Englewood Woman Celebrates 104th Birthday with a Big Bash
Collard greens, gospel music, gum and family.
Those are some of the secrets that helped Rosie Atchison live to be 104, quipped her granddaughter, Tammy Barnes, 47.
On Saturday, the Englewood resident celebrated her birthday with dozens of family members at an outdoor party on the 6100 block of Marshfield Street.
An exhausted Atchison simply nodded when asked that afternoon if she was enjoying the party, which included singing, table games and even Michael Jackson impersonators. Atchison, nicknamed Big Ma Ma, is blind but her family says she understands what is happening around her.
“We are all here because we love her from the bottom of our hearts,” said grandson Andrew Atchison, 55.
During the last few years, Atchison has gained attention for her centenarian status from various news outlets, public officials and college students researching the elderly.
Atchison is a long time Chicago South Side resident who was born Aug. 15 in 1911 on a plantation in Bobo, Miss., according her family.
Atchison’s mother, Anna Brown, died shortly after her birth.
Her father, Henry Liner, reared her. Atchison eventually married and had three children on the plantation. One child died.
In mid-1930s, she left Mississippi and moved to Chicago with her two children after never getting paid for her work on the southern plantation.
She remarried but her second husband died in 1963. She cleaned railroad cars and her husband worked at a slaughter house, her family said.
Atchison lived in variety of sites on the South Side, including a slum building and a public housing unit before buying a two-flat in 1970 on 6100 block of Marshfield Street.
While in the home in 2010, she survived a fire. She was carried to safety by a Chicago firefighter.
Atchison was heavily involved in her church, Greater Salem Baptist Church, 215 W. 71st Street.
She sang in the choir. Her favorite artist: Mahalia Jackson.
“I love the Lord,” she often tells her family.
She also love soul food, like greens, okra and cornbread and a non-food item: gum.
“My habit is just chewing gum,” she says to family.
But her favorite pastime, her family says, is just being surrounded by them.
She has two surviving children, 17 grandchildren, 48 great-grandchildren, 77 great-great grandchildren and 13 great-great-great grandchildren.
“She loves her family and sacrificed herself for her family,” said Ernestine Hall, 57, a granddaughter. “She went to work to help her family. She loves her grandchildren. She allowed family members to stay in her house. She would cook. She is just a good grandmother.”
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