THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408150030
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHAPANOKE LENGTH: Long : 114 lines
For most of his 100 earthly trips around the sun, his 5,200 weeks of troubles and blessings, his 36,525 days of pain and pleasure, Percy Steward worked as hard as any man and still found time to create happiness for others.
Last week, on Aug. 8, Steward completed his first full century of life. And as soon as teary kisses from his grandchildren were dry, he was out there in his Perquimans County yard mowing the grass around his neat little house. With a push mower, if you please.
The mower is, well, a last good friend for a 100-year-old man.
``I just like to cut the grass; this year's the first time I haven't been able to plant a garden, and mowing's the best work I have,'' Steward said.
``He'd get on a riding mower and cut every lawn in Chapanoke if I didn't watch him,'' said Frances, Steward's wife - his second - of 37 years.
``He's only been sick twice in his life, and the one time I had to take him to a hospital I happened to mention that he needed to hire someone to clean the chimney flue,'' Frances said.
``Next thing I knew he was out of that hospital and up a ladder working on the chimney.''
``I've always liked to help out; that's what the Bible says you should do,'' Steward said. ``Even when I was a boy I often cut a load of heating wood for an old man who lived in Chapanoke. He never knew it until he saw it stacked on his porch. Makes you feel good.''
Half a mile down narrow Chapanoke Road that winds past Steward's house lives Norman Warden, a revival preacher, who with other neighbors has been praying for years that Steward would make it to 100.
``When I was a little boy and there was a big snow, I'd look out the window and, sure enough, Percy had come down and shoveled a path to the road so I could get to the school bus,'' Warden said.
``I vowed to myself years ago that I'd give Percy a $100 bill if he reached his hundredth birthday.''
Steward did and Warden did.
Now, in his 5,201st week of life, Steward says he has to thank first the good Lord, then Porter's Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church in Chapanoke and, of course, his two wives for keeping him going for a super-Biblical three score years and forty.
Hard labor for daily bread helped, too, he thinks.
``It's good to keep busy; I worked hard - mighty hard. Never touched the whiskey and didn't smoke much; only a pipe until about 20 years ago'' when he quit for good, Steward said.
``I wouldn't let him in the house smelling of tobacco,'' Frances said.
No fancy diets, either. Just 100 years of solid Perquimans County country food - fried, full of hamfat and cholesterol, with greens and cornfield peas on the side - to give him strength to keep up that good work.
Steward looks, well, maybe 60. He is still trim and alert, smooth-shaven and proud of his appearance.
Awaiting a visitor on the porch last week, Steward wore a pair of blue-, gray- and yellow-checked slacks, suede shoes, a sports shirt, and close at hand was a rakishly shaped straw hat.
He doesn't need glasses and reads when he feels like it.
``But these teeth - I bought 'em.'' he said, grinning to demonstrate.
And just for the record, nobody in Perquimans County has a better memory.
How many other folks can remember a dozen presidents, including two Roosevelts; Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and all those other upstarts since FDR?
``That first big war in 1914; I remember that - they didn't need me then,'' Steward said.
``When that second big war was coming, Mr. Franklin Roosevelt said to build a Navy blimp base down there in Weeksville below Elizabeth City, and I quit farming and went to work with the civil service in Weeksville.
``There was no big machinery then; we dug all the foundations and all the pipe ditches by hand.''
Steward ended his career with the civil service as a brakeman on a shortline U.S. railroad line that ran from the Navy's Weeksville air station to a Norfolk & Southern Railroad junction in Elizabeth City.
``I retired after the war when they moved all those blimps to Lakehurst up in New Jersey.''
He kept right on working around Chapanoke and bought the little house and the acre of land along Chapanoke Road, which used to be called ``The 9-foot Brick Road'' in Perquimans County. Steward was a boy when the county began laying all those bricks on what is now U.S. 17 through Chapanoke and on toward Parksville.
The bricks are still visible under an occasional pothole.
In those days Parksville, two miles north of Percy's house, was nearly all small farms amid a wilderness of juniper forest.
It's still a lonely landscape - houseless and remote on the southwest edge of the Dismal Swamp.
Steward will tell you that living to 100 leads to emptiness.
``They're all gone: my four children, my first wife, friends I had when I was young.''
His last surviving son, Percy Jr., died in 1991 well into his 60s. Another son and two daughters died long before.
Happily there are a lot of surviving grandchildren ``and three great-great-great-grandchildren,'' Steward's wife said.
And, remarkably, Percy, the oldest surviving Chapanoke Steward, has two brothers and a sister who are still alive and living in Virginia.
After the death of Mattie, his first wife, Steward found Frances soon enough to help him finish raising his family - and hers, too.
``No, we don't ever fight,'' Frances said. ``I remember when that preacher said we were to have and to hold until death do us part and that's the way it is.''
The Stewards scorn air conditioning in their house, but television keeps them company in the evening.
``We stay up sometimes until all hours and then Babe - that's my Percy - will wake me up at five in the morning because he's thought of something he wants to do for me or the church or someone else.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
DREW C. WILSON/Staff
Percy Steward celebrated his 100th birthday Aug. 8. Steward says he
thanks the Lord, Porter's Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church in Chapanoke and
his first and second wives for keeping him going.
by CNB