A photograph shows 107-year-old Eula Mae Johnson of Delray Beach as a young woman.
Eula Mae Johnson (seated) is surrounded by granddaughters Bernice Johnson,
Shannon Johnson and Naomi Palmer and daughter Ruthie.
Johnson’s voter registration card shows her birth date of Aug. 6, 1909.
Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
Eula Mae Johnson has reached that awkward age where family members no longer put one candle on the cake for every year.
The Delray Beach fire department would no doubt be relieved, because Eula Mae Johnson and Palm Beach County were born in the same year.
On April 30, 1909, the county was officially created out of the northern chunk of Dade County. Johnson arrived on Aug. 6, 1909, in Bartow, Georgia.
In 1923, when Delray Beach was incorporated, she was already 14.
In 1935, when she arrived in Boca Raton to pick beans on Butts Farm, she was 26. Boca Raton was just turning 10. By the 1940s, she’d moved to Pearl City, Boca Raton’s black neighborhood.
“She probably is the oldest person living today in Delray Beach,” Janet DeVries, an archivist, historian and author, concluded after searching the city’s census and marriage records.
In 1969, when Eula Mae Johnson retired to Delray Beach after spending the 1950s and ’60s in Brooklyn, N.Y., you could still have a new home built on Lake Ida Road for $17,000. She still lives there, still has the same phone number after nearly a half-century, and still looks forward to every tomorrow.
“I’ve been here a long time,” she says with a laugh, “and I feel fine. I don’t have any pain, thank God. The good Lord is looking down and keeping me.”
Born the granddaughter of a slave, she left school in the seventh grade, rode wagons, picked beans, worked a mule plow, and married at 19.
Her husband was not a good man. She remembers watching him sleep while she stood over the bed with an ax, considering. She left him instead, and married twice more. The second one died, and she left the third. Along the way, she started a dynasty.
“I birthed 16 children into the world,” she says. “Seven sons and nine daughters. They were all pretty … pretty good.”
Of those 16 children, 11 survived to adulthood, and seven are still living. She has 35 grandchildren, 65 great-grandchildren and 52 great-great-grandchildren.
In March 2007, she became a great-great-great-grandmother for the first time, and a dozen more have arrived since then.
Altogether she is the matriarch of 176 descendants, including two children younger than some of her grandchildren.
Would she marry again?
“I don’t intend to!” She grimaces. “What would I do with another husband?”
Eula Mae Johnson is a rarity, and well on her way to becoming even rarer.
In 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number of Americans 100 or older at 72,197, out of a total population of 317 million.
In 2010, the most recent U.S. Census counted only 4,090 centenarians in Florida, out of a population of nearly 19 million.
If she can hang on for three more years, Johnson will enter the truly rarefied ranks of the “supercentenarians,” those 110 or older. The Gerontology Research Group, which tracks U.S. centenarians and validates claims, has verified only six living supercentenarians as of May 14.
Validating claims is a problem, the census takers acknowledge. Errors abound, and African-Americans of that age often have no birth certificates. Johnson has lost hers but does have Social Security and voter registration cards that attest to her birth date.
Nowadays, she has slowed down but has no intention of stopping. Seated before a big-screen television, she watches Andy Griffith, Gunsmoke and Bonanza reruns on the Me-TV channel and remembers when a neighbor charged 25 cents to listen to her new radio.
“It was amazing,” Johnson says. “You didn’t see anything like that at that time. And then we thought it was wonderful to have a TV.”
She views the world with a satisfied smile, enjoys the small pleasures and tolerates the usual questions.
“I’d have a drink, but I’m not a drinker,” she says. “I never smoked. And I eat whatever my taste calls for. That’s what I eat.”
Ribs, collard greens, burgers, biscuits and syrup. She’s partial to butter pecan ice cream but no longer entertains macaroni and cheese. “Cheese will bind you up,” she insists.
Her back yard was a Garden of Eden until the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 took the garden with them. She grew her own greens and sweet potatoes, cabbage, cantaloupe and on and on, and went fishing in between.
She sees her doctor every three months and takes some pills for blood pressure and pre-diabetes but gave up on Centrum Silver, the multivitamin for older people.
She’s been to Canada, Detroit and Las Vegas. Pressed to name another foreign country she’d like to see, she finally summons “England” but without much conviction.
She admits to having once gotten a speeding ticket, for going 42 in a 25-mph zone. She was 92 at the time and quit driving three years later.
“I just quit,” she says. “Nobody stopped me.”
Age has made her mellow, you think. And then you make the mistake of asking if she enjoys an afternoon nap.
“No!” she bristles. “I don’t take any nap in the daytime. I sleep at night. I can’t sleep in the day.”
Across the room, her granddaughter Naomi Palmer smiles and mouths, “Yes, she does.”
According to Palmer, her grandmother dozes off in the front of the TV, then vehemently insists that she hasn’t been sleeping when they wake her. Only old people nap, after all.
In 1909, when Eula Mae Johnson was born, the U.S. president was William Howard Taft, who vowed in his inaugural address not to appoint any black Americans to federal office.
On Oct. 23, 2012, when President Barack Obama brought his re-election campaign to the Delray Beach Tennis Center, she stood behind the line holding a sign that said “I’m 103,” and was hugged by America’s first black president.
Did she ever expect to see that day? “Well, I didn’t know,” she says. “I expect to see most anything.”
Maybe that is the glory of being 107. Not that you are surprised to see a black man elected president, twice, but that nothing surprises you anymore.
She is still sharp, but there are moments. Sometimes she stands before the mirror and thinks she is seeing through it to the room beyond rather than a reflection.
Not long ago, her granddaughters tried to discuss a living will.
“You can make all the plans you want,” she reminded them. “But you might die before me.”
On Mother’s Day, she went to church at Tree of Life Ministries, as always, then celebrated with a catered feast of chicken and broccoli, mashed potatoes, cabbage and corn on the cob.
Finally, she endures that inevitable question.
What have you learned from all these years?
“I learned a whole lot,” she says. “Be kind to everybody. I read the Bible and pray every day.”
What do you pray for?
“I pray to live to see tomorrow.”
She has talked for an hour or more, and you sense the time has come for her to not take another nap.
Is there anything else she’d like to say?
Eula Mae Johnson ponders the question a moment.
“No,” she decides. “I think I’m about said out.”
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