Friends, family gather to mark Mattie Underwood Whitehead's 101st birthday
The year 1922 was filled with many historical events:
• In football, Alabama’s Crimson Tide put up the highest winning score in its history — then or since — beating Marion Institute’s Cadets 110-0;
• Alabama’s first radio station, Alabama Power Company’s WSY (forerunner of WAPI in Birmingham), began broadcasting;
• Reader’s Digest was first printed;
• Snow fell on Mauna Loa in Hawaii;
• Alabama Gov. Thomas Kilby became the first living person to have his face identified on a U.S. coin, the centennial half-dollar.
And on Sept. 26 of this eventful year, in the Black Belt town of Marion in Perry County, just south of Montgomery, sharecroppers Phillip and Helen Haynes Underwood welcomed their ninth and last child, Mattie.
Now Mattie Underwood Whitehead — and with a Gadsden street named in her honor — she recently marked her 101st birthday.
A black-tie celebration with family members, friends and others was held at an Attalla venue on Sept. 24, filled with joyous shouts of “Happy 101st birthday!”
Mrs. Whitehead is the second cousin of another native of Marion, Coretta Scott, wife of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Their grandmother was Patsy Tubbs Scott.)
She played high school basketball and sang in the church choir as a young woman, and married Charlie Whitehead on April 5, 1942, Easter Sunday. They had nine children (two remain) and ultimately moved from Marion to Gadsden and into their house on Whitehall Street. Her husband died in 1984 when he suffered a heart attack while driving to work and his vehicle crashed into a tree.
Mrs. Whitehead is a longtime member of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Alabama City (behind the former steel plant). She sang in the choir for many years before having a stroke at the age of 36 during a performance in Albertville.
According to a story by Gadsden Times reporter Benjamin Nunnally in 2018, the choir was singing “Oh, I Want to See Him” when she felt her right leg go numb. She told the other choir members that she thought she’d had a stroke, but drove back to Gadsden even though she had to push the pedals with her left foot. She managed to get home, but had to crawl up the steps.
Doctors confirmed she’d had a stroke that affected the right side of her body, but she recovered her strength and mobility and kept singing in the choir for another 30 years — only stopping, according to the 2018 story, because her friends had left — and still is always singing.
She was able to get around, cooked at holidays, did her own makeup and attended to her garden and housekeeping until her later years, and has always enjoyed visiting with friends and her many “grands and great-grands.”
Watching television remains a favorite pastime; her favorite programs are “Law & Order” and “In Heat of the Night.”
The street she still lives on was officially changed from Whitehall to Whitehead Street two years ago to mark her 99th birthday, following requests to the Gadsden City Council from her neighbors. Thomas Worthy, a council member at the time, said she was “the oldest resident on that street and had lived on it most of her life.”
One more time: Happy 101st birthday, Mrs. Mattie Underwood Whitehead!
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Friends, family gather to mark Gadsden resident's 101st birthday
