110-year-old: ‘I always have something to do’
“I’m doing good, thank the Lord,” Wash Wesley said on the eve of his 110th birthday, as his family and church family crammed into a Maywood banquet hall to fete him.
Generations of nieces and nephews — including a greatgreat-great-great nephew of three months — and dear friends from the Second Baptist Church sang birthday wishes to Wesley, who turns 110 Monday.
“I’m here today with my greatuncle who’s made 110, wow!” 7-year-old Joshua Dickerson told the crowd over a microphone. The child turned to his great-greatgreat uncle: “I hope you keep on living, OK?”
Wesley’s life has so far spanned 18 presidents. When he was born in rural Louisiana in the year he calls “nineteen-three,” Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House.
He was the baby of a family of six children born to farmers who grew cotton and corn. He worked his way through Mississippi and Texas and Oklahoma before settling in 1950 in Maywood where he lives today.
He retired from International Harvester. And he’s outlived both his wives. He never had any children, just scores of nieces and nephews he dearly loved.
Wesley’s voice is deep and deliberate, his skin decades smoother than how you’d imagine a centenarian’s, thanks to what goes on it: water, and sometimes Vaseline. His health is solid — except he got glasses in recent years to help him read his Bible.
And there’s one reason Wesley — a beloved deacon as his church — believes he’s lived so long: God
“I wish for the Lord to keep me like he’s been,” was what Wesley asked for when he blew out his candles.
A holder of an Illinois driver’s license, Wesley still does his own grocery shopping, his own laundry, his own housework. He tends a garden in his backyard, growing vegetables and some flowers.
Wesley didn’t start cooking until his 80s, after his second wife got sick and he cared for her in the dining room of their home instead of putting her into a nursing home. But she ate what he cooked, and he kept at it.
“I like to be doing something all the time,” he said. “I sit down a while, I stand up a while. Then I do some work a while. I always have something to do.”
Wesley gets a birthday bash every year, ever since he turned 100.
“Deacon Wesley, we salute you,” said Rev. Donald Williams, who heads one of Wesley’s prayer groups. “We thank God for you and we know your time will be extended if God still has something for you to do.”