A 103-year-old adventure

Because Margaret Gibson gets her hair done every Monday, it is a sharp shade of gray, light and well-coiffed. There is a salon in the building, so she does not have to go very far, even though she cannot walk to it any more. The last time Gibson was on her feet was two years ago — when she was 101 years old.

Gibson, an alumna of this university, lives at Goodwin House in Alexandria, Va., a retirement community. Some of the elderly residents still work part-time and get around on their own. Others, such as Gibson, live in the health-care unit, where nurses constantly monitor their well-being.

At 103 years old, Gibson has made herself at home there. She has had plenty of time, at any rate — she first moved to the Alexandria community in 1983. Patty Butler-Burkhart, the director of resident services, met Gibson when she started working at the Goodwin House 10 years ago. Back then, she said, Gibson was "schoolmarmish" and terse.

Then, one day, the two women realized they were both Terps.

Now Gibson is not only forthcoming — she is downright talkative. She was born an only child in 1908 in Washington and lived across from her school, she said, where she would hear the bell from her house and run across the street to get in line. She moved between the city and northern Virginia during her childhood. Her father, Harold, worked with the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her mother, Emma, was a housewife.

She spent two years at the Wilson Normal School for Teachers in Washington before coming to this university to finish her education. While here, she lived in the then-newly built Margaret Brent Hall, which still stands as St. Mary's Hall today.

After she graduated in 1935, Gibson taught 5th and 6th graders in the city's public school system for 40 years and traveled to England every summer. She moved to the Goodwin House 29 years ago and has been living there ever since. Her room now is heavily decorated with old photographs of her family, friends and her partner, Hayward Miller, who she dated for 40 years but never married. There are duck figurines perched around the room, and a perfume tray, sitting on the night table, stocked with glass bottles and a slight blanket of dust. Her college diploma, which hangs in the room's entryway, is the very first thing you see on display.

* * *

Gibson's sight is nearly gone, and her eyes, though a radiant blue, are glassy and distant. She answers questions sharply, smartly, but always focuses straight ahead. There is nowhere else to look.

But, though her timeline is murky, she remembers most things vividly. She remembers all the way back to her childhood, when she moved to a one-story house in Arlington, Va. because her father "couldn't make the stairs anymore." She remembers Willard Small, a friend of the family who also happened to be the dean of the College of Education when she attended this university.

She remembers two friends from her time at the university. One might have also been named Margaret (but whose last name escapes her), whose father was a minister in southern Maryland. She remembers another who died at the Walter Reed National Medical Military Center in Bethesda. She remembers how she took the train to visit this friend in her final days, but she cannot recall her name.

She still remembers her time at this university, though.

"I loved the history professor that was there," she said, but his name escaped her, too.

"I was going to say, if you could pull that one out of your hat then I'm really impressed," Butler-Burkhart said, loudly, to make sure Gibson could hear. "Because I only remember two of my college professors, so—"

"Well, he was so good looking."

"Well, that always helps, huh?"

* * *

When Gibson was a student here, she did her work at the library and in her dorm, and it was a lot of work, but it was not particularly difficult, even though she told Butler-Burkhart at one point that she took eight classes in one semester. She had a curfew and other rules to follow — she was, after all, a college-aged woman in the '30s — but didn't pay much attention to them.

"Everybody broke ‘em," she said.

She would find time to go to hockey and basketball games on the campus. She also liked football, even though the team was not very good. She had a dining plan, though the food was not very good. She also had her fair share of suitors.

And what did they look like?

"The way I wanted them to look," she said.

"What were they interested in, that made you like them?" Butler-Burkhart asked.

"Me," she replied.

* * *

Gibson said she remembers coming to the campus 10 years ago for a dance, when she lived in her house in Arlington, but Butler-Burkhart instantly mouthed a rebuttal: No, that's not right. Gibson has not lived in that house in nearly 30 years, which means the dance was at least three decades ago, if not more.

Gibson's memories are vivid, though. She went as the date of one of the guys she would "go around with" when she was a student, when she and her friends would break curfew and hang out at the edge of the campus, when sometimes they would pile into one of the men's cars, if anyone even had a car, and head a little further down the pike, as they used to call it, a place that was pretty good, even though there were not too many places to go in those days.

Some number of years ago, she went to the dance with an old flame and another couple, and she has not been back to the campus since.

jwolper@umdbk.com