Newscoma

Meet Mildred Heath, who has worked in the news business for 85 years.

LINCOLN, NEB.– A 100-year-old Nebraska journalist is slated to be honored as the country’s oldest worker.

Mildred Heath of Overton is a reporter for the Beacon-Observer newspaper, a weekly publication based in Overton. Heath has been working at newspapers in the state for about 85 years.

From her Newspaper:

Love for life and for working with people is what has kept this newspaperwoman going in the 85-year-long career she started in 1923 at the age of 15. At that point, high-schooler Mildred Nelson considered it, “just natural” to take a job at her hometown newspaper, the Curtis Enterprise (Curtis, Neb.), to work alongside her sweetheart, Blair Heath. There, she taught herself to operate a Linotype – a machine that turned hot lead into lines of type for the printing press. “I got really good at it,” she says with pride, “but the lead was really hot.” She still carries burn marks from those early days.

In 1927, after graduating from school, Mildred Nelson married her newspaper boyfriend, and in 1929 they bought the Farnam Echo, beginning a family and publishing partnership that now involves three generations. In 1938, the couple moved to Overton where they founded the Overton Observer. For many years, the Heaths lived in rooms behind the Observer office with their three daughters, Donella, Polly and Barbara, who were literally born into and grew up in the newspaper business. In 1948, they purchased the Elm Creek Beacon and later combined the newspapers.

Awesome. Just awesome.