105 Years Young

By Leanne Kleinmann

When you meet Mabel Womack, it’s not surprising to discover that she spent her career as an educator. Her mind is sharp, and she’s as full of questions for you as you are for her.

“My mother was a teacher, too, before she married,” she said. “There were only about two professions a woman could do and the other was nursing. I didn’t care about that. So, I ended up teaching for about 44 years, in all.”

What’s more surprising to learn is that, at 105, she’s the oldest living alumnus of Lambuth College, now the University of Memphis Lambuth.

“I was so surprised,” she said about a ceremony honoring her as the oldest living Lambuth alum earlier this year. “Dr. Reddick got up and told all of those stories about the Womack family.” Dr. Niles Reddick is the chief operating officer and dean of the UofM Lambuth.

Mabel’s late husband was Richard E. Womack Jr., son of former Lambuth President Richard E. Womack, who led the college in the early 20th century when the board threatened to close the school because of declining enrollment.

“Dr. Womack said not over his dead body,” said Mabel of her father-in-law. “He moved his family into the main building, which had a dorm in it, and they ate with the students in the cafeteria. Then he traveled and got more students.

“He saved it back then, and it got saved again,” she said, referring to when the University of Memphis took over the school in 2012.

Mabel Bonner Womack’s journey to Lambuth was a little less straightforward. Growing up, she and her family criss-crossed the South, from her birthplace in Hernando, Mississippi, to Alabama to Starkville, Mississippi, where her father went to college at then-Mississippi A&T (now Mississippi State). When Mabel was in high school, the family moved back to the farm they owned on land that is now Wolfchase Galleria in Memphis, then called Ellendale.

Education was her constant.

After graduating from Bartlett High School, she went to a junior college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, before enrolling at Lambuth. How did she choose Lambuth?

“Back in those days, your parents decided for you,” she said. “My father was having problems with farming at that time and my mother came up with cancer, so Lambuth was close. I rode the train home every weekend.”

Her mother died the day she was supposed to start her senior year.

“My dad was distraught, of course, but he managed to get me to Lambuth for my last year, which was a blessing.” The Lambuth dean told her she couldn’t miss a single class and expect to graduate. “So, I did it — I graduated in 1939.”

She met her husband at Lambuth — after all, his father was president of the college for 28 years — though Richard Jr. had already graduated and begun teaching and running schools as a principal. After his military service, they headed west — “Richard had read all the Zane Gray stories” — including to Colorado and California, following teaching and other career opportunities.

Along with raising her two sons, “I was teaching all the time,” Mabel said.

And traveling, first with her husband and family in the summers; later with a friend after her husband died in 1988 (her sons have died, too, one in 2012 and the other in 2022). Mabel said she’s visited 70 countries in all. Switzerland is a favorite, and she regrets she never got to South Africa.

“But there’s also so much to see in our country,” she said. “I think parents should show children our country first. And our government in Washington and all.”

Her travel fit right in with her teaching. “It was really an experience that I was able to use by having, in those days, slides to show to the children,” she said.

People ask her all the time how she lived so long, and she’s not really sure.

“It all sort of happened suddenly … life went so fast after I retired,” she said.

Her family gave her a strong Methodist foundation — “there was no smoking or drinking in my family” — and taught her to serve others.

“I’d go home from school and tell my dad and mother about seeing a boy who didn’t have shoes in school,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Now, don’t you criticize him. If anybody needs shoes, let’s go out and get some for them.'"

Is there a secret to living such a long life?

“Not really,” said Mabel.

Do you feel lucky?

“Oh, yes.”

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