LITTLE ROCK — Lorene Franks Bivens never drove a car, rarely went to the doctor and never had a surgery or broken bone until a few days before her 102nd birthday when she broke her collarbone, her granddaughter Sharon Hearnsberger said.
Though Bivens’ body had aged from working in cotton and farm fields most of her life, Hearnsberger said, her mind was still sharp at 102.
“She could remember things from when she was 5 years old,” Hearnsberger said. “We even found in her Bible on her 100th birthday, she wrote ‘100 and still kicking.’”
Lorene Bivens died Sunday from congestive heart failure at Twin Rivers Health and Rehabilitation in Arkadelphia.
She was 102.
Born Aug. 30, 1908, in Horse Creek, Tenn., to Ed and Jessie Franks, she was the fourth of five children.
Bivens attended school until the eighth grade when her family moved to Tyronza, in Poinsett County.
Her family became sharecroppers on a farm where she picked cotton from her early teens to her early adulthood when she met her future husband, Brodie Bivens, while working in the field, Hearnsberger said. The couple married Oct. 9, 1927. They had four children.
The couple rented a house on a farmer’s property while Brodie Bivens oversaw the fields and worked at a cotton gin. Lorene Bivens stopped picking cotton to focus on their children, garden and livestock, Hearnsberger said.
Her granddaughter said Bivens hated working in the cotton fields so much that one time, when her family brought her a cotton boll they had picked for her, “she said, ‘No, I don’t ever want to see one of those again.’”
Bruce Joiner, Bivens’ grandson, said she told him that during the Great Depression, the family didn’t even realize there was an economic crisis because they were self-sufficient by raising livestock and growing their food.
When Bivens’ husband retired in the mid-1960s, the family moved to Arkadelphia and provided for themselves on 40 acres, Hearnsberger said. They had pigs, chicken and cattle that they slaughtered or sold and kept two acre-size gardens of various vegetables, Joiner said.
Bivens kept a garden until she was 98, Hearnsberger said. Each year, she made jelly and canned fruit, including plums, peaches, apples and muscadine grapes, Hearnsberger said.
“She was up before dawn to do what work needed to be done because you never knew what the weather would be,” Hearnsberger said. “Even just working in the house with the kids, you had the laundry, feeding, keeping the house clean. Even in her later years when she [lived at] home, she had to keep that floor mopped.”
Brodie Bivens died in 1985. His wife lived alone until she was 98 and moved in with her daughter Clara and son-in-law Wally Joiner, who own one of five houses on the family property.
For more than 30 years, she kept track of the family tree in her Bible, always sending out birthday cards for her relatives, Hearnsberger said. After developing hearing problems in the late 1980s, she stopped going to church, but watched a local televised church service every Sunday, Hearnsberger said.
Whether it was quilting blankets, sewing clothes or writing monthly letters to her pen pal in Florida for more than 15 years, Bivens stayed active, but equally enjoyed relaxing on her porch, watching and listening to songbirds, her granddaughter said.
“She’d go out on the front porch and call the whippoorwill birds. Grandma was really good at that, she’d call them almost up to the steps,” Hearnsberger said. “She could name [the type of birds] just by hearing them.”
Arkansas, Pages 17 on 09/29/2010