105 and still interested, alert and happy

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Dorothy Shannon (right), of Mitchell, greets Jessie Willhoite Sunday at Willhoite’s 105th birthday celebration at Firesteel Healthcare Center. Several family members and friends attended the event for Willhoite, whose birthday is today. (Melanie Brandert/Republic Photo)

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Not many people can recall a flu epidemic that hit Oregon in 1918, recovering from smallpox in high school or enduring a blizzard while serving as a hospital nurse.

For Jessie Willhoite, those memories are still fresh in her century-old-plus mind.

Willhoite’s secrets to longevity aren’t much of a mystery. She believes in the importance of keeping up with the news, taking interest in other people and maintaining her health.

“It’s a good thing to have a sense of humor,” she said.

Surrounded by family, friends and former nursing colleagues, Willhoite celebrated her 105th birthday Sunday with a party at Firesteel Healthcare Center, where she has been a resident for two years. Her birthday is today.

Firesteel officials submitted an application for Willhoite to become a member of South Dakota Health Care Association’s Century Club last Friday. When asked on the application what Willhoite contributed to her longevity, she told a staff member, “The Lord wasn’t ready to take me home yet.”

Once she becomes a member, Willhoite will be the 35th oldest resident in South Dakota, said LuAnn Severson, Century Club program coordinator for SDHCA.

Jessie Cottingham grew up in Sisseton with five brothers and four sisters, with only one sister surviving. Her father ran a blacksmith shop in town and when it burned down, her family lived in Oregon for a year before returning to Sisseton.

The South Dakota weather was more to their liking than Oregon’s damp climate.

“We kids did not like rain. We liked snow,” she said.

She recalled the deadly flu epidemic of 1918. It swept across the world, killing an estimated 50 million people during World War I, according to archives.gov.

“We were a block and a half from where a big cemetery was and we had a continual burial procession,” she said. “There were no antibiotics.”

She graduated from Sisseton High School and moved to Mitchell to attend nursing training at Methodist Hospital. She worked at the hospital for several years, noting that aides were quite good and nurses followed doctors’ orders from their medical calls.

Willhoite recalled a blizzard in the ’30s or ’40s in which couples could not travel into town to have their babies delivered.

“Fathers had to deliver their own babies,” she said. “There was only one death. That was a sad thing.”

Jessie married Vernon Willhoite in 1940, and they lived on a farm between Mitchell and Loomis. They adopted her brother Robert’s son while he was in the military and eventually moved to Mitchell.

She remembered her son’s football team winning the state championship the first year he competed.

Willhoite also recalled trips to the Black Hills with her husband in a camper on their pickup.

“One time I caught a trout about six inches long,” she said. “I’m not fond of trout. I like walleye better.”

Willhoite’s immediate family includes daughter-in-law Paula Cottingham, of Sioux City, two grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

Her husband died of cancer in the 1980s and their son, Bob, died a few years ago of a heart attack while living in Sioux Falls.

Her nephew Clyde Lehman, 84, and his wife, Alice, 77, of Mitchell, are her closest relatives locally. Alice Lehman presented her with a new quilt from the Lehman family and a prayer shawl from her nursing colleagues.

Clyde Lehman said he thought his aunt’s secret to longevity was being caring and having a good life.

“She’s had a lot of hardships and she’s come through,” he said.

Alice Lehman called Willhoite a strong person.

“I feel like she has been a very good neighbor, a good mother, a good wife,” she said of her aunt-in-law. “She’s just a genuinely good Christian lady.”

The couple both described her as independent — to the extent that she insists on paying her nursing home bill herself.

Willhoite’s hobbies once included sewing, reading and gardening. Now she enjoys writing letters to family and friends and attending church. She voted in the 2008 election.

Gladys Bortel, 88, of Mitchell sat next to Willhoite as they ate birthday cake and shared a few laughs and memories.

Willhoite had been Bortel’s supervisor as head nurse on the third floor of the former Methodist Hospital.

“I worked as an aide for awhile and ended up being director of nurses,” said Bortel, who retired in 1986. “She was just a very caring person. She stood up for her people.”

Dorothy Shannon, 79, of Mitchell, worked as a nurse for Drs. Floyd Gillas and Preston Brogdon at Third Avenue and Main Street and knew Willhoite from the hospital.

“She’s such a caring person,” Shannon said. “Her patient care was so superb when she gave it.”

Shannon attributed Willhoite’s longevity to taking good care of herself, along with good, hard work and being a caring person.

Willhoite, who gets around in a wheelchair, only takes medication for her heart.

When one of Willhoite’s relatives hugged her goodbye and told her she would see her next year, Willhoite found it a little humor in it.

“She’s counting on a lot,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

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