By Marty Gordon
Bernadine Lester turned 104 this past week, but the birthday did not come with family and a big birthday cake. Instead, like everything else about daily life, the COVID-19 pandemic forced changes in the way Lester celebrated this milestone achieved by few people in the United States.
Her daughter, Kathy Lester Hall, has continued to celebrate her mother’s milestones, and the coronavirus did not stop her this time. It just came with some adjustments.
“We would have liked to give her a hug,” Hall said, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t
The staff at Commonwealth Senior Living in Christiansburg provided decorations inside the facility while Hall sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, talking to her mother through a window. Hall also held a ZOOM meeting for other family members to wish her mother a happy birthday. Twenty-eight family members took part.
The Christiansburg woman has lived through a lot of changes during her lifetime.
She was born in 1916. Woodrow Wilson narrowly defeated Republican Charles E. Hughes for another term in the White House that year. World War I raged across the pond in Europe. Wilson signed legislation creating the National Park Service, and the Boy Scouts were granted a Congressional Charter.
Lester has lived through the Spanish Flu epidemic of the early 1900s and the scare of polio in the late 50s. Now she is dealing with COVID-19.
Like others who grew up in the early 1920s, life wasn’t easy for her. Lester’s mother, Nora, died from the flu epidemic when she was only two years old. For a time, she lived with her grandmother in Smyth County before moving in with her father, Albert Groseclose, in Pulaski. He worked for the railroad and would raise four daughters.
“It wasn’t easy for him to do that, raising four girls, but he managed,” she said in an interview for her 103rd birthday last year. But she admitted the family always had what they needed.
Bernadine Lester celebrated her 104th birthday this past week at Christiansburg’s Commonwealth Senior Living.
In 1934, Bernadine married Ray Lester. They were married 62 years before his death. They had three children: Carol, Ray Jr. (Eddie) and Kathy. Lester has nine grandchildren and 13 great-grand-children.
But Bernardine Lester and her daughter aren’t alone in the hands-off celebrations necessary because of the coronavirus. Last week, Jason and Deanna Doby also held an unusual event of their own. Deanna is 33 weeks pregnant, and the Christiansburg couple held a drive-by baby shower. Over a dozen family members and friends drove past their home with signs and balloons, honking their horns and waving to the mom-to-be.
