The staff at Current River Nursing Center all know that if you ask 100-year-old resident Kathleen Woolard a question, she’ll have a quick answer. More often than not, she’ll say something witty or unexpected, then chuckle.
On her best days, Miss Kathleen proves that her sense of humor is very much still intact. Asked about her amazing longevity during a recent interview, she shrugged and said, “You just go on, one year after another. That’s the way it goes.”
She countered with a question of her own: “What would you expect me to do? I do the best I can!”
On that day, which was one of her good ones, Ms. Kathleen noticed a staff member with a Monster energy drink and asked, “Are you sure you can handle that?”
The centenarian can’t be expected to recall her life in detail, but she can almost always competently converse about the things that have mattered most to her: memories of riding horses, her family and chief among the things she likes to talk about is her enduring love for motorcycles.
“I got one for my birthday and fell in love with it. I nearly took it to bed with me,” she says.
In doing so she had purchased the first BSA motorcycle ever sold in Springfield, Mo., (and couldn’t even ride a bicycle, says her son).
He tells the story: “The man that sold her the bike took her to the top of a hill and let her coast down with the motor running. He would then drive it back up the hill. They did that until she got to the bottom and just took off. That was in 1943 when a lady that owned her own motorcycle was unheard of.”
He says, “Years later, while on a trip to visit Mama’s sister Nola, we had some time to waste so we went to the motorcycle shop to see if anything seemed familiar.”
Ridley recalls that the place appeared to be empty and they were about to leave, thinking there was no one to wait on them.
“An older gentleman walked between the parked bikes and suddenly he saw my mom, stopped, and turned white as a sheet. He said, ‘Tot?’ and she said, ‘Pops?’
“She started to cry and the man ran toward her. I have never seen anyone move so fast as that old gentleman. They embraced for a long while.
“Then he turned to me and asked, ‘Are you her boy? Pick any bike in the shop and go for a ride. We’ve got some catching up to do.’ The two of them walked off together.”
Ridley, of course, left as requested.
That was the same gentleman that sold her the motorcycle and taught her how to ride, says Ridley.
He says he has no idea what his mother’s past relationship with that gentleman was, and to this day he has asked no questions. (A lady, even one’s own mother, is entitled to her privacy), he believes.
Ridley also says he has no idea how his parents met, only the location, Kingston, RI, and that his dad was a Navy SeaBee.
“The Seabee’s motto was, ‘We build, we fight.’ She and my dad separated when I was only five years old, and she raised me as a single mother.”
Even then Ridley saw his mom as both confident and courageous. “She was amazing then and still is,” he says.
When asked about whether she had a career, Kathleen Woolard talks about being a secretary. “I filled up many notepads like that one” [she says, indicating the reporter’s notebook].
Her son says he doesn’t remember his mother being a secretary, although she went to school for it. What sticks in his mind is that he had a working mom who provided for him, and he never felt as if he lacked for anything.
“She dedicated her life to caring for me. She made sure I attended parochial school and went to church. She gave up a lot to raise me and take care of me,” he says.
They lived in Rockford, Ill., until she decided they should move to Paragould, Ark., so they could be closer to family, and where she could get a job that supported the two of them.
In 1963, Ms. Kathleen purchased a general store that had once been owned by her parents, Harrison and Delia Woolard.
The store was located in Stringtown, on the Missouri-Arkansas State line, a “stone’s throw” from properties owned by her parents and brothers Redus and Jim Woolard.
“My grandparents and Uncle Redus lived on the Arkansas side, and my Uncle Jim lived on the Missouri side,” Ridley remembers.
There he and his mom worked as a team. She ran the store, and he worked as a stock boy.
She also took care of both her parents until they passed away. In the meantime, Ridley had grown up and moved to Florida to raise his family. Kathleen visited in her camper trailer and stayed several years.
She had a heart attack and a stroke at the same time, about 10 years ago, and after that she wanted to go “back home, to stay,” says Ridley.
After that, whenever he would visit his mom, he would ask her if she wanted to go riding.
“She would say, ‘Just let me get my helmet,’ and we’d take off. She was still riding well into her 80s,” he says.
Once on a visit when his mother lived in Corning, Ark., he and his son, Shawn, stopped through on their way to Branson. Kathleen went with them, riding 150 miles a day.
She still loves to talk about those trips, eyes sparkling when she says, “Richard’s bike [a 2003 Harley-Davidson 100th Anniversary edition Fat Boy] was a lot more powerful than mine. It could get up speed really good.”
After the stroke the family could tell Kathleen’s short-term memory was fading.
“We would ‘do the loop’ in conversation, which means she would ask me a question and we would go from topic to topic and she’d come back around and ask the same question she had asked the first time,” says Ridley.
He learned that an old friend, Bob Adams, had opened a senior citizens’ boarding home in Doniphan. He made arrangements for Kathleen to relocate to the town where she has hung up her helmet for good, and to a people who have become an extended family.
As the reigning, oldest resident at Current River Nursing Center, (100 and counting), Ms. Kathleen is a local treasure.
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