Newspaper Photocopy: The Greenville News on Viola's Birthday · Greer Heritage Museum collection

Title

Newspaper Photocopy: The Greenville News on Viola's Birthday

Accession Number

2026.25.2

Accession Date

11 March 2026

Accession Creator

Adrienne Fuehrer

Depositor

Found in collection

Description

Passage from The Greenville News by Jessica Morris about Viola, Mrs. Ramey Kirkwood, and her 100th birthday.

Format

paper

Storage Location

Box 11 Folder 3 (Viola Kirkwood)

Text

THE GREENVILLE NEWS, GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA
Washington's Birthday 100th for Art (cut off)

By Jessica Morris GREER-- "'Whatcha doing, Mama? Whatcha doing, Mama? Mama making bed?'
"'Yes.'
"'I want to make bed.' I couldn't lift the quilt alone, but Mama let me take one side, and taught me how to make a bed." Says Mrs. Ramey Kirkwood of Greer, recalling a conversation 96 years ago.

"'Mama making bread?'"
"'Yes, I'm making bread'
"'What is the first thing you do.'
"'I don't know.'
""You wash your hands.'

"So I climbed down off the stool and got a dipper of hot water. I washed my hands. I can see myself holding them up to her for inspection. When I got back on the stool, she gave me a small lump of dough."'now watch Mama,' was all she said, and I kneaded just as she did. She put hers in four big black pans and I put mine in a little one. Then she fired up the stove. She would lift the tea towel to look at hers and I would lift the napkin to see mine, though I don't know whatever for. Mama put them in the oven. Mine, being small, was finished first. Mama took it out and spread it open, putting in butter. It was the best bread I ate in my entire life."

The curious little girl who was Viola Post of Iowa is clearly remembered by the capable woman she has become. Her delight in learning new skills brought her an interesting life.
For over 38 years she practiced optometry. Before that she was a photographer. An artist, she still paints and has been offered $500 for one of her oils. She once could play 10 musical instruments and still is a competent cook.

Born in Iowa Feb. 22, 1869, she was a frail child. Breathing cold air made her ill each winter so her parents moved, when she was almost 6, to Texas. After marriage to Ramey Kirkwood, a jeweler of Baton Rouge, La., she traveled in 17 states, living in 9 of them before settling in South Carolina.

Fifty years ago the Kirkwoods moved to Greer because Abbeville had no roads on which they could run their car.

Now a widow, Mrs. Kirkwood will celebrate her 100th birthday today. The women of the seven church circles of the First Presbyterian Church will give a drop-in from 2 until 6 p.m. at her home at 109 Few St.

Birthday greetings received Thursday from President Nixon pleased Mrs. Kirkwood, reminding her of the day she first saw an air plane. She and her mother were sitting on the steps of their house in New Orleans. They heard the plane before they saw it. It was following the stress and just as it drew near Viola's father "came tearing down the street to make sure we saw it. Theodore Roosevelt was in it."

She met Ramey Kirkwood when he learned watch repairing from her father. "We were married Oct. 15, 1891. Mr. Kirkwood never complained." his widow recalls. "If he didn't like something I had cooked he just left it on the plate and said nothing. His hair stayed black and he looked the same all the years I knew him." They celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary when he was ill in the hospital a month before his death in 1955.

At 9 Mrs. Kirkwood made her first dress, using two yards of calico at five cents a yard, a dozen buttons at five cents and a spool of thread at the same price. Later she used a pattern from the Peterson Magazine, pinning the pattern and cloth on the rug to cut the six panels. It was princess style in a pin stripe, white with black lines, and had clusters of three buttons all down the bias panels. "I wore that one to Sunday school."

Thereafter she made her clothes and her mother's, suits for her brother and even a madras vest for her father. It was stiffly starched affair made from a half a yard of materials printed with green leaves and pink rosebuds, she recalls. "When I gave that to Papa he was proud. Everybody in town had to known who had made that vest."

A number of the women in her mother's family lived into their 90's. Mrs. Kirkwood says she used to wonder if she might live to be 98. She enjoys living alone. "I get up when I'm ready, eat when I'm ready and go to bed when I'm ready."

She keeps her five-room house spotless, being assisted with heavy cleaning each Thursday afternoon by teenage girls in a Sunday School class of the First Presbyterian Church. The Kirkwoods' only child died in infancy. Cousins of her husband sometimes visit from Louisiana, but she has been mama and grandma to three generations of little girls in Greer and still is a favorite of the teen-age crowd. She speaks with pride of the young women who help her clean her house and is planning a drop-in for them at 3 p. m. Sunday.

There is no sign of age in her wit or quick laughter. One neighbor says "She is 100 years wise and happy as a child."

Relation

Dr. Viola Minnie Post Kirkwood