Active 97-year-old says he’s ‘just lucky’

Burlie Thomas, who will be 98 years old in March, walks a mile five days a week on a treadmill in The Ola and John Hawks Senior Wellness and Activity Center in Conway. He also plays on the center’s championship beanbag-baseball team and is the star player, said Debra Robinson, executive director of the Faulkner County Senior Citizens Program. Thomas said the center keeps him going strong by providing social and physical activities.
Burlie Thomas, who will be 98 years old in March, walks a mile five days a week on a treadmill in The Ola and John Hawks Senior Wellness and Activity Center in Conway. He also plays on the center’s championship beanbag-baseball team and is the star player, said Debra Robinson, executive director of the Faulkner County Senior Citizens Program. Thomas said the center keeps him going strong by providing social and physical activities.

CONWAY — Burlie Thomas of Conway said he feels pretty good as he approaches his 98th birthday, and he credits much of that to the Faulkner County Senior Citizens Program.

He walks a mile on the treadmill five days a week at The Ola and John Hawks Senior Wellness and Activity Center on Siebenmorgen Road in Conway.

Thomas, who said he sometimes has problems with his short-term memory, is sure about when he started at the center.

“I started Aug. 14 in 2005 at the senior center. My wife died in June. My boys — I was here by myself — and they wanted me to go to [the] senior citizens [center], and I didn’t want to, and it’s been more benefit to me than my medicine is,” he said.

Debra Robinson, executive director of the Faulkner County

Senior Citizens Program, said Thomas tells her often how much the senior center means to him.

“He’ll say, ‘It’s the best medicine I could take,’” she said. “Just being around people does the body and mind so much good. Having a place to come to and not sitting at home — it just makes such a big difference in [seniors’] lives.”

Thomas is a member of the center’s beanbag-baseball team, a sport he started playing seven years ago, he said.

“I made the Hall of Fame two years ago,” he said. “That’s why I go to the senior center. The [former] coach said I was the best one on the team.”

The beanbag-baseball team won the championship in September at the state Senior Olympics in Hot Springs.

“He honestly is our best player on the team,” Robinson said.

Thomas, whose birthday is March 26, said he was born and raised in a two-room log house in Centerville in Faulkner County, northeast of Greenbrier. He helped his father on the family farm and enjoyed fishing and hunting, especially rabbits, squirrels, opossums and “things like that,” he said.

He worked on the farm until he left for World War II.

“That’s all I knew till after I came back from the war — I made it all right. I was one of the lucky ones; I didn’t see combat,” he said.

Thomas was in the Army and was a member of the military police in Canada for 23 months.

“We were a prisoner escort,” he said. “We rode the ships up into Alaska, and the trains, but they stopped the ships about six months or so after I got there.

“I came back home and farmed till ’51 and went to work at the International Shoe Factory in Conway,” he said. Thomas said he worked there just shy of 25 years, then went to work as a janitor for Ward Body Works, where he retired after four years.

He and the love of his life, his wife, Mae, were married almost 66 years — from Oct. 14, 1939, until her death. Thomas said the way marriages are nowadays, that is “almost unbelievable.” They had two sons, Robbie Thomas, who, with his wife, Pam, lives in Conway, just one-quarter of a mile from his father, and Ronnie, who lives in Texas.

Pam Thomas said her father-in-law is an “exceptional person.”

“The love of his family just shines through in everything he does. I couldn’t have asked for a better father-in-law; he’s really something else,” she said. “We’re very, very proud of him.”

She said Thomas practices beanbag baseball at home on a board made for him by her 27-year-old son, Bradley, who gave it to him for Christmas one year.

“I think that’s what’s kept him going so much, is the friendships over there and the activities and so forth. He’s met some old friends again and made a lot of new friends,” she said.

Thomas said that although his father died at age 45, his mother lived to be 97, and she had a sister who made it to 102 years old. He said there isn’t a secret to his longevity.

“I’m just lucky, is all I can say. For some reason, I’ve had things [happen] that I shouldn’t be even alive now. I’ve had surgery eight times. I had bypass surgeries; I had a light stroke and three heart attacks,” he said. Thomas also survived colon cancer 30-plus years ago, and he said that’s when he stopped smoking. “My grandpa got me smoking on a corncob — I was about 4 years old,” he said. “I chewed tobacco some, but not very often.”

His closest call, he said, was in 1939.

“It was in August, and a big limb fell out of a tree on my head. We were cutting wood on the farm. That piece that broke off stuck up in the ground, and it busted the hide in my head and cut my ear. I turned blind and couldn’t see for a while,” he said, laughing as he recalled the day. “I went into the house, laid around all evening and slept all night and went to work the next day and cut wood. I’m lucky. By rights, it should have killed me.”

His son and daughter-in-law live down the road and check on him often, he said. He also has a sister, who is in her 80s, who lives on property that adjoins his.

“I’m trying to take care of myself all I can. I haven’t had anything to bother me so far this winter,” he said.

In addition to walking a mile five days a week on the treadmill, Thomas said he doesn’t drink milk or eat butter.

Thomas took a short break when the weather was too cold, but he’s back on the treadmill and playing beanbag baseball, and getting ready for a big birthday celebration in March.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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