By Ron Hayes
OCEAN RIDGE — The night before Gladys Kuhman died, a doctor at Bethesda Memorial Hospital couldn’t get a blood pressure reading.
“Is she waiting for someone?” he asked.
No, said her daughter, Gail Ennis. The family has said their goodbyes.
“Oh,” the puzzled doctor said. “Is she always this stubborn?”
Yes, she certainly was.
“She was feisty,” Ennis says. “A very tiny, very strong woman, and the glue that held our family together.”
Mrs. Kuhman died in the hospital’s hospice unit Nov. 1. She was 93, and had suffered a stroke Oct. 16.
Mrs. Kuhman was born in Pittsburgh on March 9, 1920. After high school, she married Jerome Kuhman, a carpenter, who survives her.
“They eloped in 1939 and always wanted to come to Florida, but they ran out of money in South Carolina and had to go back to Pittsburgh,” her daughter said.
The couple finally made it in 1953 and moved into what is now the Seaview Mobile Home Park on Federal Highway in Boynton Beach.
In 1968, the Kuhmans moved to Ocean Ridge, where Mrs. Kuhman kept a pet spider monkey named Poo, joined a bowling team and became a passionate gardener.
Marie Speed has lived just across the street for the past 22 years.
One day, she glanced out the window to find her neighbor up on the roof, and a ladder down on the ground.
“She’d climbed up there to fix the antenna and the ladder fell,” Speed recalled with a laugh. “She was just a real spunky, plainspoken woman. She was sort of ageless.”
In time, age did catch up with Mrs. Kuhman, but she remained no less spunky.
About four years ago, her daughter recalled, Mrs. Kuhman drove out Boynton Beach Boulevard to pick up a bucket of chicken — and didn’t return.
The family put out a silver alert.
“She left home at 4 p.m. and a state trooper found her at three o’clock in the morning, heading back east. She’d gotten on the turnpike and just kept going.”
Mrs. Kuhman never drove again, but one detail still makes her daughter smile.
“There was an emergency card in her wallet with my name and address and phone number on it, but she never called,” Ennis said. “I think she was just determined to get back on her own.”
In addition to her husband and daughter, she is survived by another daughter, Joyce Rietano, of Homosassa; a son, Fred Kuhman, of Walhalla, S.C.; six grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren; and three great-great-grandchildren.
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