Happy birthday to you, Edith Renfrow Smith!
While this column is not typically directed toward one specific individual, Ms. Smith, who turns 109 years old Friday, is no typical individual.
Readers might recall her incredible story from two years ago, on her 107th birthday — she was the first Black graduate of Grinnell College. Class of ’37, who came to Chicago, where she became secretary to Oscar DePriest, Chicago’s first Black alderman. Future jazz great Herbie Hancock lived across the street, and taught her daughter to play “Chopsticks.”
When Ms. Smith turned 108, we revisited, and were rewarded with sound advice (“This is a wonderful world and you need to take care of it”) and a jar of her homemade raspberry jelly. I figured, if turning 107 and 108 were noteworthy, how could 109 not be?
Besides, I was curious: How’s she doing?
“Oh, I’m just fine,” said Ms. Smith. “I’ve been doing fine.”
I apologized for not visiting in person, as in previous years. But I had unwisely put off reaching out until July, and by then COVID had settled in for a prolonged stay. She understood completely.
“You go keep that to yourself,” she said. “I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”
What Ms. Smith did not mention — and this might be a clue to how one gets to be 109 — is that she herself already had COVID, last May.
“She didn’t have COVID like everybody else,” said her daughter, Alice Frances Smith. “She was in the hospital for something else. They tested her, and the day she left, the doctor said, ‘You know she has COVID.’ And I said, ‘No, no one told me.’ My mother didn’t have a fever. She had nothing. That was her big excitement for the year.”
Well, that and having another building, in addition to the library and the gallery, named in her honor at Grinnell.
“This time a community dorm,” said Alice “They had a big party” — at Brookdale, where she lives on Sheridan Road — “for the naming of the building. She can’t travel. We had a big ribbon cutting in the dining room. My mother got to invite whoever she wanted. About 40 people — relatives from Detroit, Kenosha, Gary, Washington DC., Atlanta.”
So what is a typical day for her like? The day we spoke, WGN-TV sent a crew by, and she whipped up some preserves for them, though not to her typical high standards.
“They wanted to see me start my strawberry jam. That is what I did today,” she said. “I only made three half-pints. I hadn’t planned to make it until tomorrow, so this was a hurry-up job. They really didn’t see a good job. But they got what they wanted.”
She moved here about a year and a half ago. That might be a noteworthy lesson. Even toward the end of your 11th decade, sometimes a change is necessary.
“It’s better all around. The atmosphere is completely different,” said Alice “They make my mother feel really wanted. My mother feels really happy.”
She is not averse to using technology, as a member, for the past 49 years, of the First United Methodist Church of Chicago, 77 W. Washington.
“My church has been so supportive of their seniors,” she said. “They see that I get communion whenever they have it at the church. They have telephone communion. They bring [the bread and wine] the day before and then they call on Sunday. It’s wonderful.”
Her birthday plans are small. Alice is whipping up a seafood quiche, and she’ll enjoy it with a few friends from the building, plus some ladies she volunteered with — she volunteered at the Art Institute until she was 98.
In the past, Ms. Smith has waved off the idea that she is a repository of wisdom. But she did leave me with a parting thought.
“Do what you can do and stop telling people you can’t,” she said. “And take care of yourself.”
I promised her I would try, and that next year, for her 110th, I’ll show up in person.
Alice sees her mother as an example of resilience.
“She lived through the Spanish flu, and never got that,” she said. “If you can go through so many wars, so many other kinds of pandemics. It’s unbelievable. She’s had a really good life and enjoyed it immensely.”
Then she corrected herself.
“She’s enjoying it immensely.”
