America's Oldest Workers, still going strong

Mildred Heath has been in the newspaper business for 80 years.

• 91-year-old yoga instructor hard at work

Mildred Heath started working at her hometown newspaper when she was 15, toiling over a hot-metal linotype machine with her boyfriend. She married him a few years later in 1929, and they co-founded a business that eventually expanded to three papers.

She has since passed that business on to her three children, though she outlived them all, as well as her husband. The business was recently sold, but she still reports for one of those papers, the Beacon-Observer.

"If I get news, I turn it in," Heath says, commuting the short distance to her office in an electric wheelchair. Two years ago, when she was a spry 100, Experience Works awarded her the title of "America's Oldest Worker." She says that being a centenarian journalist has one drawback when it comes to sources: "The people I knew are all dead."

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