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Archiver > WHITNEY > 2003-02 > 1045541699


From: "Carol Clute" <>
Subject: Re: [WHITNEY-L] Paul Whitney, age 100
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 23:19:17 -0500
References: <001a01c2d6cc$d202b360$cf9c3a41@oemcomputer>


Way to go Paul! Thanks for the story Frank
Carol
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Young" <>
To: <>
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 4:37 PM
Subject: [WHITNEY-L] Paul Whitney, age 100


> Well, you convinced me very quickly. Here it is, from The Columbian, 17
Feb 2003.
>
> 100-Year-Old Discovers Home on His Own
> Man left daughter in Oregon for North Dakota
>
> MOTT, N.D. (AP) --- This town harbors a runaway.
> He's holed up in a small apartment, reading books and doing
crossword puzzles. And at age 100, Paul Whitney is glad to be home.
> Whitney ran away to Mott from Grants Pass, Ore., where he had
been living with his 73-year-old daughter. He felt she coddled him too
much, and he figured they would drive each other crazy.
> It reached a point last April where he couldn't take it one more
day. He stuffed clothes and his heart medicine into a pillowcase and, with
his aching knees, crawled out of the window.
> He had only one place to run to --- the southwestern North
Dakota town of about 800, where he had lived as a boy until 1919, and where
his mother died of pneumonia in 1908.
> Whitney said that after getting out the window, he made it to
the Grants Pass bus station, where officials had been warned not to sell a
ticket to an old man wanting to go to Dickinson, N.D.
> A police officer arrived. Whitney said the two talked, and the
officer told him, "There ain't nothing wrong with you. Go get your ticket."
> So Whitney bought his bus ticket and climbed on board to watch
the miles roll by. He hired a taxi to drive him the final 60 miles from
Dickinson to Mott, and had a bit of a shock along the way.
> He told the taxi driver he planned to take a room at the Holiday
House, where he had stayed in years past.
> "Been burned down since 1989," was the reply.
> With the driver's help, Whitney found a service agency in Mott
that helped him get into a small apartment.
> There he has enough to live on --- a few pots and kettles on the
stove, a pile of rummage sale books next to his reading table.
> A few weeks back, some men in town came to see how he was
getting on. They checked out his apartment, left and returned with a
recliner, table and chairs, a chest of drawers and pictures for his walls.
> "We figured a 100-year-old guy shouldn't have an empty old
apartment," said Lanny Johnson, one of the four.
> Whitney, who also lived earlier in Arkansas, has memories and
stories, like the one about the time he took a bullet through the chest, and
the way Mott used to look back in its earliest days. The town will
celebrate its centennial this year.
> Doris Schatz delivers meals to Whitney and picks him up Sunday
mornings to take him to church.
> "He does a wonderful job," she said, "He takes life as it
comes."
> She figures he needs people to talk to, though Whitney says he's
perfectly satisfied.
> "When you stop chasing women, you don't get lonely," he said.
> There are places around Mott he'd like to see --- a pond, the
old homestead. He has been up to the cemetery to visit his mother. His
plot is there beside her, as it has been all along.
> He figures some might say his decision to run away to Mott was a
foolish idea. But life is what you make it, he says. And he made it home.
> :"I'm satisfied here," he said.
>
>
> Paul sounds like my kinda guy!
>
> Frank Young
>
>
>
>
>

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