her birthday party?

''It was great,'' she said. ''I hope I have another one.''

Publication date: 07-03-00