Centenarian’s 101 Reasons for Working

Audrey Stubbart holds down a full-time job as a proofreader and columnist for a daily newspaper in this Kansas City suburb.

To hear her tell it, it’s no big deal.

But other folks make a bit of a fuss. After all, not many people keep working into their second century.

As she approached her 101st birthday recently, she had no plans to retire from her job at the Examiner.

Although, she said, “some morning I may get up, and I might call in and tell them this is it.”

But it doesn’t seem too likely.

Her newspaper career began when she was 65, after the publishing house she was working for told her she had to retire. Before that, she and her husband had a sheep ranch in Wyoming, where she also taught school and reared five children.

“I don’t like to waste time,” she said.

Stubbart’s decision to keep working into her second century has attracted international media attention. But she says she has tired of all the hoopla.

“I don’t like to be singled out and made special just because I’m 100,” she said.

Jeff Fox, the paper’s executive editor, said the staff planned a small celebration for Stubbart’s birthday--not much more than what they’d do for another staff member. Last year, when she turned 100, the paper sponsored a party that was open to the public and attended by several hundred people.

“She’d prefer it that we treat her like everybody else,” he said. “But we don’t have anybody else who is 100.”

Stubbart said she didn’t have big plans for her birthday. The celebration of her daughter’s 60th wedding anniversary a few days before her birthday was already enough excitement.

She hitches rides to and from work with her co-workers and still lives in a house on the two acres that she picked out in 1944 while her husband went deer hunting in Wyoming.

Although she doesn’t do as much gardening as she used to, she does let a man from the retirement home across the street keep a small garden in her yard.

Coral Beach, who works at the paper with Stubbart, said she remembered when squirrels dug up several of her flower bulbs.

“She said she wished her sons hadn’t taken her guns away because she’d go after those squirrels,” she said.

Stubbart, who keeps a small library on her desk, often calls over reporters to point out errors in their stories.

Fox said Stubbart is a stickler for using words correctly. He says that’s an invaluable trait.

“Sometimes you just want to say, ‘Come on, Audrey, typeset it and let’s go,’ ” Fox said. “But you can’t do that.”

The topics of Stubbart’s weekly columns range from her thoughts on a speech to different memories from her life. She’s developed a small following. “If we skip a week, we get calls,” Fox said.