The love of learning has kept Ethel Taylor young (at 99)
Clinton resident Ethel Taylor celebrated her 99th birthday on Tuesday, Nov. 7 with her family and friends. Pictured are Susan Little, Tana Taylor, Ethel Taylor (center), Corrine Taylor Johnson, and Terri Taylor.
“I always loved to read. We had a neighbor who papered her kitchen with newspapers. People used to do that back then. We didn’t get the newspaper. We had magazines, and the Bible, of course, but we didn’t grow up with newspapers though we had a newspaper in our hometown. We usually got a copy of the paper from somebody else if we did read the paper. We tried to live frugally. It was during the Depression, you know, so we had to save money to keep from starving [Great Depression of the 1930s]. That’s just the way things were,” explained Taylor in a recent interview.
Taylor celebrated her 99th birthday last week, Tuesday, Nov. 7, at the Waters of Clinton, the nursing home in Clinton on Longmire Road, with friends and family.
During the birthday celebration, she was presented with a proclamation signed by the City of Clinton Mayor Scott Burton and City Council declaring Nov. 7 “Ethel Taylor Day” in honor of her birthday.
Taylor’s response to receiving the proclamation, which came as a complete surprise, speaks volumes about her personality.
“This is for me?!” she asked upon receiving the proclamation. “Thank you, thank you so much. I appreciate you all.”
Gracious, kind, thoughtful of others, and genuine.
Ethel Taylor has all of these qualities — and more.
Born in Whitley County, Ky, on Nov. 7, 1918, Taylor, one of five children, said she always had determination, even during life’s hardships.
Ironically, this determined lady with an iron will was born during one of the deadliest flu pandemics in modern history. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became ill and some 675,000 Americans died during the pandemic.
“The year I was born, the family kept my mother, who was pregnant with me, inside the house for fear she would get some of the diseases that were prevalent at the time, especially the flu,” Taylor recalled. “Luckily, the flu epidemic that was raging at that time didn’t kill any of our immediate family.”
When the Stock Market crashed in October 1929, ushering in “The Great Depression,” she was 10 years old. Taylor remembered the Depression years as hard ones for her family and neighbors.
“I just know that we lived better than most people because we had the coal mines that my father owned. We stayed warm and had a garden, so we did pretty well, but other people, our neighbors, they didn’t do so well. It was harder on them that it was us,” she said.
When radio and television became mass marketed commodities, Taylor said her family was one of the first in the area to get them.
“We had the first radio, and later, the first TV. My daddy was interested in stuff like that, electronics and technology,” Taylor said.
Going to school for Taylor meant waking up early in the mornings and walking to the one-room schoolhouse a few miles from her house.
“They didn’t have school buses then where I lived but we didn’t have to walk very far. My daddy was on the school board. He stayed up with all that stuff,” said Taylor.
Taylor was a bright student.
“I was ready for high school when I was 12 years old,” she said.
But finishing school was not easy, not back then. “I completed 8th grade and started high school, but I had to quit because my mother got sick,” said Taylor. Taylor was the oldest daughter and quit school to help with the housework and cooking.
“We didn’t have electricity then so we had to iron and do all that stuff. It was more work, but it had to be done,” she said.
Taylor quit high school three times because of her mother’s illness. Quitting, however, did not deter Taylor from wanting to eventually finish school. It was always her goal, she said.
“I walked from where I lived in the country to the city school. I was determined. I was going to go to school. One year is all I actually went to high school. We had to fight and do it the best way we could if we wanted an education. I decided one of these days I was going to go back to school, but in order to go back I knew I had to have money so I saved my money,” she explained.
The first job was working for a friend of hers in a jewelry store.
“I saved my money with the first job I got, then I jumped to another job and continued to save my money. In the back of my mind I knew I was going to go back to school,” she said.
Taylor’s big break in fortune came in the 1940s, when she and her husband Raymond and their two sons, Ronald and Robert, were living in what was by that time Oak Ridge. She found a job working as a file clerk with the City of Oak Ridge and ended up moving up to head file clerk over other clerks managing an entire file system.
It was then that Taylor decided to get her GED. Her sons were grown, and she had saved enough money by that time to complete her GED.
“I went to the University of Tennessee for seven months and got my GED,” recalled Taylor.
Her husband, Raymond, was very supportive, and even encouraged her to study, she said.
“We’d go out to eat, Ray and I, because I didn’t have time to cook then. I was going to school. Our older son was in college and the younger one was in high school. I’d take a book with me when we’d go out somewhere and he’d pull that book out. He was going to help me learn. I remember one time Ray pulled the book out and said he was going to teach me speed-reading. He pulled it out and scribbled something, or acted like he was scribbling something and said, “did you see how I did that?” and I said, “but Ray, I just started yesterday!”
Ethel and Ray were married for 60 years before he died at age 60.
“We were never divorced. I felt like divorcing him sometimes and I’m sure he felt like divorcing me at times, but we lived together that long,” stated Taylor. Raymond, 11 years her senior, was born in Harlan, Ky., but his family moved to Whitley County when he was a child.
“He had sisters that were my age and we played together. We rode stick horses around the house and that’s actually how I met my husband, riding a stick horse in the yard, and just playing around in the yard like kids do,” she said.
“Raymond G., my husband, was a big strong man who played semi-professional baseball in Knoxville. The “G” in his middle name stood for Gladys. Yes, really, Gladys was his name, and I liked to tease him about it sometimes. I’d say, ‘what’s the matter with you, Gladys?’” she said.
In the years she worked, Taylor said she has done a little bit of everything, from her first job working in a jewelry store, to a file clerk, to a secretary in an Oak Ridge department store (Miller’s)--and even as a proofreader for The Courier News.
The proofreading job at The Courier was a brief stint that lasted about a month or two, she said.
“I worked for Horace Wells, the newspaper editor in Clinton for a short time. Very briefly. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. He didn’t want you to ask questions, but I always felt like when you have a job, the more you know about a job the better you can understand why you’re doing that job. He was a good newspaperman though,” added Taylor.
Asked how she has managed to succeed in life like she has, Taylor said, modestly, that she really did not think she has accomplished that much, but what she has accomplished she attributes to determination.
“I’ve always had a lot of determination. I was determined to do things and the good Lord didn’t stop me. He just helped me go on,” she said, with a grin.
And that sums up Ethel Taylor – gracious, kind, and full of determination – she greets each day with a smile, a positive attitude, and a desire to keep learning new things.