giving thanks

Troy resident thankful for kids and at least 54 of her 100 years

Her husband, Lloyd, ‘made my life heaven for 54 years’

Hazel Brown says her sense of humor helps keep her healthy. Brown is 100 years old and lives at the Caldwell Nursing Home in Troy. As youth, she worked in the tobacco fields of her family's farm and survived the 1913 Dayton flood and a cyclone. Staff photo by Jim Witmer

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By Katherine Ullmer, Staff Writer 12:01 PM Wednesday, November 25, 2009

TROY — At age 100, Hazel Iona Brown of Troy hasn’t let life get her down.

At age 3, she watched the 1913 flood waters rise outside her grandmother’s house from the front door. The cyclone that came through the Greenville/Union City area destroying homes and lives when she was 8, left her home standing at its edge. She and her siblings tried to come down from upstairs at the height of the storm, but it blew their light out so they stayed put, though the wind drove a 2-by-4 through a wall into the room, she said.

She was 10 when her mother died of the flu in 1919 during childbirth.

As a child she worked in the tobacco fields on the family farm. Stripping tobacco was hard “gummy” work, she said.

Her father remarried, but their stepmother, unaccustomed to children, wasn’t kind, she said. So she readily escaped by marrying at age 16. The two children from that marriage, Herbert Butt and Phyllis (Butt) Anderson, both of Troy, remain her pride and joy.

“I’m most thankful for my two kids as I’ve got somebody to love and that loves me,” she said as she sat in her room at the Caldwell House nursing home in Troy, with her daughter and son and his wife Helen nearby. She said she lost the love of her life, her husband, Lloyd Brown, six years ago. “Lloyd made my life heaven for 54 years,” she said.

She met Lloyd, a welder and teacher of welding for Hobart Brothers in Troy, at a Hobart dance, she said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2341 or kullmer@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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