100-year-old helps others through love of sewing

Virginia Johnson celebrates a century of life by sewing masks during coronavirus pandemic.

By Allison Dunn / The Blade
Fri, 22 May 2020 16:45:40 GMT

At a certain point in her life, Virginia Johnson stopped thinking about her age, but her good nature and desire to help others never went away.

“It comes on one day at a time. I never really thought I’d live this long. Well, I never really thought about it either,” Mrs. Johnson, known to most as Ginny, told The Blade on Friday.

But Mrs. Johnson was thinking about it on Friday.

“This is my birthday, I’m 100 years old today,” she announced with a laugh.

Born in 1920, she has lived through a world war, the Great Depression and the Great Recession, all three of her sons serving in Vietnam, the death of two husbands and one son, and countless other trials and tribulations — some personal, some profound.

Now, as she begins her 101st year on this Earth, Ms. Johnson finds herself, like virtually everyone else the world over, enduring a global pandemic the scale of which was unimaginable just a few months ago.

Celebrating her milestone birthday during the coronavirus pandemic meant she was unable to leave or have visitors inside of her assisted living facility, St. Clare Commons in Perrysburg, because of social distancing precautions. Instead, her family gathered outside to visit and be able to wish her a happy birthday through a window. Regardless, she wasn’t letting the quarantine slow her or bring her mood down. Instead she found a way to help others in need, displaying the sort of attitude that she’s lived by for 10 decades.

“I try to be as lighthearted as I can, for my own sake. If I sit down and start feeling sorry for myself, I’d be a puddle of tears and a mess and nobody would like me,” she said.

A recent conversation between Mrs. Johnson and an employee at St. Clare Commons sparked an idea about how Mrs. Johnson could contribute back to the community during quarantine. It started when activities assistant Chasidy Nieb helped fix a stapler for Mrs. Johnson.

“She said, ‘I can’t fix anything mechanical, but give me a needle and thread and I’ll fix anything,’” Ms. Nieb recalled.

Ms. Nieb asked why Mrs. Johnson wasn’t sewing masks if she knew how to sew. Mrs. Johnson didn’t have the materials, so Ms. Nieb changed that.

With some cloth, elastic, and thread, Mrs. Johnson sat behind the sewing machine with the biggest grin on her face. She was in her element.

As a child, Mrs. Johnson begged to learn how to sew as she hovered over her mother and her machine. When she was about 12, Mrs. Johnson began taking lessons. She designed a dress made from a white fabric with red flowers, ruffled sleeves, and a big tie around the waist. She enjoyed the end product the most, she said.

Mrs. Johnson moved from West Virginia to northwest Ohio with her first husband, a salesman named Bill Wilson, who later died. She later remarried Lester Johnson, who owned a farm outside of Genoa. She learned the dedication of hard farm work, but she also enjoyed its softer side of newborn animals or traveling down country roads in a wagon pulled by their ponies.

And still, her love for sewing remained.

As of Friday, Mrs. Johnson has already made a handful of masks. Some are adult sizes that will go to the facility’s caregivers and others will fit children. The smaller masks will be donated to local day-care centers as youth will be returning to those facilities within the next few weeks, Ms. Nieb said.

Mrs. Johnson attributes her triple-digit age largely to staying active and eating right — with a bit of chocolate here and there. Along with sewing, she keeps a box of poems she has collected since she was a child, and she has new dedication to her faith.

“Try to help your fellow man because sometimes we’re the ones that need help and I think we should follow it. That’s what God told us in the Bible,” Mrs. Johnson said.

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