Week 21: Citizen Cane

If you’re old enough to remember reading the Boston Post, you’re probably old enough to remember their biggest publicity stunt in 1909. According to history, the now defunct publication, which folded in 1956, wanted to recognize the senior-most person in each New England town. A few hundred gold-tipped, mahogany wood canes, covered in ebony lacquer, were distributed to selectmen and then presented to the patriarch or matriarch of respective towns. While most originals ended up unaccounted for, lost, damaged, stolen or in a museum, a few towns still carry the tradition handing out the canes a century later. An inscription on the top of the cane reads, “Presented by the Boston Post to the oldest citizen of Wilton, N.H. (TO BE TRANSMITTED).”

Pauline “Polly” Kenick, 99, of Wilton, is one of those cane-bearers.

“It has to be genes; it’s nothing I did,” Kenick said. “I just did what I do.”

She was the youngest of two daughters whose father was a railroad worker and often on the rails away from home. Her mother, a homebody who lived to be 101, “kept tight reins on us,” explaining she and her sister were never allowed to go to dances. After graduating from Nashua High School in 1929, she became a nurse. Her job, as she was earning her license, was working in a shoe-shop office making 25 cents an hour. However, after marrying her husband in 1934, she would go on to be nurse in Exeter for 38 years. After she retired in 1971, she followed her husband to St. Petersburg, Fla., where they lived until his death in 1986, four years after a stroke.

“I traveled up and down the coast with a man and a wheelchair and a blind pet poodle for four years until up here,” she said with a laugh.

Nowadays, her life is as busy as ever. Despite mobility from a walker, she is either knitting hats for soldiers, working on craft projects, spending time with family or playing the piano. She has three children, ages 65-71.

“I’m not very fast, it’s not always easy, but I get there,” she said.