Mary Belin reflects on her century

If to live to the age of 100 is a blessing, then Mary Belin has a two-fold one.

Yes, she needs a walker to get around, and true, her daughter Ann has to shout to adapt to her mom’s diminished hearing, but that is minor compared to the greatest gift that Belin has these days – a mind as sharp and good-humored as it’s ever been.

Seated in her favorite chair, graciously willing to forego her afternoon viewing of Jeopardy to accommodate an interview, Belin reflected on the past century, that began for her on April 1, 1925, when the former Mary Ella Johnson was born at home in Hosford to Clarence Manuel Britton Johnson and his wife, Fannie Narcissus Bonner, during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. 

Her dad worked in the lumbering industry and the family, of five sons and two daughters, was by no means wealthy. It wasn’t until she was starting out in elementary school, when the family moved to the community of Kenny’s Mill, where the wastewater plant is now, behind the current senior citizens center, that she lived in a house complete with indoor plumbing, electricity and running water.

“I wore my brother’s clothes, high top brogans and his outgrown overalls and I had the shirt with overalls made out of flower sacks,” Belin said. “And we were fortunate.

“He’d get clothes because he’d outgrown them and there wasn’t anything left for me,” she said. “I wore those high top shoes; I survived.”

In those early years in Port St. Joe during the Depression, she learned the value of work, and would soon land her first job. “I worked all day long on a Saturday at the 10-cent store and made a dollar,” Belin said. “I worked from nine in the morning ‘till nine at night, and had a 30-minute lunch break and a 30-minute supper break and made a dollar. I was supposed to get 99 cents because you’d take a penny out for ‘income tax’

“They gave me a crisp dollar bill and I had it though I never spent it,” she recalled . “I had it in a box in there somewhere until Hurricane Michael came.”

Later, she would ride her bicycle to Costin’s Department Store, where she worked for two summers, for $10 a week. “It wasn’t much; it might not have been that much,” Belin said. “Mr. Cecil there, he lived to be a hundred, and he was the nicest person I ever worked for.”

World War II, which was raging when Mary Johnson graduated from Port St. Joe High School in 1943, had a profound effect on the family. Three of her brothers went off to war in the Army Air Corps, and her younger brother Harry was killed in action in Germany. The other two came home and cared for their mother, and their father died in 1947.

Also returning from the war was Leonard Belin, who was the first man drafted in Gulf County at age 24. A gifted athlete, he at one time had an athletic scholarship to Auburn University but lost that after he was cleated in the leg during a football game.

Leonard Belin was able to play semi-pro baseball for The St. Joe Saints, alongside the husband of one of Mary Johnson’s girlfriends, and it was she who set the two up on a blind date, a picnic at Wayside Park.

Mary, who was 21 at the time, nine years younger than her future husband, remembers what they had – strawberry shortcake prepared by Miss West, and a friend who prepared them fried chicken and potato salad.

Upon their marriage Feb. 15, 1948, Leonard was working at the box plant, where he would work himself up to plant manager. The couple bought their house in 1948, a year after it was built, and lived there ever since, including 63 years of marriage, which ended March 2, 2011, when Leonard passed away in his early 90s.

Together the couple raised daughter Ann and son Jim, and Mary is blessed with four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

“‘Miss Mary’ was very involved with the lives of her children and other youth of the City of Port St. Joe by volunteering, mentoring, shaping and molding their lives through school and church activities,” reads a proclamation presented to her by the Port St. Joe city commission on her birthday, declaring it Mary Belin Day. 

It notes her volunteer work with the St. Joseph Historical Society, the Port St. Joe Garden Club, and the Friends of the Library, as well as being the oldest member of the First United Methodist Church, which she joined in 1939 at age 14.

In recounting the many historic events that have happened over the past century, the proclamation notes that Belin has lived through the administration of presidents Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Biden and Trump.

“I voted for him,” she said, referring to her first vote, for FDR. “That’s Franklin now, not Theodore. He was a little older.”

While so many things have happened in her lifetime, discoveries of everything from color television to iPhones, and the launching of men into space, of the Civil Rights era to the fall of the Soviet Union, she said she has vivid memories of the Challenger disaster, and when John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

But it’s also the smaller, gradual things that she recalled, especially in the lives of women.

“A woman couldn’t work in a business when she was pregnant, and they couldn’t teach school,” said Belin. “Everything’s changed. You didn’t wear tight dresses like they’re wearing now.

“Way back when I was little, women didn’t go to the grocery stores or many stores. The men did all the shopping,” she said. “A woman didn’t walk down the street by herself; she walked with either a husband or with somebody.”

And she has memories of the way Port St. Joe used to be, the smells of the paper mill or the seafood industry, and how so much has changed, including the blossoming of a tourist industry.

She offered up some remarks about tourists, and then with a sly grin, conceded she probably shouldn’t be so critical.”But they can’t do anything about it,” she said. “They can’t fire me.”

On the perennial question of what she owes her longevity to, she said she’s kept in shape but hasn’t necessarily had a perfect diet.

“I like to eat,” she said. “Thinking about it though, I like hot dogs and french fries and stuff like that. Get me some chicken nuggets from Burger King and french fries and that’s good stuff, good eating, isn’t it?”

Together with her daughter, she keeps a tight schedule, breakfast at 7:15 a.m., and then lunch at 11:15 a.m., and supper at 5 p.m., and in between the Price is Right, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and other television, aided by closed captioning. Plus she likes to sit and gaze out her front window, watching the world go by as she works on a jigsaw puzzle.

This past week she luxuriated amidst the end tables filled with the 55 greeting cards she got for her birthday.

“There’s only two, I think, that are alike. The rest of them are all different ones,” Belin said. “That’s a lot of cards; oh my goodness. I’ve never gotten that many in my life. I didn’t know that many people remembered me.”