Martha Meeks Brown's 104th birthday is coming up soon, and she has been told she holds the record for the oldest independently living resident at Parkway Village.
"God, I guess, has just been good to me. I've always tried to live a clean, good life," Brown says. "I've been busy. Real busy. I think you have to do that."
Brown brushes off suggestions that she hire someone to help her with more than light housekeeping. She walks to the dining hall at Parkway Village for lunch and dinner almost every day, and she does her own laundry in the apartment building's facilities.
"All you have to do is push a button, but I have to walk down there to do it, and if I had somebody here I'd have them do it and I'd sit," she says. "If you do that, then you can't move."
Brown grew up on Little Rock's Schiller Street and witnessed the nearby construction of Little Rock High School, now Central High, in 1927. She remembers seeing women in fancy matching hats, high heels and gloves arriving for Razorback games played at what is now Quigley Stadium.
"We went to Immanuel Baptist Church, which was not too far -- it was there on Bishop Street," she says. "I've just always been in the church. I've been at Immanuel all 104 years."
She remembers seeing the old Immanuel building burn when she was a teenager, and going to Sunday School classes in a temporary location at Westside Junior High.
She walked to and from school, returning home each midday for lunch, but her earliest memory is of riding in her family's Model T Ford to visit her grandparents in Whelen Springs.
Poor road conditions led to frequent flat tires and her father would have to stop, fix the tire and then turn the crank on the front of the car to start the engine again so they could be on their way.
When Brown graduated from high school in 1934, the Great Depression was on and college was out of the question.
"I got a job and I had to ride the streetcar from Schiller to downtown," Brown says. "It was with an advertising company. I got paid $5 a week. I just worked there a few weeks."
A deacon from her church recruited her to work for him at Magnolia Oil Company.
"It was a real good job and I was secretary to the chief clerk," Brown says. "I worked three years there and then I married my childhood sweetheart. At that time -- you won't believe it, but they wouldn't hire married women. They only hired single women."
She and the late Charles W. Brown exchanged their vows on July 2, 1939, in the sanctuary at Immanuel.
He had gone to junior college for two years, she says, and he had a good job selling tobacco and cigarettes. He made $22 a week and had a company car and an expense account.
She and Charles were still newlyweds when her mother died. Because her father traveled extensively with his railroad job, they welcomed her younger brother and sister into their home.
"My sister was 12 or 13 then and my brother had been drafted into the service, but then he came back from there and lived with me until he married," she says. "He was missing in action for a while. He was in the Air Corps and he was a prisoner of Germany for a while and he escaped and got to Italy and they got him home."
She and Charles built a home on Evergreen Drive, around the same time as construction of Williams Elementary got underway. Charles sold heavy equipment by then.
"He brought a big piece of equipment and he made the road on that day up to 7000 Evergreen, on down that block," she says.
When their own two children -- Winston and Donie -- started high school, Brown went to work as secretary to the principal of Hall High.
Brown was born in 1917.
"I was vaccinated for smallpox when I was 6 months old on the upper part of my leg, and I have a great big scar from it," says Brown, who survived the Spanish flu and polio pandemics as well. "When I was a child, whenever you got a disease, like diphtheria, mumps, whatever it was, the Health Department came to your house and put a big cardboard sign up and it would say whatever it was you had and you were quarantined. No one could go in your house and you couldn't come out."
Brown moved to Parkway Village 16 years ago, shortly after she began losing her sight to macular degeneration.
Over the years she has enjoyed playing bridge, volunteering at Immanuel and, most recently, listening to the Bible.
"I listened to three tapes of it by different people," she says.
Brown turned to Scripture for comfort following the 2017 death of her daughter, Donie Brown Harrison, then 74.
"I live by Proverbs: 3, 5 and 6," she says. "I thought, 'I can't get through this,' but I just said those verses over and over and that helped."
If you know an interesting story about an Arkansan 70 or older, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:
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