Pearl Parker Pierce, who was born in 1897, was a school teacher and an Extension Homemaker who served as president of that organization’s state association in 1946. She also served in the Wayne County Board of Education for six years in the 1940s. She was interviewed by Becky Barclay of the Goldsboro News-Argus, which published the following story on the occasion of her 100th birthday, Sept. 21, 1997. Mrs. Pierce died September 10, the following year, just short of her 101st birthday.
In her 100 years of life, Pearl Pierce has seen the world she knew as a child change in many ways.
She has seen man take to the air and fly in an airplane. She has come out of the darkness with the mere flick of a switch thanks to electricity. She has turned her horses out to pasture to ride around in a horseless carriage.
Mrs. Pierce has seen other miraculous inventions such as television, telephone, radio, computer, vaccines for many illnesses.
She is celebrating her 100th birthday today with a party at Guardian Care.
She is the daughter of the late John and Addie Reynolds Parker. She was born in Sampson County Sept. 21, 1897, the oldest of seven children. She lived there six months, then moved to Clinton.
“We had the best home life when I was growing up,” she said. “We had a wonderful home life and I relive it every day.”
“Even though Momma had seven children, she knew where all of them were all the time. She had no problem keeping up with us. And she never had any problem straightening us out. I was born when kids minded.”
When she was a child, Mrs. Pierce’s family didn’t have many big holiday celebrations like people do today. “We’d get out in the yard and play,” she said. “We’d also hitch up the horse and buggy and go visiting family.
“I remember one Christmas we all hung up our stockings. Papa went out one day to feed the stock. When he came back in the house, his hat was all knocked in and snow was all over his clothes. He was panting like he was out of breath and had a great big apple in his hand.
“He said that our old rascal (Santa) wouldn’t come to our house any more. He told us that he had found Santa hiding in the barn and had whipped him. All of us kids cried and cried. Papa loved to tease us.”
Mrs. Pierce tried to help other families any way she could as a child. “I remember one family where the mother had convulsions,” she said, “and she fell in the fire and burned her face very badly. I got food together and a whole lot of clothes to take to her. When we got there and saw her, we couldn’t stand it and wanted to go home. Her eyebrows were burned off and her lips were parched.”
“Frequently on Sundays, we’d go out to Grandma’s house,” she said. “We all piled in the buggy, on the back, on the front, some sitting on others.
“It was about seven miles to Grandma’s house and it took us an hour to get there in the buggy.”
Her family belonged to the First Methodist Church in Clinton. Her father was a steward and they attended Sunday school and church every week.
Mrs. Pierce marvels at the many inventions she has seen. “The invention I remember seeing that impressed me the most of all was the first automobile that came into Clinton. It was a little red car.”
“Before that I rode horseback to go anywhere. I remember one afternoon when I was going home and the horse was tired. When we got home, he jumped over the fence. That scared me to death.”
She recalls learning to drive. “Papa just turned it over to me,” she said. “He let me take it and go anywhere I wanted to. You didn’t have to have a drivers’ license back then and I was only 12 or 13 when I began driving Papa’s car.”
Mrs. Pierce received her teaching certificate. She retired having taught in schools from the mountains to the coast. “I loved it and I didn’t have any trouble from my students,” she said. “I accomplished quite a lot during those years, a lot more than I could teaching now. I always wanted to be a teacher.”
She reminisced about teaching the mountains in 1925 when she first became a teacher. “There was one 18-year-old boy who would always talk back to me,” she said. “One day I told him not to talk back to me because it makes me very mad.
“He kept on doing it. Then he reached over and handed me a switch out of the corner and I put it on him. Then he handed me another switch and I wore it out.
“I was give out and he was, too. He was 18 and weighed about 200. He was the meanest boy in town and at school.
“The year before I went up there, the school sent me a record of the school. They had had 13 teachers and he run them all off. I told him and the other students that I had come to stay. I told them that if they were nice, I was nice. If they were ugly, I’d be just like that. I never had any more problems with that boy or the rest of the students.”
When she taught in Wayne County, Mrs. Pierce was on the board of education for six years. “While I was on the board, there were three schools that didn’t have gymnasiums,” she said. “We were trying to get gymnasiums for all of them.
“One morning we went to a meeting and were told that one of the schools would get one. I got up and went down to the commissioners office and told them there were two more schools that needed gymnasiums. I straightened them out and they gave me the other two.”
Mrs. Pierce has lived through two world wars. “I had a sweetheart, but luckily he didn’t have to go off to war. He was a master mechanic and they sent him to the shipyards. We later married.”
She married Albert W. Pierce, who died in 1967. The couple had no children. They came to Goldsboro in 1921, then moved to Nahunta in 1928.
When Mrs. Pierce and her husband first built their house in 1928 they had no electricity. “We used lamps. It was two or three years before we did get electricity,” she said.
Mrs. Pierce joined Nahunta Extension Homemakers Club in 1928. On the local level, she had the offices of president, secretary and treasurer. She was the only Wayne County person to serve as state president.
She is a member of Nahunta Friends Church, where she has served as clerk of monthly meetings, clerk of ministry and counsel and president of the Missionary Society. She was also pianist and Sunday school teacher for 40 years.
“When I first started playing the piano for church, there was one old man in there who wanted the hymns played very slowly, the way they had always been played. When I played the piano, I started moving it. He came to me one day and asked me if I didn’t believe I could play a little slower. I told him know. I know I couldn’t. And played right on,” she said.
Until she was 96, Mrs. Pierce lived in her own home. Then she moved Guardian Care, where she has lived the past four years. I can’t mention anything I haven’t seen change in my lifetime,” Mrs. Pierce said. “Everything has changed.”
Is there a secret to living to be 100? “No,” she said, “I didn’t do anything special.”
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