This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Biography Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/EZm.2ACIB/1615 Message Board Post: This might interest someone--not related. The Tennessee Republican Huntingdon, Carroll County, Tennessee Friday, January 10, 1930 Carroll Countian Is 118 Years Old Popular Bluff, Missouri: When Uncle TOMMY KEMP came to this county from southern Tennessee nearly 70 years ago, and established a farm in what then was nothing but wilderness, he brought along the fine theory that the best policy in life is to eat what you want, drink what you want, and do as you please so long as it does not intrude on the rights of your fellow man. “I just live a normal life,” he said. “I walk plenty, work all I want to, eat and drink what I want and that includes tobacco and coffee. When I could get it, I used to drink considerable whiskey, too. I have never used spectacles. Fast is, I can not find any through which I can see as good as I can with my nakey eyes” “I’m good for a long time yet. Yes, I’ll be 119 years old next September 10—and yes, I’m positive I’m 118 years old. Why in 1861 I was too old to serve in the Civil War.” It has been a happy life for Uncle Tommy, not only for himself, but for his family and friends, they assert. He spreads cheer wherever he goes—is seldom cranky like some other folks and is never ill. He recently told a physician friend that if doctors had to be depend on him for a living, they would have to back to the farm. He enjoys each day of his life more and more and takes pride in “minding his own affairs and keeping out of the other fellow’s business.” THOMAS KEMP is a retired farmer. He owns a small farm, which he attends to himself, but for the last three years, he has spent the time visiting from one relative to another, enjoying the fruits of a century of work. “But I’m going to keep my little farm,” he say. “It gives me something to do, and I would died of lonesomeness if I should quit work altogether. You know there is no telling how long I’ll live and I’m going to keep on preparing for the future. One of my sisters, for I was one of a family of 13 children, lived to be 126 years old. She died four years ago in Washington.” Few people in this district realize he is probably the oldest man in Missouri. He resides with his daughter, MRS. AMANDA RUDICILE, five miles northeast of Poplar Bluff, and takes great delight in walking to Poplar Bluff and back, or going rabbit hunting when snow covers the ground. Kemp uses walking canes, but not because he is feeble. Ninety-eight years ago, while he was going to see a girl one day in a stage coach, the coach turned over and rolled down a Tennessee hill at a point between Huntingdon and Brownsville. He received a broken hip. “Years ago,” he recalls, “ I was a mail carrier. I rode a horse 40 to 75 miles a day. That may sound fishy, but it is true. Many is the day I have set my alarm clock at 3 a.m., rode the old horse 12 to 15 miles before breakfast and then finished my trip. Of course I did not use the same horse every day.” Kemp said he was born in Carroll County, Tennessee back in 1811, where he remained until a young man. He was married in Kentucky in 1836. His wife died five years later and within a few years, he married her sister. She died 40 years ago. Since that time, he has chosen to remain single, insisting he didn’t want to be “burdened with another partner.” “Yes, the world is different now,” he says, “Back in the old days, the young women wore dresses. Now they wear handkerchiefs, sewed together, or something not much bigger than handkerchiefs. Why, the women now, or at least some of them, don’t have enough clothes to whip the flies out of the sugar barrel.” >From the Kansas City Star.