Eight months ago, Mary Lockett received a birthday surprise – a parade of well-wishers, including police and fire engines with wailing sirens and flashing lights, as they passed her home on South Kenmore Street in honor of her 104th birthday.
And on October 6th, the Virginia House of Delegates sent their own special greetings, perhaps a little late, but still very much appreciated.
“I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying these moments,” said Del. Alfonso Lopez (D-Arlington-Fairfax) as he presented Lockett with the resolution honoring her “wisdom, grace” [and] Integrity ”as a“ highly admired community leader ”of“ deep and persistent faith ”.
MPs in the Lower House of Legislature unanimously passed the measure under Lopez’s auspices in August.
The lady in the center has spent 82 of her 104 (one and a half) years in Arlington’s Green Valley neighborhood. She and her late husband Edward raised four children who provided her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in abundance.
“I’ve had good times and hard times – God kept me going,” Lockett told the Sun Gazette during the October 6th ceremony. She recalled events that included the earliest work at the Pentagon and told the story of her and her husband planning their new home in the mid-1950s. It has stayed there to this day.
“We built this house from scratch,” said Lockett, noting that while they couldn’t pay the bricklayers in cash – “the best,” she said of their work, but they made up for it by asking them for one long day fed work. “I made them pork chops,” said Lockett.
Back then, the Green Valley neighborhood (then alternately known as Nauck) was one of the few places where African Americans could live in the still strictly demarcated Arlington. Kenmore Street was “a gravel and mud road,” Lockett recalled, with tracks that ran a local streetcar line that took residents to Rosslyn and the District of Columbia.
Over the decades, Lockett served as a deacon in her church (Mount Pleasant Baptist in Alexandria) and was an important member of the Nauck Civic Association.
“I worked with them for a long time,” she recalls.
Her charming and well-kept home is emblematic of a woman who leads life on her terms. Lockett gets up early (typically 5am) and is ready to drop in at 7.30pm for the day after the Wheel of Fortune ends. Long a fan of blueberries, they continue to advertise their healthy properties as the secret to longevity.
Lopez came up with the idea of a legislative resolution honoring her life after reading about this 104th birthday party.
“It’s about honoring someone who has given so much to the community,” he said. “The whole story she saw – such an inspiration.”
Lockett was born on February 7, 1917 to Edward and Annie Sheppard from nearby Baileys Crossroads, the sixth (and last surviving) of eight siblings. Her year of birth is shared with the likes of John F. Kennedy, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Desi Arnaz, and she shares her February 7th date of birth with another notable Arlingtonian, Katie Couric.
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