A century ago, Woodrow Wilson was president, few Americans had phones or graduated from high school.In 1916, tow trucks were invented. So were hamburger buns and toggle light switches. The Red Sox had won a World Series. The average home cost $5,000 and the average car cost $400.In December of 1916, the likes of Kurt Douglas and Betty Grable were born, and so was Esther Hill.Hill was born in Montgomery City and lived most of her life in Jonesburg. Work and marriage took her other places, like St. Louis, Jefferson City and Texas.Now she lives in Warren County again, where she zooms around the hallways at Oak Pointe of Warrenton in a power wheelchair. In her room, she uses a walker.She has a hard time hearing, and moves a bit slower, but her memories are clear and she talks fast. She is known to the staff as a storyteller.“She has the world’s best stories,” said Mona Gardner, resident assistant. “She said when she was working in St. Louis, she was outside and she saw these big feet come out of a car. It was the world’s tallest man.”Indeed, Robert Pershing Wadlow, who died in 1940, was just under 9 feet tall and was the Guinness World Record holder as the tallest man. He lived in Alton, Ill. Hill, a registered nurse, worked in St. Louis.Hill was a modern woman for her time. Probably ahead of time. Nursing wasn’t her first career choice.“I wanted to be an archeologist. This was during the deep Depression, in Jonesburg. I went to a small school and I was a woman,” Hill said.Colleges denied her an education and a career in archeology.“Job opportunities were nursing, teaching school, being a typist or file clerk. Well, I didn’t want any of that,” she said.She married in 1936 to Paul Hill and graduated from the Missouri Baptist School of Nursing in 1938. At nursing school, she fell out of favor with her instructors because one of the rules was students needed to be single.After nursing school, Hill went into private-duty nursing, and then she was hired at Barnes Hospital. She remembers being paid $30 a month plus meals and laundered uniforms. It was a coveted position for the time.During her life she worked at hospitals and also with the Missouri Health Department and the Warren County Health Department. She was the first public health nurse in Warren County and hired just after the 1957 Katie Jane Nursing Home fire.Her health department work involved developing health and safety plans, teaching safety standards, doing on-site inspections and helping groups with the Medicare Home Health Agency Law.Her first marriage to Paul Hill ended in divorce after more than a decade. She was married to her second husband, Richard “Bud” Hill for 51 years. The two men were distantly related.She has pursued hobbies her entire life.“At different times in your life, you do different things,” Hill said.During her 100 years, she has studies genealogy, collected antiques, kept a garden, raised irises and lilies, rescued cats and she reads all the time.She also has a fondness for the supernatural and feels a connection with the unexplainable. She remembers the day she was born, Dec. 4, 1916, and being held by her grandmother. She remembers being in impossible situations, like being in a car, stuck in a snowy ditch, and alone on a porch and unable to move, then asking for help and being rescued. She said no one was there to hear her or see her, but just when she asked for help it came.Her spirituality has led her though life.“We have a responsibility for the Earth and all the people in it. I’ve always felt, even as a child, that I’ve had a responsibility to make my little corner of the Earth better than how I found it,” she said.As each decade passes, more people, especially women, are living beyond 100, but it is still uncommon. And science has yet to discover the recipe for such longevity.Is it lifestyle? Attitude? Luck?“Good genes,” said Hill.To her, life has been good, and it still is.“I’ve enjoyed every day," she said. “I’ve had a most interesting life that most people don’t experience.”

Esther Hill is 100 years old. She was born Dec. 4, 1916. Record photo/ Kate Miller.