Obituary of Robert Hodges ~ 2003

Transcribed by Joan S Dunn

Source: The News & Observer Nov 12 2003

TAPS SOUNDS FOR WWI VETERAN - The Pamlico County man thought to be the 
nation's oldest living veteran missed Veterans Day by a few hours.  
Robert Hodges, who according to a family Bible was 115, died Monday 
afternoon in a New Bern hospital.  
The sharecropper's son, featured in a News & Observer report Tuesday before
the family disclosed the death, died of problems related to blood clots, 
relatives said.  
"I knew the time would come sooner or later, but it still threw me off,"
said his youngest daughter, 64-year-old Rosia Joyner of New Bern.  
Hodges was in remarkable condition until the end. In an interview Thursday,
he was able to sing whole verses of the World War I song "Over There" and 
recall fragments of his time as a doughboy in France, including an 
acquaintance with Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American 
Expeditionary Forces. In a 1999 interview, he was able to recall more.  
"[Pershing] called over to our battalion and told the officer, 'Send Robert
over,' " Hodges said. "We'd sit and talk, tell jokes. I'd polish his shoes.
He was a good man -- if you'd done right."  
There are thought to be fewer than 200 U.S. veterans of World War I alive. 
North Carolina sent 86,457 men to that war, but Hodges was the only living 
veteran that the state Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion 
offices could name.  
In 2002, the Department of Veterans Affairs recognized Hodges as the oldest
person in the nation collecting veterans benefits. A steady stream of 
journalists and the curious already had already begun arriving on his 
doorstep in Stonewall, in rural Pamlico County, but the recognition brought
more. One day, a busload of schoolchildren came by.  His four surviving 
children, all daughters, didn't enjoy the commotion but thought he deserved 
it. "It was good for him to be recognized by society because of his age 
and his contribution to the country," Joyner said.  
Hodges was the grandson of a former slave who lived to be 112, according 
to family lore. He grew up as the second of 13 children on a plantation 
near Bath, the state's oldest incorporated town.  
Last year, he told a reporter from The Baltimore Sun that he began working 
on someone else's farm when his was 8 or 9. "I remember where I worked the 
first day in my life," he said. "I can't see it, but if I could get there, 
I could get you right to it."  
He enlisted in the Army in August 1918 and served as a private in a 
stevedore battalion until discharged one year and three days later. He saw 
no fighting and mainly helped load and unload food and equipment for the 
troops.  
When he came home after the war, Hodges returned to his work as a farmhand 
and was soon named a foreman.  He saved money, bought land and had been 
married nearly 70 years when his wife died at 92 of Parkinson's disease.  
Hodges outlived his four sons. 
In addition to Joyner, he is survived by daughters Rhoda Lipkins, Vera 
Davis and Helen Hodges, all of Stonewall.  
Funeral arrangements had not been made Tuesday.





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