Ethel Phillips Wiggins has tried not to worry during her century of living because, she said ,worrying is like a rocking chair.
"A rocking chair gives you something to do," Wiggins said, "but it gets you nowhere."
In her 100 years, Wiggins has encountered times when others would expect her to worry. At age 95, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer, and she had to undergo a mastectomy.
"I went through that surgery with flying colors," Wiggins said. "I had company all afternoon when I came out of it. God has been good to me."
The cancer has not returned.
Her daughter, Ann Wiggins Wagnon, said lightning recently struck a transformer and followed the wire and went under her mother's house in Capshaw, west of Athens, and hit a gas line.
Smoke started rising in the bedroom where Wiggins stays. Her grandson looked under the house and saw blue flames and turned the gas off.
East Limestone volunteer firefighters cut a hole in the floor to put out the fire without harming the home where she will celebrate her birthday.
"We're lucky, very lucky," Wagnon said. "The house could have burned down or exploded."
Born in same house
Wiggins was born July 8, 1909, in the house where she still lives. The bedroom where she stays in a hospital bed is the bedroom where she was born. Her father, Mac Phillips, bought the home, located on U.S. 72 east of East Limestone Road, in 1898.
It originally had four rooms. The family operated a cotton farm that at one time was 1,250 acres.
"The community was called Shoal-Ford because there was no bridge over the Shoal creek, and people had to ford it," Wiggins said. "I went to Shoal-Ford school, which had seven grades in one room."
The teachers lived with the Phillips family, which included Wiggins, her two older brothers and an older sister.
Wiggins said tenants lived in homes on the farm and shopped at the general store the family owned. The store still is on the property next to the house and operated until the late 1950s.
Her father served as postmaster of the post offfice located in the store.
"In 1901, Papa wrote to The University of Alabama and asked if they had a medical student who was graduating," Wiggins said. "Dr. Darby came to us and lived here and worked at the store."
The family left the house only to attend school and services at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Madison County. Two or three times a year, her father took them to Huntsville to get school clothes or other supplies.
Going on boy hunts
While a student at Athens High School, Wiggins and her friends started going to Decatur to meet boys.
"There weren't any boys in Athens," she said.
On one of their boy hunts she met Robert "Scout" Wiggins, a football player at Decatur High School. The two used to go window shopping, and he saw her "ooh and aah" over a Shirley Temple doll.
"I got it that Christmas, and I still have it," Wiggins said. "I can't get rid of that."
Wiggins said she likes collecting dolls and even made her own doll while living in Athens and going to school at Athens College, now Athens State University.
"My best friends, Martie Armstrong and Margaret Young, made one, too, and we lugged those dolls with us everywhere we went," she said.
Wiggins' cloth doll is black and white with a clown-like outfit. The white areas now have brown stains, and one arm is missing.
"We need to get that fixed," Wiggins said, as the doll rested on the edge of her bed.
Wiggins graduated from Athens College in 1929 with a degree in science. She taught school for six weeks at Capshaw.
Moved to Kentucky
Wiggins and her husband married in September 1936 in Nashville and moved to Kentucky, where Scout Wiggins worked for the railroad. After about five years, they moved back to Limestone County to help her father with the farm.
"Other than that time, I've lived in this house," she said. "I've never missed a Christmas here but one."
That was after she was injured in a car accident in the 1970s and had to stay with her daughter.
"She's never let me forget that she didn't get to spend that Christmas at her home," Wagnon said.
July 12 celebration
Her family, which lives locally and in Kentucky, will celebrate her birthday Sunday at her beloved home.
"I'm not going to fix something to eat," Wiggins admonished.
Her daughter said there will be finger foods, cake and punch. Wiggins said her only request for her birthday is to have her family with her.
She has two children, Wagnon and Bobby Wiggins. She also has six grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
"What I liked about Christmas here was being with all my family," she said. "All my memories here are special. When you've lived someplace so long, you can't pick just one special memory." Wiggins, who doesn't worry, doesn't dwell on her age, either.
"I've been working toward it so long, I guess," she said. "I never did think about it. It seems too big (the number 100)." To see more of The Decatur Daily, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.decaturdaily.com Copyright (c) 2009, The Decatur Daily, Ala. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
Copyright (C) 2009, The Decatur Daily, Ala.