Folks who make it to their 100th birthday have traveled a long road, but when a century takes a man from the heart of the Jim Crow South to a city that witnessed the nomination of our first black president, the path is particularly winding.
That is the journey taken by George Gray Jr., a retired postal worker who lives in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood.
This is a man born in Mississippi when William Howard Taft was United States president — not that a black man could vote for him. Louis Armstrong was still a year away from picking up his first cornet. Gray met Martin Luther King Jr. when the civil rights icon was a boisterous kid in knee britches.
Gray doesn’t shy from talking about the past, but notes with a grin that “If I let go from here” — he puts a finger to his mouth — “I catch it all back here,” and points to his rump.
That’s a good life lesson from a centenarian. Maybe he learned it during his decades of marriage to Juanita, who died in a 1987 auto accident.
Gray, who is among an estimated 97,000 centenarians in the United States, lives in a well-appointed home west of Monaco Parkway. The living room features polished oak flooring and a century-old sofa whose brocade, while showing some wear, is still in good shape.
In that respect, the sofa is akin to its owner. While Gray has lost most of his hearing, and a busted hip a few years ago ended his dancing days — hoofing was a favorite pastime — he still gets around, albeit with a walker and wheelchair.
“I love this thing called living,” he says. “I try to do a little bit of it every day.”
Gray was born in Hattiesburg, Miss., not far from where the state’s southern panhandle begins. The town was a lumber and railroad center, hence its nickname “Hub City.”
His father was a Baptist minister, which in that day and place was one of the few inroads a black man had into the professional class. Gray’s mother, whom he calls “the rock of the family,” took in white folks’ laundry. He still recalls using his toy wagon to pick up and deliver his mom’s wash.
“She also had a handful taking care of us,” says Gray, who had four brothers and sisters.
When Gray was 6, his parents split, and he moved with his mother to Birmingham, Ala., a bona fide city and home to a burgeoning iron and steel industry.
The boundaries of race were both written and unwritten, which brought an additional layer of navigation to childhood. “We boys growing up together, we had to watch out for one another,” Gray says.
But he recalls carefree days of shooting marbles — “I was pretty good at that” — and building kites from newspapers, storebought kites being too dear. And what could be better than sending yesterday’s headlines aloft?
He also remembers a community where neighborhood adults watched over all the kids, not just their own.
“I’ll tell you one thing for sure, if you did something wrong and Mrs. Jones saw it, she didn’t tell your mom, she’d call you over and bend you over her own lap,” Gray says. “Those people raising their children seemed to understand each other.
“People watched me pretty closely because I was a preacher’s boy,” he says. “I always had to watch what I was doing.”
Gray was a good student and yearned for a college education.
After high school, he traveled to Atlanta. Thanks to the help of a professor at Morehouse College, he arranged a barter deal to work his way through the school.
Gray had two courses with Martin Luther King Sr., who was pursuing a theology degree while preaching at Ebenezer Baptist Church. He remembers his classmate’s chubby-cheeked son.
“He was a child,” Gray says. “He was not the Martin Luther King that all of us got to know when he grew up.”
But Gray’s dad died in 1935 during his senior year, and the younger Gray never finished college.
By then he was dating Juanita Ross, an Atlanta resident attending Clark College. They married on Christmas Day 1938. Four years later, they moved to Johnstown, Pa., where Gray’s family had relocated, and he joined his two brothers at Bethlehem Steel.
There was a newfound freedom in the North. Gray still doesn’t resent having grown up in the South, but he doesn’t look at it with rose-colored glasses. “Someone was always ready to tell me what I could and couldn’t do,” he says.
But the mill’s pollutants were hard on Gray, spurring bronchial problems. World War II was underway, and Gray did a military hitch. A doctor recommended a “high and dry” climate for his lungs. In 1944, the Grays moved to Denver.
After a brief stint in a tent factory, Gray took a job as a mail handler with the post office. They moved into “Veterans Village” in north Denver, a community of quonset huts. A son, George “Skip” Gray III, was born in 1945. (He is a Denver lawyer.)
Parenthood inspired Gray.
Over the course of the next 25 years, the couple added 23 children to their family. One they adopted; the rest were through a foster-parent program. The Grays were driven by a belief that young black men needed every break they could get, starting with a stable home and caring parents.
“Every child needs a good home and looking after,” Gray says.
Gray retired from the postal service after 35 years, devoting his time to his Masonic lodge — he is a 33rd-degree Mason — and various civic groups, such as the Five Points Business Association, the American Legion, Scott United Methodist Church and the East Denver YMCA.
Juanita died in 1987. A librarian who was the first black woman to run for Denver’s Board of Education, she is the namesake for the Juanita Gray Community Service Award, which kicks off Black History Month.
The pace has slowed for Gray, although he was feted with a three-day bash when he turned 100 in October. It was a big turnout. Cake and everything.
“I always loved my life,” Grays says. “When I look back on it, I had no bad time at all.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com