SpringfieldNewsSun.com

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — In her mid-90s, Amy Barnhart wasn't sure she wanted to follow her surgeon's advice about having colon cancer surgery.

When he told her he'd done the same surgery on a 105-year-old, Barnhart responded: "Did she live?"

"It just popped out," Barnhart said with a smile.

Barnhart's subsequent surgery went well enough that on Friday, Aug. 29, the woman some call the Queen of Oakwood Village Retirement Community was smiling at her 100th birthday, looking a quarter century younger.

"Here I thought all my old friends were gone," said Barnhart. "I've made an awful lot (of friends) here at Oakwood."

Barnhart moved to the retirement complex after the death of her husband, John. Eighteen years later, she not only continues to stay in her own apartment, she continues to hear the same complaint she heard when she arrived: "You walk too fast to live here."

Wearing a special dress for her Friday party, Barnhart strode quickly down the hall last week in a pink sweater, white capris and white Reeboks, an air of energy about her.

Although she said she no longer walks merely for exercise, Barnhart does a fair amount of walking visiting friends all over the facility.

"If you can't get me because I don't stay at home, you can call the office and leave a message," she said.

When not on the move — and on most mornings — she can be found at the table beside the second-floor elevator, working on the 1,000-piece puzzles that take her about two weeks to complete.

Emily Smith is always there to help.

And passersby, including staff, pitch in.

"They all stop and put in a piece," Barnhart said. "Everybody that lives here, you'll find them looking and putting in a piece."

And chatting while they do.

"I don't like to be by myself, and that's why I moved here," Barnhart said. "I was out there in the country and I couldn't stand just to stay alone."

Born in Maryland, she moved to Clark County with her family when she was 5 and attended Hunter School on Middle Urbana Road near the Champaign County line.

She remembers the mile-long walks to school, playing fox and geese and drop the handkerchief, and the winters when her father would hitch up the wooden sleigh to take the kids to school.

"He had those jingles on the horse, so we'd go jingle all the way," she said.

She went on to Black Horse School and North Hampton High School.

"We didn't finish high school," she said. "My dad had died when I was 13 and as quick as we could start working, we did."

Her work was on a family. Married at 17 to John Barnhart, 10 months her senior, "I always say I never worked anywhere, but I worked everywhere."

That included wallpapering for relatives, doing permanents for her neighbors in the Rockway School area, and doing other things to make a little money and keep in contact with others.

In the early days there also was a year's stay in Chicago after Robbins & Myers in Springfield had cut her husband's wages in a down time and he decided to go to electrician's school to secure a better future.

They returned to Springfield, and he worked for Ohio Edison, then International Harvester while they raised three boys.

Barnhart's youngest son, Nicholas, is gone now but remembered on Barnhart's watch, which bears a cartoonish character of one of the Campbell's Soup characters.

"He worked for Campbell's," she said.

Her son Roger lives in Northridge and takes her to all her doctor's appointments, and another son, Harold, drops in two or three times a month from his home in Piqua, then has to track her down wherever she's visiting in the home.

Her seven great-grandchildren are a source of pride for her.

Never a smoker, drinker or carouser, Barnhart said she keeps herself on a routine, getting up every morning to watch the news, eating three meals a day and not sitting around on her couch.

"People don't see how I do it. Well, I don't either," she said. "But I don't hurt, and as long as I can keep going ..."

At Oakwood Village, the consensus is that she'll be doing that for some time.

Said one resident as Barnhart breezed by, "nobody walks like Amy."

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.