‘I am lucky to be here.’ Fort Worth woman reflects as she reaches a milestone — 110
Earline Andrews always figured she might live to be around 80, like her grandparents, parents and brother who went before her. She hoped to see the age of 100 but never spent much time worrying about it.
As her 80th birthday came and went in 1990, Andrews kept going — and kept going, and kept going. Through the ‘90s and the dawn of a new millennium, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks that changed life in America forever. Through once-unthinkable technological advances, a financial crisis and eventually into her second global pandemic, after the Spanish flu of 1918. She was an 8-year-old then, and still remembers losing her aunt to pneumonia caused by the virus.
Andrews is reaching the milestone of 110 on Wednesday, an age she admits would have been unreasonable to ever anticipate reaching. And though her hearing is mostly gone, her eyesight is poor and she needs the help of a walker affixed with tennis balls to get around, she says her mind is still sharp.
“This old thing is still working,” Andrews said proudly last week, seated on a couch in her niece’s home in northeast Fort Worth where she lives.
Her niece, Rayline Binion, who’s 93 herself, will drive Andrews and a cousin on Wednesday to a birthday lunch of coconut shrimp at Red Lobster, the only meal she’ll go out for. Binion will then take her to back to her home, where a group of her friends in the neighborhood will be waiting to surprise her with a party.
Andrews is looking forward to her birthday, but she says at this age she’s excited for every new day she gets. She voted early in Fort Worth on Tuesday, saying, “I never missed a vote.”
“I feel the same way on my birthday that I do today,” Andrews told the Star-Telegram on Friday. “And I feel that I am lucky to be here.”
For Binion, her late brother’s daughter, the birthday is definitely a big deal. “One of the most exciting things I’ve ever heard of,” she said.
“I’ll never know another 110-year-old,” Binion said, “unless I get there myself.”
Making it to this age puts Andrews in fairly rarefied territory, separating her by only seven years from the Guinness World Records’ oldest living woman, Kane Tanaka, who’s 117. The oldest woman ever, Jeanne Louise Calment, lived to be 122, according to the publication.
But when asked if she’s hoping to break any records, Andrews began to laugh. “I can tell you right now, no, I’m not trying to set a record,” she said.
She says she’s mainly focused on enjoying the time she has, no matter how long that is, with people she loves. Living with her niece, in her finely decorated home inside of a gated community, Andrews likes to step outside to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the different flowers. She likes listening to the audiobooks she has shipped to her house, most of them about history. She’s currently on a book about Stonewall Jackson.
Andrews, who was a middle school teacher for 42 years mainly in Texas, still values her independence, and doesn’t like to be spoken down to.
“I do not have to be entertained. I can entertain myself,” she stated plainly during her interview with the Star-Telegram.
Part of her self-reliance comes from her upbringing, in Marion County near the Louisiana state line, when kids were expected to do more and to learn on their own about life.
Only 110 years in the past.
‘You learn to take life as it comes’
There was a one-room schoolhouse up the road from Andrews’ family home where she went for her first three years of schooling. Her parents didn’t think it was a good education for her, with all eight grades packed into the room, a single heater in the middle to keep them warm in the cold winter months.
So, beginning in fourth grade, they sent her and her older brother to a school three miles away, in Louisiana. She recalls riding on the back of their horse, Dolly, with him, along dirt and clay roads.
As she grew up and continued through school, Dolly became Andrews’ horse, and some of her most cherished memories from childhood involve time spent with her. Around the age of 12, she would race Dolly against the first Model T cars, taking on men who lived in Texas and drove to Louisiana for work. She said she would win.
“The men started coming to my daddy and said, ‘Earline’s gonna get killed. She’s racing every car on the road,’” Andrews said. “When he walked in that house, he was not a happy camper ... He pointed his finger at me, and he said, ‘Everything these men have been telling me about you racing all the cars — it’s the truth.’”
Her parents were strict on her and put high value on education, in a time when it still wasn’t all-too common for women to go to college. That was especially true during the Great Depression, of which Andrews said, “You won’t really know the meaning of that word unless you lived through the depression.”
Her father, a farmer who worked for the Standard Oil Company at night, was struggling to support his family along with everyone else.
But her parents had savings set aside specifically for a college education, she said.
“From the time we were very, very small, my parents would say, ‘We are saving such and such for our children’s college education,’” Andrews said. “And we went through with it.”
Andrews attended college in Natchitoches, La. — a city name she can still spell with no hesitation — at what is now Northwestern State University, joining several of her friends from her high school. She studied education and history, and got her first job as a teacher in a little oil field town in Arkansas.
Wanting to get back to Texas, she said she got a job in Overton where she spent about 14 years, before she taught in nearby Tyler for another 20-some years. Her mother had wanted her to be a teacher, she said, “and I followed her rule.”
“I enjoyed all 42 years,” she said. “And I started out in the heart of the depression.”
She stopped teaching in 1975, before turning 65, in protest of what she said was the school district’s policy that teachers retire at that age. She and her husband, who died in 1998, never had children, but Binion said she always treated her and her three sisters as if they were her own as they were growing up.
She traveled plenty in her retirement, according to Binion, walking on the Great Wall of China at age 80 and riding on a camel’s back in Egypt at 85.
Her brother died in 1985, following her father’s death in 1955 and her mother’s death in 1974.
As she has continued living, getting weaker and quitting traveling for good, she says she hasn’t worried much about the prospect of death.
“It has not bothered me at all,” Andrews said. “You learn to take life as it comes and you learn to adjust and roll with the tide.”
‘Enjoy your life while you can’
When asked what secret she has, if any, to her longevity, Andrews burst into laughter before answering.
She said she does walk every day pushing her walker, noting up until recently she could make it half a mile around the block. Her niece also emphasized she has avoided vices like alcohol and tobacco and maintained a fairly healthy diet over the years.
But at the end of the day, Andrews said her advice to anyone wanting to make it to the age of 110 is to try to worry about it a little less.
And to “enjoy your life while you can.”
“Get the most out of every day, I would say,” she said. “We all have to look for the best. In other words, we have to look for the positive instead of the negative.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
