New Journal and Guide
More Blacks are living to age 100, including Kathleen Owens Simmons who celebrated her 100th birthday in June in a senior living facility in Norfolk.
Simmons grew up in Suffolk, rode a worn-down bus, dubbed the “Ol’ Grey Goose,” to a segregated Suffolk school, and worked in a greeting card factory in Brooklyn after high school before meeting her husband, military policeman Opel Simmons, in Newport News.
After Opel Simmons retired from the U.S. Army in 1963, the Simmons family relocated to Portsmouth and joined New Bethel Baptist Church. There, Kathleen Simmons served as an usher and a member of the senior choir and was eventually ordained a deaconess…