Offers insight
Colonie woman, 95, shares her secrets to longevity.
Alice Campbell does not look like a woman who’s about to turn 95. If she had told me, when we met at her house in Colonie on a recent morning, that she was 20 years younger or more, I would have believed her unquestioningly. Apparently, I’m not the only one. Andrea Campbell, who is Alice’s great-niece, said when Alice recently went to the doctor’s office, nurses there also couldn’t believe she was 95.
And her youthfulness is more than skin deep. Alice lives with a vigor that defies her age, say those who know her. Despite a cancer scare more than a decade ago, she takes no medications. She still does her own yard work. Her mind is sharp.
So what’s her secret? What advice does she have for those of us hoping to live so long and well?
“Good living,” said Alice, who
has a sister who is 101. “No drinking. No smoking.”
Also, she added, stay at home and avoid the honky-tonks her parents had forbidden her from going to. And be good to others.
“Be nice to people,” Alice said. “Treat everybody as they should be treated, and you can get to where I’m at. I’m 95. But I’m still going strong at 95.”
Don’t for a second think that Alice’s relatively youthful appearance means her life has been easy. It has been anything but.
Alice grew up on her grandfather’s farm in Choctaw County, in western Alabama. It was a poor place then, and it still is. Alice described a childhood of picking cotton for a grandfather who was “a mean old dog ” and carried a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver.
Alice left the farm when she married Lenward Campbell at 22. Seven years later, in 1956, she followed her husband to Albany, joining the Great Migration in which millions of Black Americans moved from the rural South to the cities of the North.
Alice landed in a crowded apartment at 167 S. Pearl St., near Madison Avenue. She was not, it’s fair to say, initially impressed with the noisy, crowded city around her, a place that couldn’t be much more different that rural Alabama.
But Alice and Lenward stayed, worked hard and climbed the ladder in their new hometown. Soon enough, they bought a row house on Elm Street, and later a house on Morris Street in the Pine Hills neighborhood. They built a life.
Alice, for 21 years a nurse’s assistant at the Stratton VA Medical Medical Center, often
worked three jobs, but family was her focus. She and Lenward had one child of their own yet cared for generations of nieces, nephews and foster children.
“That’s the way I was raised,” said Alice, a longtime member of the Walls Temple A.M.E. Zion Church. “I never said no to nobody. I found a way to help if they needed it.”
Lenward, a janitor with the state, was in his early 50s when he died of meningitis. Alice, for 36 years a widow, describes him “as the best man you could ever have.” She never remarried, though, as she pointed out, she certainly could have.
In 1991, seeking a neighborhood that felt safer for children, Alice bought her current house in the West Albany section of Colonie, off Sand Creek Road. In doing so, she broke a barrier in a
region that was, and remains, deeply segregated.
“I integrated this place,” Alice said. “I was the only Black person on the block. That’s the way it still is.”
The color of its occupants wasn’t the only thing that made Alice’s home unusual in the neighborhood.
“This is the house that all the kids came to,” said Andrea Campbell, who was raised by Alice. “The backyard would be full of children. The front yard would be full of children.”
When neighbor Regina Jakubec walked her dog by the house, those kids would swarm out to see and pet it. Jakubec soon started calling Alice “Grandma,” and, decades later, treasures their friendship.
“She’s just a sweetheart and a pistol,” Jakubec said, before
allowing that Alice does have one bad habit: She tends to end phone conversations abruptly, assuming the other person is done talking before they are.
“At 95, I guess I would do the same thing,” Jakubec said. (I would, too.)
But for a few more days, Alice is still only 94. Her birthday is May 24.
In the days until family members gather for her party, Alice has things to do. She has a garden to tend, for one thing, growing peas and green beans on a patch that can feel like a small piece of grandfather’s rural Alabama farm.
“I’ve always had one,” Alice said of the garden. “It brings back memories.”