"I am probably going to survive for a long time,” Harriett Rose wrote in a 2012 installment of her longrunning Chevy Chaser magazine column, ‘Observations.’ “My mother was 95, my other two aunts were in their 90s when they died, and my doctors threaten me with living to be 100.”
In that article, Rose was lauding her Aunt Rosalind, who was approaching her 102nd birthday at the time.
“If I go before that 100th birthday,” Rose continued, “I’m going to be so irritated about the exercise I did when I hated it, about the sensible diet and the intelligent books I struggled through. Who needed it?”
As it turns out, it was a futile sentiment: On Sept. 13, Harriett Rose will indeed turn 100 years old, achieving a milestone that many of us aspire for but few will achieve.
The aforementioned column – one of more than 200 she penned for our magazine over nearly 20 years – showcased a typical representation of Rose’s approach to writing: sharp and witty. Poignant without taking things too seriously. To the point and to the bone. In my decade-plus tenure at Smiley Pete Publishing, I have primarily known Rose through her written words, rather than in person, but I am confident in presuming that this straightforward style has also informed her approach to life in general.
Rose enrolled at the University of Kentucky in the late 1930s, a time when very few women were pursuing postsecondary education. She received an undergraduate degree in music in 1941, and then returned to UK in the 1960s, as a mother of two who was concerned with helping put her own sons through college.
While she’d originally intended to simply renew her teaching certificate, as her son David and daughter-in-law Marsha tell it, during her return to college, she wound up taking (and enjoying) a psychology class. Four years later, she’d earned a PhD. in counseling and psychology. One of the first women to complete a doctoral program in four years at UK, Rose served as the executive director of the UK’s Counseling and Testing Center from 1965 to 1985, then went into a private psychology practice for about 10 years after she retired from the university.
For years, our readers have known her as one of Lexington’s best-known columnists and best-loved octogenarians/nonagenarians. It’s worth noting that, in many ways, those two things went hand-in-hand: Though she had published dozens of journal articles during her academic career, Rose didn’t begin her career as a professional writer until the age of 80. After years of collecting and retelling family and personal stories, she had become known among her family as an adept storyteller.
Encouraged by friends and family to find a way to somehow anthologize her stories, Rose began taking nonfiction writing classes at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning in the mid 1990s.
“Harriett is an inspiration for Carnegie writers,” said Neil Chethik, the Carnegie Center’s executive director and a former teacher of Rose’s. “She started her writing career at age 80 and compiled a substantial body of work.
I still mention her when someone says they’re too old to learn.”
(The organization has hosted an annual writing contest, the Harriett Rose Legacies Writing Contest, which is open to participants ages 55 and older, in her honor for the past 15 years.)
Soon after starting the class, she saw an ad in a new local magazine seeking submissions from local writers. She submitted a column to the publishers of Chevy Chaser magazine, not knowing if they would pick it up or not. A few months later, she saw her article, “Ladies Luncheon,” in print, and publisher Chuck Creacy reached out to see if she had anything else to submit. Thus was born her beloved monthly column, which appeared in nearly every issue until Rose retired her pen in 2017. (She also published an autobiography at the age of 94, called “Not Necessarily Kosher,” highlighting her personal history and that of several generations of her family.)
Especially in the later years of Rose’s column, her topics tended to highlight the effects of aging, always in a quippy and straightforward voice.
“I’m doing all sorts of things I don’t like, in order to postpone the disabilities that I observe in the very old,” she once wrote. “I’m just old – not very old. I exercise, which I’ve always loathed; I eat sensibly, skipping things I used to love; I read things I don’t particularly like, along with the trashy novels I do like, to keep my mind active. I play Scrabble on the computer, realizing I’m not as good as I used to be, but in the hope of keeping me verbally alive. I write on the computer, hoping my ideas stay relevant in this world.”
Harriett, as your 100th birthday approaches, I hope that you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in those efforts you took to keep your mind and body healthy over the years – the unhealthy meals you skipped, the exercise you loathed, the books you pushed yourself to finish. Due to the pandemic, your 100th birthday celebration might not look quite how you had once envisioned it, but know that we are celebrating you from all over Lexington, and that your voice remains an important and relevant thread in the fabric of Lexington’s culture.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you’d like to send a message to Harriett Rose a birthday message, email this magazine’s editor at saraya@smileypete.com with “HARRIETT ROSE” in the subject line, in advance of her birthday (Sept. 13). We’ll pass the messages along to her family.