Starkville woman turns 103

Starkville resident Ethel Wilson celebrated another year in the century club on her 103rd birthday Tuesday.

Wilson was born April 17, 1915 in Iowa, where she was raised, and then attended Iowa State University and received a degree in foods and nutrition. She worked as an assistant dietitian in the women’s dormitory at Iowa State, where she met her husband, Mississippi native Arlie Wilson, while he was there doing graduate studies.

The pair went on their first date to a military circus, and they married August 30, 1941, right before his service in the U.S. Public Health Service, a branch of the Army.

“Grandpa was in the military, and during World War II they lived all over,” Wilson’s granddaughter Mardi Hasson said. “They lived in New York, Florida, Arkansas.”

World War II was not the only historical event Wilson has seen in her lifetime. “When I got out of high school, it was in the early 30’s in the Great Depression,” Wilson said. “You couldn’t get a job anywhere. There was no money to get jobs and times were so tough.”

The Wilsons moved to Starkville from Iowa in 1948, also exposing Wilson to the civil rights issues of the time that she was not accustomed to.

“It was a three-day trip from Iowa down here down on the bus,” Wilson said. “We stopped in St. Louis. As I came farther south, I saw separation of the blacks and whites. The bus station had separate bathrooms, and I had just never seen that before.”

Wilson and her

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