She’s only partly Irish, but St. Patrick’s Day is still a big day for Mae Knapp. She was born on that day in 1912 in Arkansas.
“That’s as good a place to be born as any,” said the retired schoolteacher. “But we didn’t stay there very long.”
Knapp will be celebrating her 98th birthday at Guest Home Estates with cherished relatives and friends, including Connie Bright, Mulberry.
“Mae is very special to our family,” Bright said. “My parents and my husband’s parents have passed on, but Mae ‘adopted’ us about 17 years ago. She claims me and my husband, Jack, as her children, as she never had any, and our children and grandchildren as her grandchildren.”
Knapp was the oldest of four children, with a beloved sister, Anna, and two brothers. She still has a brother, about eight years younger, living in Lamar, Mo.
She attended high school in Jasper, Mo., where she received training to become a teacher. Her sister also became a teacher. They shared a car, and Knapp would drop her sister off at the school where she taught, then drive on to her school, which was farther away.
After she had been teaching several years, rules were changed and teachers were required to have college training. Knapp attended night school and summer school while teaching and got her teaching degree from Pittsburg State University.
Married women were not allowed to be teachers in those days, so her career ended when she married Joseph Albert “Bert” Knapp, a farmer, on April 24, 1936. The couple moved north of Jasper.
“We had an enjoyable life together,” Knapp said. “He treated me like a queen.”
They were married 61 1/2 years before his death on Dec. 27, 1997, two days before he would have turned 88.
Mr. and Mrs. Knapp were devoted Seventh Day Adventists. She had been brought into that church by best friend Inez Barley in the 1950s.
“I had started her little girl out in first grade,” Knapp said. “Inez died about a year ago.”
The Knapps helped start the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Lamar, and were active in the Pittsburg church as well.
“Mae and Bert were the Adventist parents to us,” Bright said. “When our children were going to Enterprise Academy, a Seventh Day Adventist boarding high school near Abilene, Mae surprised us and wanted to help with the cost of the private education. She helped us for eight years as she continued to help Stephanie, our youngest, as she went to Union College, an Adventist college in Lincoln, Neb. Mae said she was investing in eternity.”
One of the tenants of this denomination is that it celebrates the Sabbath on Saturday rather than Sunday.
“The church also stresses good, clean living with no smoking or drinking,” Bright said.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way,” Knapp said. “The Good Lord lead us in the right way and we followed. He’s still taking good care of me.”
She lived in Mindenmines for many years before coming to Pittsburg, and lived on her own until she was 95. Now she’s at Guest Home Estates.
“Mae is very close to her nieces and nephews, and her nieces have decorated her room here beautifully,” Bright said.
Knapp enjoyed her own home, but has adjusted well to the move and looks forward to her birthday.
“I’m blessed with good health,” she said. “The Lord has a purpose for me to still be living, or I would not still be living.”
PITTSBURG —
