A Life Worth Celebrating: Mrs. Ivy Elizabeth Stroud Adams turns 95!

A Halloween baby, a farm girl from Chesterfield County, a wife, a mother, a businesswoman, a woman of faith — and, to her daughters, a living example of kindness that does not hurt a soul if it can help it.

Mrs. Ivy Elizabeth Stroud Adams, born October 31, 1931, celebrated her 95th birthday surrounded by friends and family, including daughters Melissa, Sabrina, Ivy and Vikki. In a family interview recorded for the occasion, Melissa opened not with a list of accomplishments, but with a request: make sure to say something about Bobby.

Bobby, the family’s adopted eldest son, died about three years ago, and his sisters still speak of him as a hero. As a teenager, they recalled, he played Santa Claus for his little sisters, stuffing a pillow into a red shirt and arriving with a pillowcase of oranges and old toys. He stood up for them, too. One daughter remembered a boy on Sanders Street trying to take her bicycle from the garage, and Bobby, then about 15 or 16, stepping out in his deep voice to ask what the boy was doing with that bike. The boy ran. From that day, she said, Bobby was her hero.

“He was just part of our life,” the family said. “We knew that he was special.”

That closeness, they said, was true most of all between Bobby and his mother. It was a bond, they said, unlike any other in the family — not jealousy, not favoritism, but a special closeness that lasted all the way up to his death. At his funeral, person after person told them what Bobby had done for them: when no one else thought they were worth anything, Bobby asked what they needed, gave up his job and his home, and helped them recover and start again.

It is a fitting place to begin a 95th birthday story, because so much of Mrs. Adams’ own life sounds the same way: steady, generous, and rooted in faith and family.

Mrs. Adams was born in Chesterfield County, near Wilkes Chapel, where her parents, Jeff and Clara Stroud, lived on a farm and ran a dairy for years. The family later moved to Hartsville, where her father went to work at Sonoco. She started school at Thornwell Elementary School in Hartsville at six years old.

She met the man who would become her husband when she was about 11. Kinchen Adams had walked her aunt home next door, and the little girl who insisted on staying up to watch the courting never forgot it — and, she laughed, neither did he. He went into service overseas, and about four years later, when she was 13 or 14, they met again. Her father, watching how the young man treated his own parents and sisters, told her he would make a good husband.

She married as a teenager in the mid-1940s, at a parsonage, and, as Mrs. Adams put it simply, “God blessed our marriage. He blessed our lives.”

They lived for a time with her parents on Mill Avenue in Hartsville, then built a life of work together. With her father and then on their own, they ran Mill Avenue Cleaners in Hartsville, later moved to Darlington, and bought S&E Cleaners there. Mrs. Adams began working at 14, and she worked in the cleaners for years — and kept running the business after her husband died.

“I’ve just had the most wonderful, wonderful life,” she said in the interview. “And from the beginning, I guess from the day I was born.”

After several years of marriage, when the couple had been told they could not have children and, as the family put it, everybody was praying, they adopted Bobby, then a baby of about 15 to 18 months. He was, Mrs. Adams said, an answer to prayer.

Vikki followed, then Ivy, Sabrina and Melissa, and Kin Jr., the youngest — “the caboose of the family,” as one daughter put it. In the interview, the family counted together, laughing as the numbers grew: about 19 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren, plus a great-great-granddaughter. The exact tally shifted as they counted aloud, but the point did not: a large family, held together by a loving, kind mother who showed up.

Mrs. Adams’ son Kinchen (her youngest child) shared his feelings on the love he has for his mother: “Growing up with Mom was something that every child would probably like to experience. Even before I started school, I would be in the yard while she worked in the flower beds or hung the clothes on the clothesline. She would let me help her dig holes to put flowers in and show me how to plant a flower. It couldn’t be too deep and couldn’t be too shallow. While my sisters were at school, it was just me and Mom at home. We used to play ‘share’. So at lunch my mom would make a chocolate milkshake. Not everyday but, a lot. We would sit on the porch swing and I would ask her if we could play ‘share’ and she would let me have sips of it. I remember the warmth of the sun shining on our backs as a special time in my life. Mom was easy on us about most things but, when we said or did anything that was questionable, boy watch out!!! Here she would come with a belt or she would get a switch off of a bush. Those things hurt. I remember them very well. But, she loved us and she did a great job raising us spoiled kids while Dad worked. Mom and Dad worked well together in raising us. I couldn’t ask for a greater Mom. I thank God for her.”

Mrs. Adams has worshipped at First Baptist Church since 1950, living close enough to walk there with her family. Faith runs through her story the way work does: in the marriage she says God blessed, in the business she and Kin built, and even during her hardest times, her faith has sustained her.

Ever engaged in her community she spent several enjoyable years in the Order of the Eastern Star during the 1970s until 1980, and also served in the Darlington Pilot Club for many years as well.

Born on October 31, Mrs. Adams has been a Halloween baby all her life, and she remembers it with delight. Her parents were not much for buying costumes, so she wore her mother’s old dress, or her father’s old suits, with something over her face, and went out bobbing for apples, trying to scare somebody.

She remembers Mill Avenue the same way: a wonderful neighborhood where she knew who lived in every house on both sides of the street, and where neighbors looked after one another.

For this year’s birthday, the plan, as one daughter put it, is simple and fitting: “Just friends and family celebrating her life.” Sit-down meals, family around the table, and time together — not pumpkin, she laughed.

Visitors remark on how active she still is. She has a walker, she said, but she does not use it until she has to.

“Don’t lose your own independence, your mobility,” she said. “Don’t start depending on it before you have to.”

It is the same spirit that comes through in her music and her art. She took music lessons for about five years, still has a piano, and loves to sketch — houses, lakes, whatever catches her eye. Her daughters call her a very good sketch artist

And it is the spirit her daughters describe when they talk about her character: “She’s lived and she’s human, but she will not hurt your feelings. She will take it and swallow it before she hurts anyone’s feelings. She’s the most loving, forgiving person you’ll ever meet.”

“That’s the joy that shows through her,” another daughter added. “We’re all trying to live like that. It’s hard.”

At 95, Mrs. Adams looks back not with bitterness, but with gratitude — for parents who prayed, for a husband she married young and loved for a lifetime, for children who became a large and loving family, and for a community that, in her words, looked after each other.

Happy 95th birthday, Mrs. Adams. May the year ahead be as full of family, faith and laughter as the 95 that came before it.