106 and Still a Free Spirit : A Feisty Karen Carter Has Few Regrets: ‘I Have Lived to Be a Happy, Old Woman’

Karen Martishie Hancock Carter holds a Bible opened to the 91st Psalm, her favorite. Stuffed between its tissue-thin pages--which she has underlined, highlighted and noted like a used textbook--are letters from those seeking her divine intervention.

The prayer warrior gets busy.

Carter prays for a Pasadena couple trying to have a baby; for an East Los Angeles woman whose son, a gang member, is doing time in prison; for a 40-year-old Burbank man dying of AIDS.

Eyes closed, her cupped palms facing heavenward, Carter ends the prayers by thanking her creator for the simple things in her life.

For being able to hear the clock tick.

For having enough strength to get out of her wheelchair and onto crutches.

For the mulberry tree she sees first thing every morning.

“For giving me another day of life, in this, my 106th year of living. It’s so good to be alive.”

She opens her eyes and places the Bible on an aluminum tray that holds a roll of toilet paper, a whistle and a flashlight--an emergency kit of sorts always within arm’s reach.

“There aren’t too many things I can do these days,” Carter says, referring to the infirmities of aging--broken hips, failing eyesight, lapsing memory and a heart condition, the latter which she treats nightly with her own remedy: two teaspoons of Jim Beam in a half-glass of water.

“(But) as long as I can do this,” she says, wiggling her thumb, “I can pray for people.”

And so she does every day from a two-room travel trailer in Sylmar where she has lived for 20 years. And even though she lives alone, she says she really isn’t; sometimes she awakens in the middle of the night and sees the faces of angels--young, smooth, round faces--hovering on the wall above her window.

“In my mind they look like angels,” she says. “In my heart, I know they are.”

Born in Missouri in 1886, Carter’s at times nomadic life has led her to take up residence in more than half the United States. At the age of two weeks, her family left Missouri in an oxen-pulled covered wagon for Oklahoma, where her father farmed a homestead.

“My first schooling was in a little log cabin schoolhouse,” she says. “I was about 5 years old when I started school. I used to walk five miles to that school and there was a spring right next to it right by a great big acorn tree.”

Closing her eyes, spreading her arms in front and waving them slowly, she is lost momentarily in another place and time: “It was so beautiful.

“I like to bring things to my memory. I’m glad that I can relive certain moments.” She opens her eyes. “But you know what, I can’t for the life of me remember what our desks looked like. I have tried so many times. I wish I could remember that.”

She never finished the fourth grade, Carter says, because she “was put out to work.” The family had moved to Colorado and by age 9, she was cleaning railroad bunkhouses and cooking.

“I worked for my boarding and clothes,” she remembers. “I washed dishes and scrubbed floors for as many as 20 men in one bunkhouse. . . . I learned many wonderful things from them.”

Among the lessons: baking bread, pies and cakes; vegetable gardening, and caring for horses. Later, Carter worked as a housekeeper and, while still a child herself, helped raise other people’s children.

“I’ve had an active life,” she says. “There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. I remember when my first husband, Lee Woods, and I first had electricity and water in the house. But we had no sewage system, so I got me a shovel and dug us a ditch almost as big as this trailer and put a top on it.”

At age 17, she married Woods. Carter outlived him and her second and third husbands, W. C. (Bill) Nanney and Charlie Carter. She doesn’t remember exactly how long she was married to each and won’t say which was the best husband.

“If you are married to somebody, then that person is the best, regardless. Each one of my husbands had their good sides and their faults. I don’t know what they would say about me,” she says with a laugh.

Her marriages produced four children. Daughter Thelma Woods, who now would be in her late 80s, disappeared in the mid-1930s and Carter says she never heard from her again. Another daughter, Claire, died in a 1987 auto accident at age 78.

Son Bill Nanney, 82, lives in San Francisco, and Bob Nanney, 67, lives in Santa Clarita near his mother. Bob calls daily and visits his mother regularly, often bringing one of her favorite meals: a cheeseburger and French fries.

Carter speaks fondly of second husband Nanney, whom she met in Colorado after Woods died of a heart attack. She thinks that she and Nanney were married for about 50 years, during which time he worked as a railroad brakeman, bill collector and door-to-door Singer sewing machine salesman.

“I was his hunting dog,” she says of the Singer job. Carter scouted potential customers by visiting their homes and chatting with them before Nanney came in with the sales pitch.

“We even worked the fairs,” she recalls. “I learned tailoring. I could show you in 10 minutes how to make a pattern. And then I’d make the suit for you, too. I even repaired the machines. I could do anything that I made up my mind to do.

