“I can’t see or hear very well. But like Minnie Pearl used to say, ‘I’m just so proud to be here.’ My birthday was 2/25/23. I’m over 100 years old. I didn’t tell anyone my age for a long time. When I was about forty, my mother told me, ‘If anyone asks how old you are, don’t tell them because then they’ll figure out how old I am.’ Mother didn’t want to get old. 

My father was Richard Inge. His father was a doctor from a prominent family in Mobile, but I was born in Birmingham. The Depression was real bad. Coal mining shut down, and people were unemployed. I was about to start high school when my family moved to Mobile. We rented a house on Glenwood Street, about three blocks from Murphy High School. Our neighbor was a commodore of the yacht club near Berkeley Field. He introduced me to sailing when I was fourteen or fifteen. I sailed for the rest of my life. 

We had long talks when he drove me to the yacht club, and he helped me get a DAR scholarship when I was about to go to college. He also advised me to take engineering. I became the first woman to graduate from the University of Alabama in electrical engineering . Then, World War II started, and they found me a job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York. I took the train up there–that was something for this country girl going through Grand Central Station in New York City. I made ninety cents an hour checking circuit boards, then got a raise and made $1.35 an hour. We were paid from a little push cart with envelopes of cash. I later transferred to the GE plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is on the water. It was time to get a boat and sail again. 

I was reading a sailing magazine and saw a man named Hedges was looking for a crew to help sail his 45-foot steel-hull sailboat from Chicago to Bora Bora. Hedges went to Bora Bora during World War II and wanted to sail back to it. I wrote to him with my qualifications; he was surprised to hear from a woman. We sailed on one of the great lakes to test me out. I passed. We started out from Chicago in the middle of the winter. It was so cold, and I wore wool pants. We went from the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and down to New Orleans. Got rigged up in New Orleans to go out to sea. We had an auxiliary engine, but there wasn’t the fancy navigation stuff there is now. We had one man who could use the sextant and do celestial navigation.  I wanted to learn how to use that.

We fixed some leaks in Key West and put the ratlines on the shrouds. We also stopped in Havana. That was before the Revolution and Castro. The fellow who kept up our engines had been seasick the whole time. He left us when we got to Panama; I became our engineer for the rest of the voyage.

That was my first long ocean voyage. We arrived at a little bay at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands. That was a different world. I had taken  French in high school and used it there. On the ship, it’s hard to wash clothes–salt water doesn’t wash things too well. We found a creek with freshwater and washed them there. We also found a ham radio operator to call back home. We planned to stay in Hiva Oa for a week but liked it so much that we stayed for six. We didn’t want to leave.

We also stayed in Tahiti for a while but finally got Mr. Hedges to Bora Bora to see the people he’d known there. Somehow I got a message that my father died and my mother wanted me to come home. I found a freighter that carried a few passengers and booked a passage to Panama. Then, I took a bus from Panama to Texas and a Greyhound bus from Texas to Mobile. It made many stops along the way. I got to Dauphin Street and walked two blocks to my mother’s house. Did all of that by myself.

There were more voyages around the world. I sailed across the Atlantic with a friend on a square rigger from the Canary Islands to the West Indies. They had a crew, but I worked with them. I got on their list and did more crewing with them on trips in the Pacific. We did a 100-day voyage from Panama to Tahiti. Between those voyages. I did a lot of sailing and racing on Mobile Bay. I didn’t win every race, but often came in at least second or third. 

I was eighty-four on my last major ocean voyage. We went to Easter Island, Tahiti, Fiji, and New Zealand. I was still crewing: working on the mast and furling the sail. I sailed regularly until I was 100. I haven’t sailed in a year, and I miss it. Sailing is what I love.”

Louise