Liz Kirchner
Esther Griffith arrived to her hundredth birthday party last week in a gleaming green Model A Ford.
“They said, “Your ride’s out here” and I said, “What?” and then “Lord have mercy!” It was two-toned green! I was so surprised!” Mrs. Griffith recounted, describing when Roy Cole pulled up to take her to the Christiansburg Church of the Brethren where two hundred guests waited to greet her.
Cole said he was honored to do that for her and they pulled up in a parking space marked “Reserved for the Birthday Girl”.
“You would have thought she was a rock star. All the people outside,” her daughter Norma Cole said.
She wore pale blue pants and a pretty top with a sparkly tunic.
“My daughter-in-law got me my outfit,” Griffith said. “Sparkly blue shoes. The whole nine yards.”
In a comfortable chair at her daughter’s house in Pilot, Esther Griffith is fashionable for an interview in turquoise culottes, matching paisley top and earrings. Her fingernails are polished turquoise too. She is surrounded by gifts – an outsized “What happened in 1919” card, stacks of Circle-a-Word books, an enormous hot pink foil balloon floating over the sofa that says, “100.”
“We had it right over here in Christiansburg. Right across from the cemetery,” she says of the party. “We started at 2 o’clock and had 200 people or so. And four cakes!”
Lilly Esther Griffith was born in May in Floyd County just weeks before the Treaty of Versailles was signed ending WWI, Prohibition started and Babe Ruth was knocking them out of the park.
Esther grew up with her twin brother, Edgar Duncan, they went to White Rock School on Alum Ridge Road and she remembers her early life with him.
“I remember playin’ around with my brother. He was fun,” she said of Edgar, who lived to be 92.
Her daughter, Norma Cole, is texting a friend at the kitchen table asking her to email some photos. Esther remembers simpler days.
“The phone was up on the wall and you would crank ‘em,” she said.
She learned to drive as a kid, but didn’t ever want to because it seemed dangerous, but worked at the Blue Ridge Overall Factory in Christiansburg for 25 years all through the Depression.
“If you wanted a job, that was it. If they hadn’t fixed up that building then we wouldn’t have had any work,” she said giving a sense of life in the mountains of southwest Virginia.
But life wasn’t all hard work, it seems, since Esther Griffith can play the banjo and the harmonica at the same time.
“Mostly “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain,”” she said with a twinkle in her eye and everyone who spoke about her says “She’s very funny.”
Asked to what she owes her long life, she guesses it’s clean living.
“I don’t know. The good Lord just kept me,” she said. “I never smoked. Never drank whiskey. Never drank beer,” she said smiling and squinching up her nose.
She loves going to church – always has.
“I like everything about it. Singing and having parties and dinners and lunches.”
She met her husband, William Akers Griffith when she was about 19, she recalls, in the summer.
“We had a big crop of tomatoes, so we went to the cannery and he was working there too,” she said remembering when rural canneries lined Virginia creeks and farm families would come to can fruit, vegetables and meat, socializing and working together.
“One evening he came by and threw a tomato skin at me. So, I knew he liked me. I was 19 or so.”
Esther Griffith has had a long life and hundreds of people celebrated – on her birthday and every day – that long life and the hard work, church, love, and of course, banjos and harmonicas it represents.