“People used to say to me: ‘How do you think you can do that? Where did you learn that?’ ‘Well,’ I’d think to myself, ‘I have common sense. I know about people. I can meet anybody and talk with anybody.’ But, you know, even the most educated person doesn’t use common sense. They depend on their books.”

The family moved a lot during that marriage because “we had to go where we could make the sales.” It wasn’t uncommon for her husband to come home at 2 a.m. and announce “We’ve got to pack and move on, Karen,” Carter says.

“I’ve been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things.”

Their travels took them from Bingham, Ala., to Lincoln, Neb., from the nation’s capital to Salt Lake City and Santa Monica. Florida, she says, is one state that got away. She has family there and would love to visit them, but knows her health precludes such a trip: “That’s the place for old people, but I can’t get there.”

Among the most memorable and moving of her travels, however, was a brief visit to Washington in the mid 1960s. Carter is a descendant of John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, and while in Washington, son Bill took her to see Hancock’s statue.

“I looked at him (Hancock) and began to cry,” she recalls. “My dad, Lorenzo Dow Hancock, looked just like him.”

Carter rises from her wheelchair, walks on crutches to a kitchen cabinet and pulls out a small wooden box. Inside is a pair of 17th-Century eyeglasses that she says is a Hancock family heirloom. The frame is a single piece of shaped wire, the lenses no larger than 50-cent pieces.

“This is all I have and all I know is that I am related,” she says.

Carter turns the pages of an old family album, filled with photographs dating to the turn of the century. A favorite shows the gray hair that cascades to her knees.

“I’ve never cut my hair,” she says of the long locks she generally wears in a bun. Instead, she performs a ritual she learned as a young girl from the Blackfoot Indians in Idaho.

“Have you ever seen hair burn?” she asks.

Every January, during the year’s first new moon, Carter wraps a wet dishrag around her hair, exposing from four to eight inches of hair. She then lights a match and singes the ends.

She says the Indians taught her that burning hair “would renew the life and energy in it.” When daughter Claire was a child, Carter burned the ends of her hair as well. “Everybody would just have a fit about that,” Carter recalls. “But I always thought it was a wonderful tradition.”

Often, she is asked about her hair in letters from grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, which Carter estimates number at least 100. Keeping track is difficult, but on her last birthday, Jan. 22, Carter received more than 30 birthday cards from descendants.

Friends--some from as far away as Turkey--write or phone, asking her to pray for them. Others check on her every day: A neighbor delivers the morning newspaper and throws out the garbage; his wife shops for Carter’s groceries; another neighbor cleans the trailer, does laundry and sometimes helps prepare meals. A visiting nurse frequently pops in to keep tabs on Carter’s health.

Neighbor Humberto Pintado, 58, has been a friend for more than 15 years. Every Thursday morning he leads a group of trailer park residents in Bible study at Carter’s home.

“She calls me the teacher, but I say she is the teacher,” he says. “She is a woman of tremendous faith. Her life is tied to the Scripture.”

Carter is grateful for friends like Pintado. He rescued her one morning at 2 after she had fallen off her crutches while turning to open the refrigerator door the previous afternoon. It took her nine hours to push her body with one crutch to the phone in another room. With the same crutch she knocked the phone off a table and called Pintado. She was unhurt, just unable to get back on her feet.

Three months ago, she was admitted to a convalescent center because of problems with her hips and other assorted infirmities.

Carter calls the several weeks in the center her “hell-hole period,” saying it not only took away her freedom, but also her dignity.

“I know this much,” she says. “The Lord will take care of me if I let him. I’ll crawl up here on my bed and find my pleasant spot staring out at my little mulberries and think, ‘I have lived to be a happy, old woman. Don’t feel sorry for me.’ ”

Though Carter says she has no secret for her longevity, she credits hard work, traveling, common sense, patience and “being saved in 1923 in Santa Monica by Aimee Semple McPherson at the Angelus Temple.”

Carter knows that family and friends worry because she insists on living alone and caring for herself as much as possible.

She lived with son Bill after her second husband died in the early 1950s and helped raise four grandchildren. She later married Charlie Carter and moved to an Idaho ranch. After he died in 1957, she returned to California and bought the trailer she lives in today. For a time, she lived in the trailer in son Bob’s back yard in Arleta. In 1972, Carter moved the trailer to its present location.

“She wants to live alone because she just doesn’t want to be a burden to anybody. . .” says Bob Nanney. “She always remained independent. She still does her own cooking.”

And she hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

Carter says she enjoys living alone and has few worries:

“Sometimes the biggest problem is that old woman I live with.”