Born in Stephens, Georgia on December 8, 1904, Maggie Katie Brown Kidd recently celebrated her 103rd birthday. 

  

Here she is in her 100th birthday photo (left). Doesn't she look great? And check out this photo (right) taken for her 103rd party. Shouldn't we all be so lucky to have ice cream and cake and have family and friends sing Happy Birthday at 103? That makes the familiar ending verse of "any many more" take on a whole new meaning!

Maggie Katie Brown was the 11th and last surviving sibling of 12 children born to the late William (Doc) Brown and Lucy Callahan Brown.  Like her siblings, she worked hard on the McWhorter family farm where she had been born and reared. In 1920, her parents bought the Old Wiley Raiden farm with cash her mother had saved from the combined efforts of their family's back-breaking work in the cotton fields.  She and her family members are proud of the fact that her parents were the only title holders to that land -- no bank ever held the title. After Maggie's father died in 1924, her mother held the family together as a successful farmer and astute business woman, selling her cotton in the spring when prices were higher. As each child got married, Lucy gave the new couple a bedroom suite and a mule. How times have changed! 

Maggie attended school at Mt. Zion Baptist Church where she was baptized, and on Sunday afternoons she and her mother and sisters would play softball on the churchground. Faith was and is still an important part of her life. 

Maggie Brown married Willie Kidd on November 30, 1940. Willie worked hard all over Georgia and even Pennsylvania to provide for his family. He would board trains at the end of the week to get back to Stephens, Georgia where Maggie and their two children, John and Rosalyn, still lived. After Willie died in 1962, Maggie continued to work the family farm where, as a younger woman, she had plowed with mules, planted corn, drove a two-horse wagon to the cotton gin, dug potatoes, pulled fodder, milked cows, slopped hogs, ironed clothes with a smoothing iron, cut pulp wood, carried fire wood on her shoulders, and fetched water from the spring.  And the Widow Kidd stayed there for the next 27 years, not leaving until 1989. She moved to Atlanta where she lives with her daughter Rosalyn Powell and her son-in-law, Robert. 

Maggie still takes long vacation trips with her children and enjoys family gatherings and activities. She is at her best when quilting and loves to sit quietly in her favorite chair concentrating on this special art form.  Indeed her long life is a special work of art.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Her longevity can more than likely be attributed to the hardiness of her mother, the fact that she didn't die from childhood diseases or adult infections in the pre-antibiotic era, nor from farm-work related accidents. She has thus far escaped cancer and serious cardiovascular disease, and I bet that she has a positive attitude toward her own old age, as this variable is one of the predictors of days until death among nonagenarians and centenarians -- i.e., those with positive attitudes have many more days of life than those with negative attitudes. 

Here are a few things that happened in the year of her birth nearly 103 years ago: 

• For $10 million the United States gained control of the Panama Canal Zone.
• Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany became the first person to make a political recording of a document, using Thomas Edison's cylinder.
• March 8 – The first tunnel beneath the Hudson River completed
• In St. Louis, Missouri, Charles E. Menches invented the ice cream cone during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition
• The stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up premiered in London
• Theodore Roosevelt defeated Alton B. Parker in the U.S. presidential election
• And these are persons became Maggie's birth cohorts -- Ray Bolger, American actor, singer, and dancer (d. 1987); Cary Grant, English actor (d. 1986); Jimmy Dorsey, American bandleader (d. 1957); B. F. Skinner, American behavioral psychologist (d. 1990); Sir John Gielgud, English actor (d. 2000); Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (d. 1967); Willem de Kooning, Dutch artist (d. 1997); Johnny Weissmuller, American swimmer and actor (d. 1984); Ralph Bunche, American diplomat, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1971); and Count Basie, American musician and bandleader (d. 1984). Maggie has outlived them all.