#Oldest living American celebrates 115th — or 116th — birthday

Hester Ford waved at the steady stream of folks who drove by her house Saturday to wish her a happy birthday — her 115th or maybe 116th — but who’s counting?

Either way, the North Carolina great-great-grandmother is the oldest living American, based on data compiled by the Gerontology Research Group, and she certainly has no plans to relinquish her title.

The half of a banana Ford eats for breakfast every day might be the reason for her longevity — or plain luck.

But Ford likes to think she alone is the master of her own destiny, one that so far has spanned nearly a dozen decades pocked with two world wars, the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak and now the coronavirus pandemic.

“I just live right, all I know,” Ford told granddaughter Mary Hill, the Charlotte Observer reported.

Two sets of US Census Bureau documents are what create the confusion about Ford’s age. One set lists her birth date as Aug. 15, 1904, but another set shows she was born in 1905.

The Gerontology Research Group uses 1905, which makes Ford officially 115 and the sixth-oldest person on Earth. At 117, Kane Tanaka is the world’s oldest living human.

Ford grew up picking cotton on a farm in South Carolina. She married John Ford when she was just 14. The first of the couple’s 12 children arrived a year later. The Fords moved to Charlotte around 1960. Three years later, John Ford died at the age of 57.

Ford stayed in the same home — alone — until she was 108, when she took a tumble in the bathtub. She only bruised her ribs, but now she lives in the house with daughters Daisy and Odessa.

These days, Ford uses a walker. But she’s as sharp as a tack, the newspaper reported, able to recite the 23rd Psalm without a single stumble.

Ford’s Baptist faith has been a constant throughout all her years — 115 or 116.  The words on her marble birthday cake: “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

And her relatives are believers, too.

“We just thank God for just keeping her here for us, because it gives us hope,” Hill said of her grandmother. “We’re just a blessed family.”