By John Johnston • jjohnston@enquirer.com • February 25, 2010
Freda Kolb celebrates another birthday today, and nobody's more amazed by that than Freda herself.
"Satan doesn't want me. The Lord doesn't want me," she says, holding court in the North Bend home she shares with her son Ray Kolb and daughter-in-law Carole. "I never thought I would live this long. Never, ever thought of being this old."
She is 106.
She was born in Sedamsville on this date in 1904, just 10 weeks after two brothers named Orville and Wilbur flew a gas-powered, winged contraption over the sands of Kitty Hawk, N.C.
Freda was 3 when her mother died; she was a teen-ager when World War I ended; she'd been married six years and had one child when the stock market crashed in 1929; she was a 33-year-old mother of two during the great Ohio River flood of 1937.
Nineteen U.S. presidents have held office during her lifetime, starting with Theodore Roosevelt. Don't bother asking her favorite.
"I never bothered with politics," she says.
But she does keep up with the news. She rises at 7 most mornings, enjoys two cups of coffee - black - then uses a magnifying glass to read the newspaper. She turns first to the death notices.
"To see if I know anybody."
She rarely does anymore. She has outlived all her contemporaries.
Also her husband, Ray Kolb Sr.
She was 19 when they married on June 23, 1923.
"He was a wonderful husband. The best man I ever knew," she says. He died 13 years ago at age 95.
She then lived alone in her Riverside home until, at age 103, she moved in with her son and daughter-in-law. They're sitting at a table with her, along with Freda's other child, Kathryn Noppert, who lives in Sayler Park.
Freda is wearing a blue outfit embossed with gold snowflakes, and glittery earrings. "They prettied me up for you," she says. "I make so much trouble for everybody else. I don't like people having to do things for me. I want to do things for myself, and some of them I can't do."
Her son, a retired plumber, says: "That was the hardest part in her life, resigning herself to the fact that she had to have help."
She recently had trouble breathing. She didn't want anyone to call 911. Carole did anyway.
In the hospital, a doctor asked Freda how she'd feel about getting a pacemaker.
"If that's what you think, do it," she told him.
The pacemaker should last five to 10 years. Meanwhile, Freda moves about by using a walker. "I have no pain. I'm lucky," she says.
She's been known to enjoy a strawberry daiquiri on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Other than that, "I really don't drink."
She enjoys playing cards, eating shrimp at Red Lobster and watching "The Price is Right" and "Wheel of Fortune," but says, "If I had my way, I'd discard the TV and cell phones."
TV, because "the commercials are terrible." And cell phones, because people "don't need to be riding in a car and listening to a telephone."
She still worries about her children. Her "old kids," she calls them. Ray is 78, and Kathryn is 84.
When she sees her son on his riding mower on warm summer days, she scolds: "Get him in here! Make him rest!"
"He's always been my boy," she says, glancing at Ray.
"And she's always been my girl," she adds, turning to Kathryn.
Which is to say some things never change, even when you're 106.
