Ada Winget

BIOGRAPHY

Winget was born Ada Lueva Van Hooser in Owasso, Oklahoma, USA (then Indian Territory), on 6 August 1906. She was the middle of five children born to parents Jasper Ewin Van Hooser (1880–1921) and Ola Oldham (1876–1917). Her parents were farmers who moved to Oklahoma in the hope of joining the area’s oil boom, but since oil riches were not forthcoming the family moved to the San Joaquin Valley in California around 1910, to return to the farming life. She had a horse named Tully that she rode to school each day.

Between 1917 and 1920, her mother and both older sisters died of an unknown illness, and after her father also died in 1921, she moved to Visalia to live with her uncle and his wife. She lived with them until the graduated from high school, when she decided to move to San Francisco with a close friend. The two friends found jobs at the telephone company as operators. In 1925, she married Willard Wright Gipson, whose family were good friends with hers. They first lived in Hermosa Beach, but moved to Taft after her husband got a job with Standard Oil in 1936. The couple had two children.

After the Second World War ended, in 1945, her husband was transferred to Maracaibo, Venezuela, where most of the family lived for the next three years. In Venezuela, Ada survived dengue fever after weeks of severe symptoms. Her husband died of kidney failure in 1951. On 7 September 1952, she survived the sinking of the SS Princess Kathleen, a passenger and freight steamship that ran aground and sank at Lena Point in Lynn Canal, Alaska.

In the 1960s, she married Albert Winget, but the marriage lasted only about three years until her husband died from a heart attack in 1968. A year later, she moved from Taft to Tulare to be near her daughter and son-in-law. Eventually, when she was not able to live on her own, she decided to move to the Golden Living Center (now San Joaquin Rehab) in Bakersfield, California. She drove a car until she was 102 or 103.

Winget died in Bakersfield, Kern County, California, United States, on 26 January 2019, at the age of 112 years, 173 days.