Scott Township woman celebrates 100th birthday with family, friends from a safe distance
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Virginia Flickinger was overwhelmed when she opened the door of her Scott Township home Saturday afternoon, revealing rows of handmade flowers scattered across her lawn and a life-size cutout of her as a hula dancer in Hawaii, and signs reading, “Happy birthday: 100 years old.”
And then, almost 30 family members and neighbors started singing “Happy Birthday” to Flickinger, who turns 100 on Sunday.
“I’m so blessed with my children,” she said. “This was so exciting and amazing. I thought everybody would forget about it because we’re not supposed to be close to each other.
“But they were all out in the yard and I was on the porch. To see everything out there! Thank God it turned out to be a beautiful day.”
Flickinger lived through the Great Depression, survived the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941, watched man walk on the moon and is now celebrating her milestone birthday during the coronavirus pandemic. A large party that would bring in family and friends from other states was canceled because of social distancing regulations.
Still, Virginia had her day.
“She’s a remarkable woman,” said her son, Glenn Flickinger. “She’s had a fascinating life because she’s lived through so much. One hundred years ago was a very different world than we live in today.”
Pearl Harbor: Witness to history
Born April 12, 1920, in Honolulu, Virginia Flickinger grew up on the island of Oahu, spending time learning how to hula dance. By the age of 21, she was working as a nurse’s aide at the Pearl Harbor hospital, cooking meals for nurses in their residence hall and changing the sheets and bedpans of patients.
But on Dec. 7, 1941, her life changed when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, throwing the United States into World War II.
“Sunday morning around 8:30, our house shook, and everything started to fall off the shelf. … All of a sudden, we heard people screaming outside. So we ran out to see what was going on, and we saw two of the (Japanese) planes above us and they were flying really low. They had just dropped the bomb a couple of miles away.”
After fleeing the area for two days, fearing the Japanese might invade, Virginia Flickinger headed back to the hospital, where she aided nurses who were caring for the wounded.
“I saw everything,” Flickinger said. “I saw them pulling the bodies out of the channel. I saw the battleships that were capsized.”
She worked for a week straight, unable to go home because of the number of injured.
Raised 5 children
Throughout the war, she continued to work as a nurse’s aide in Hawaii until she married John Barber, who was in the Navy, and having two sons, Bill and John Barber.
The marriage dissolved after the war, and she remarried in 1953 to Ray Flickinger. Together, the couple moved to various Army bases across the United States. After being stationed at Washington & Jefferson College in the city of Washington, the couple settled down, raising three more children, Glenn, Tom and Kathy Flickinger.
Virginia Flickinger has remained in the Pittsburgh area since her husband died in 1985, visiting her daughter in California and traveling to Hawaii to see friends and family. In addition to her five children, she has 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
“For a 100-year-old person to have been at Pearl Harbor, she lived through 9/11 — she was only 81 at that time,” Glenn Flickinger said. “Now to live through another huge world crisis is pretty amazing.”
After flying home from California in early March, Virginia Flickinger has remained quarantined in her home. Her kids drop off food at her door and sometimes eat dinner with her, sitting on opposite sides of the porch to keep her safe.
Several family members split into two shifts Saturday, driving up to her home and standing six feet apart in her yard.
“To live a long life like this, in a way it’s kind of sad because you miss everybody; but thank God I can see my children. … I’ve been blessed over and over again by my family,” she said. “I’m one of the luckiest mothers in this world.”