Miss Annie

Grand Bay Longevity A customer calls her "The Princess of Grand Bay." A co-worker calls her "Grandmother to the town." You might want to call her "Remarkable."

by Jere Hough

Published: Tue, August 19, 2008 - 2:54 pm CST Last Updated: Thu, August 21, 2008 - 3:22 pm CST

Miss Annie Rogers laughs a lot! And she likes her job. Maybe those are two reasons why she seems younger than her age.
"I was 94 the 23rd of May!" she states firmly, smiling.
Ninety-four years old and still putting in eight-hour days...standing behind the counter at the CVS Drug Store in Grand Bay, Alabama.
She takes no medication. She lives by herself. And she has known hard times.
"I was thirteen when my mother passed away," she says quietly. Then she continues proudly, "I raised five little brothers and sisters and kept house for my dad."
Back then, you could earn extra money chopping cotton on local farms around Grand Bay, but not a lot of extra money. Miss Annie smiles, "Thirty-seven cents...a day...for nine hours work!"
Her father taught her to work hard. He used to tell her, "If you went on a job, if you couldn't do a decent day's work, go home. Don't back up to the window to get your paycheck."
She had demanding teachers, too.
Miss Annie recalls, "We had to learn our alphabet, and buddy you had to know it when you saw it, too. But then, she would make us go backwards! I learned it backwards and to this day, I've never forgotten it."
Jere Hough asks if she would do it for the camera. And she did...from Z to A quickly and perfectly...laughing heartily when she finished.
Miss Annie Rogers has a little advice of her own: "If you want to do it, you can do it."
Miss Annie is a widow. She has two surviving children: a daughter in Grand Bay, and a son in Louisiana. There are grandchildren and great-grandchildren, too.

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