As soon as she could, she dropped it. She liked "Kay" better, anyway. It suited her mischievous free spirit.
She didn't get into bad mischief. But a 5,000-acre farm in Sidell, Illinois, in the 1920s seemed awful quiet to the youngest of the 10-member Schmink clan. Kay found fun wherever she could.
I had an old plug horse who could barely move, but I loved to ride him. Every Sunday we'd have the preacher to our house for chicken dinner, and Mom always said, "Now don't you get on that horse and leave! You stay around here." But I got on that old horse anyway and took off down to the farm where my friends were at. Mom went out and got those tender little branches that'd cut you, and I got a whipping for lying to her.
I was Dad's favorite, though. I'd always ask him to take me with him when he drove into town. One time, he told me I didn't need to go, but I snuck in behind the driver's seat.When he got to town three miles later, she popped out and chirped, "Hi, Dad!"
She still gets a devilish twinkle in her eye reliving the prank.
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| "I had an old plug horse who could barely move, but I loved to ride him." Nellie Gray of Sidell, who lived on a farm much like the Schminks' in the early 1900s, had her own family horse. |
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If you've spent any time in Punta Gorda, Florida, you've probably crossed paths with "Granny Kay" and four generations of her family.
Her daughter Betty Lanham's Betty's Cuts & Styles operates out of a converted Florida room off Carmalita Street. Betty's lived in the tidy house attached to it for nearly 50 years, ever since her husband left Illinois to take a job with General Development.
The first time you meet the three generations of women who run Betty's--Granny, Betty, and Betty's daughter Jackie--it feels like you've stumbled onto a movie set.
You might not notice Granny at first. She sits so quietly in a chair by the back door that she could be a client waiting her turn. But then she chimes in on a conversation, having clearly been following it all along, or cracks a bawdy joke.
Until she laid off cigarettes a couple years ago, she'd duck out the back door, with neither pause nor apology, for a smoke.
Kay Donahue, now known mostly as "Granny," is 99, so who's to stop her?
Second-generation Betty, semi-retired and pushing 80, is still the boss, though. She's kept a business and a family with six children afloat through tragic losses, hellish weather, and, now, caring for her mother. She started the first Betty's Beauty Salon in downtown Punta Gorda shortly after losing her husband in the 1980s.
The third generation, Jackie Muehling, is a bubbly 48-year-old who still looks like the Charlotte High cheerleader that she was. She raised three of the fourth generation--Austin, Tyler, and Levi--and shares her mother's beauty salon once a week, when she isn't running her own salon at a local retirement community.
"My boys grew up in the shop, with customers feeding and holding them," she remembers. "Now they'll probably do that with my granddaughter, Tynley." At 13 weeks, Tynley's already showing signs of her great-great-grandma's pluck.
On rare occasions when Granny isn't in her chair by the door, people swear they've seen her there anyway.
"I don't feel like I'm 99," she muses.
Even a recent 3 a.m. fall didn't leave her helpless. Betty knew she couldn't lift her mother, so she laid down a pillow and blanket for her to sleep until they could get help in the morning. Granny was having none of it. Instead, she scooted across the floor, for hours, until she could pull herself up again.
Jackie says that the mischievous towhead from Sidell has ended up showing all of them "what a strong and determined woman is all about."
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| Five generations. (Clockwise from left) Betty Lanham, Jackie Muehling with baby Tynley, Tyler Muehling, and "Granny Kay" Donahue. |
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Life changed for Kay Schmink at 16, when her father died.
"I figured I'd be getting married anyway, so I quit high school," she says, matter-of-fact. "I got married to a neighbor boy and started having kids right away."
There wasn't much romance in their depression-era union. One worked days, the other nights, to care for their seven children.
Betty remembers the annual back-to-school routine, and her introduction to hairdressing, vividly.
"Mother made us pretty dresses--one for each day of the week--out of flour sacks held together with snaps."
Each of them also got a hairdo meant to last the whole year. They had to endure permanent wave machines that attached to the head like suspended jellyfish. The contraptions burned their scalps, bristled with metal clips and rods, and made their hair reek for days afterward like a pomade of cat piss and bleach.
And, once Kay's children were mostly grown, in a day before battered-women's shelters, she took the extraordinary step of leaving what had become an increasingly abusive marriage.
"I just said to myself: I'm going to leave. So I did."
She took a cab to Champaign and the train to Peoria, to find work as a waitress; eventually remarried twice; outlived both; and never stopped working.
For a quarter-century she ran the gift shop at the palatial Chicago & Northwestern Railway Station and sometimes held jobs that no longer exist. One of her tasks at a Danville nursing home was preparing clients for their last journey.
"The doctor who brought me into the world died there. So I helped him on his way out, stuffing him with cotton for the undertaker."
After arriving in Punta Gorda at what most would consider retirement age, Kay Donahue kept right on working--as a receptionist in Betty's first salon, as waitress/hostess at her husband's restaurant; and in housekeeping and the office at the new Fishermen's Village tourist spot. The Donahues also ran a laundromat in the Punta Gorda Mall destroyed by Hurricane Charley.
At 99, she admits, "I've done about everything I wanted to do. But I don't feel like I ought to be this age. I don't feel old."
What's the secret that's kept her going all this time?
"Go out and have fun! I can stay home maybe a couple of days, but then I want to go out and do something!"
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| At her 99th birthday party, Granny takes her own life advice: "Go out and have fun!" |
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