Oldest Kansan dies at 112
Rosalia ? Flossie Page, the oldest Kansan on record, is dead at the age of 112 years, eight months and 10 days.
Page, who had lived on a farm near Rosalia in Butler County since 1950, died Wednesday of pneumonia at Susan B. Allen Memorial Hospital in El Dorado.
The Gerontology Research Group, which keeps a global database on people living past 100, said she was the sixth-oldest person in the United States and 11th-oldest in the world.
“Did Grandma look her age?” asked Becky Humig, Page’s youngest granddaughter who lived with her at the farm the last two years. “We’ve never seen anybody that old. We thought she looked pretty good.”
Humig said her grandmother had been hospitalized for about a week. It had become hard for Page to get around in recent years, and she had only reluctantly given up driving and cutting the lawn after she turned 90.
The former Flossie Elizabeth Bishop was born June 12, 1893, on her parents’ homestead near the southern Kansas town of Haven. As a young woman, she taught at a one-room school about 80 miles west of her birthplace.
She married Frederic Page in 1926 and they lived in Winfield, then moved back to the Bishop family homestead and finally to the farm in Butler County.
Her husband died in 1967. Their only child, Donald, died in 1993.
Though she enjoyed strong coffee, she abstained from liquor and soda, and didn’t smoke or curse. She also took no prescribed medication.