ERATH, La. (KLFY) – 90-year-old Lucille George Walker of Erath has a soulful voice.
Lucille just turned 90 years old. “We moved around when they had the sharecroppers. I remember. I was there,” Walker said. She was one of 10 children. “Three and four in the same bed,” Walker recalled.
She was born in Iberia Parish, then her family moved to Erath and she moved with them. “It was good days you know? It was good days.”
At 21 years old Lucille found the man she vowed to spend her life with. She says she knew he was the one for her. They were married for 60 years. “I just knew because other guys wanted to talk to me, but I wanted him. We just clicked. We just clicked.” Her fondest memory was when they were on an outing together. “We had an outing at the park one time. His cousin would come through from Texas. We had a lot of enjoyable times.”
Her husband worked in the fields, then for the railroad, a sugar mill, and as a cement worker. She remembers him as a jack-of-all-trades. When her two children became teenagers she jumped at the chance to now follow her dream to become a nurse. At about 30 years old she headed off to college.
“He would get them ready for school. Well, they were old enough to get themselves ready because he would be home when I wouldn’t.” Lucille worked at Erath Hospital before it was torn down, at a nursing home and at Dauterive Hospital. “I never got tired in all that time. I was proud of myself,” she stated. She eventually served as a certified trainer to Nurses Aides.
“I never got tired. I was proud of myself,” Lucille added. Lucille explains that her greatest lesson in life was to live a life of endurance. “One thing I really learned was to be patient and you have to have patience. Kindness comes with patience. I think I had a lot of that.”
Now, she’s a proud grandmother and great-grandmother who still wishes upon a star. Her one wish would be to do what she did before. “I would go back to work. I enjoyed work. I was not like oh lord I got to go to work,” Lucille explained.
As the mother of her church, Lucille’s patience about life circumstances grew two-fold. She believes it’s a trait that brought her through tough times. “I had to have that deep faith to go through some of the things that I went through in life like when my husband got killed when I was with him. I just had a peace about it. I grieved in my own way you know?”