AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: Noreen Wood

Correction appended

Noreen Wood has always loved living and working on a Boone County farm.

Born Jan. 14, 1911, she worked hard all her life, she says, but she enjoyed it.

"Anything a man could do, I did a little better," Noreen jokes.

The 96-year-old has a knack for remembering birthdays and other dates of people close to her. She lives at Bluff Creek Terrace, but as a young woman she worked in the country on farms near Route UU and Sugar Creek Drive.

She was born on her father’s farm in an area called Valley Springs, near Route UU west of Columbia, then moved to a nearby farm three years later. Noreen’s parents, Andrew Jackson and Amanda Wood, had four boys and four girls. In 1933, her father lost the family farm during the Depression.

"He lost all of his sheep and his cattle, except a pet lamb and a cow," Noreen says.

So the family moved to a farm on Hickory Grove School Road, which old-timers called Sugar Creek. When her mom got sick, Noreen quit her job as a waitress to help around the house and took a job helping her neighbors, Everett and Jean Jacobs.

Noreen helped cut tobacco, milk cows, feed cattle, work the big garden and keep the cupboard full of canned goods. She anguished when the cow kicked over the bucket of milk. She chased varmints out of the chicken shed with a club and threatened black snakes with a hoe. When a crow tried to fly off with a little chick, she fired at the black bird with a 16-gauge shotgun. "It almost knocked me backwards," she laughs.

Noreen lived at the Jacobs’ house from age 17 until she was 87, when she gave up the farm life and moved to town. She never drove a car, and she never married, although she did have some boyfriends. She says staying single is the reason she’s lived so long. "I’m glad I lived like I did," she says. "I’ve been blessed."

These days, Noreen reads a half-dozen books each month and is currently reading a novel called "Leaper: The Misadventures of a Not-Necessarily-Super Hero," written by her great nephew, Geoffrey Wood.

Looking back, Noreen says she misses the country: "It was hard work, I’ll say. I enjoyed doing it."

SECOND THOUGHTS: Wednesday, June 27, 2007

The June 19 Our Town photo column misspelled Norene Wood’s name.

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