York, Pa., woman to turn 113, is USA's 4th oldest

Mike Argento | York (Pa.) Daily Record

YORK, Pa. — When Helen Ida Wheat was born, commercial radio didn't exist. Having a telephone in your house was rare, reserved for the wealthy and elite classes. Cars looked like carriages and were powered by steam engines.

In her lifetime, radio went digital and on satellite. Telephones became something you carry in your pocket. Cars, compared to those when she was born, look like spaceships and contain enough technology to power a spaceship.

In the years she has been alive, polio was eradicated. The measles disappeared, and then, came back. Russia went from being ruled by the czars to being a communist state known as the Soviet Union and then went back to being Russia.

Man went from being earthbound to being able to fly around the world and beyond, landing on the moon.

She was witness to two World Wars, a number of police actions and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She lived through bad times and good.

And she's still here.

She was born Sept. 16, 1902, the youngest of four children. Wednesday she turns 113, which, according to the American Gerontology Research Group, makes her the fourth-oldest living person in the United States.

"She always said, 'I don't know why the good Lord keeps me around,'" said her daughter, Janie Andrews, one of her three children.

Helen Wheat went to school in York, quitting in the sixth grade to work at the York Ice Co. to help her family. She remembered previously that the family home didn't have central heat, and she and her sister would stand on a grate in the middle of the floor to keep warm.

Her first husband, Harvey Pierce Naylor, was a grocer, and later, a machinist. They divorced when her children were young, her son, Dick Naylor, proprietor of Naylor Winery in Stewartstown, said.

She then married her second husband, Bill Wheat, and moved to Maryland. Bill Wheat was a conductor on the rail line from New York to Washington. He would regale the family with dinner table tales of meeting some of history's most influential people on the train, including Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Naylor said.

In her later years, she worked at her son's winery. She worked in the vineyards until she was 93 and then moved inside, where she affixed labels to wine bottles, working until she was 97.

She liked music, and when she and her second husband attended a Methodist church that didn't have an organ player, her son said, she taught herself to play piano and organ.

She liked her wine and often attributed her longevity to having a glass of wine every evening, her daughter said. She also attributed her long life to her positive attitude and her deep faith and love of her Lord.

She has nine grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and 10 great-great-grandchildren, with another due next month, her daughter said.

She used to live with her son in York County, but after a fall and some bad health, she moved to Frederick, Md., where she lives in the Homewood Retirement Center.

She has good days and bad days. Some days, her son said, she is very drowsy and inattentive. The next day, though, she could be alert.

"My daughter had dinner with her recently and recorded her reciting The Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, and she did it perfectly from memory," Andrews said.

Her family will gather at the nursing home Sunday for her birthday party, moving it from Wednesday to allow for travel and to accommodate work schedules.

"That she was born in 1902," her daughter said, "it's kind of hard to grasp."

Longevity runs in the family.

Helen Wheat's mother lived to be 93.

By the numbers: The world's oldest persons

4

York, Pa., native Helen Wheat is the fourth-oldest person in the United States, the oldest living in Maryland, and the 21st-oldest in the world.

116

The world's oldest living person is Susannah Mushatt Jones, 116, of New York City, born on July 6, 1899.

12

There are 12 other people in the world who are 113 years old. Wheat is one day younger than the 20th-oldest — Kiyo Oshiro, of Japan, who was born on Sept. 15, 1902.

122

The oldest person to have ever lived was Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France. Calment was born Feb. 21, 1875, and died on Aug. 4, 1997, making her 122 years, 164 days old at the time of her death.

Sources: the American Gerontology Research Group, Guinness Book of World Records