When Senior Center Selma changed its name, it was a time of celebration. However, the celebration did not end with the name change. 

Two ladies at the Senior Center were honored, having two rooms named after them at the center.  Shirley Eiland,87, and  Bessie King, 100, are two of the original members of the Senior Center at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church.

Eiland’s room was named the Shirley Eiland Game Room. She always comes to the Center and misses the people she sees when she can’t come.

“I love it,” she said. “I would miss it if it wasn’t here.  It’s really the only place I go to church. I would really miss it. I love talking to these people. I miss it if I don’t go.”

Eiland grew up in Odum, Georgia, a few miles outside of Savannah. She said that growing up it was very different than what it is like today.

“We were very poor,” she said. “My father worked on a farm, didn’t own it but worked on it. We all worked. I had one sister and four brothers. It was hard work.”

Eiland said looking back on her childhood she is grateful for how she was raised. “I am very appreciative of how I was raised,” she said. “I had a good background. It taught me that I didn’t have time for getting in trouble because we were always too tired.”

Senior Center Selma Director Patricia Ivy said that having Eiland around the Center is contagious because of how much joy and happiness she brings.

“She brings joy. She brings laughter. She brings longevity,” Ivy said. “She is one of the ones that went to Judge Armstrong’s office until he said yes on bringing the center to Blue Jean Church.”

Ivy said that Eiland has a specific role to play within the Center.

“Her role is to take the hand sanitizer and make sure everyone sanitizes their hands,” Ivy said. To her, it is important that she has something to do. She always wants to help. Even from day one.”

The other woman honored,  Bessie King, who reached 100 years old. She was given the room right across from Eilands and the Center decided to call it the Bessie King Chamber. Ivy said that having someone who is 100 in the Center is something special.

“Mrs. King has more of a motherly spirit,” Ivey said. “Everybody looks up to her. Everybody takes care of her. We make sure that she has what she needs. Sometimes we go overboard because I have not experienced any senior citizen turning 100 years old and being as bright as she is. We have seen people who are 100 and they are laying in bed because they are sick or they are sitting in a nursing home. Mrs. King, she’s cool, she’s alert, she hears, understands, she asks questions and she takes everything in.”

King not only is a celebrity in the Center but is about to get inducted into the Alabama Senior Citizens Hall of Fame on August 20 in Montgomery.

Growing up in the early 1910s, life was very different for King as a child than it is today.

“We grew up on a farm,” King said. “We picked cotton. We chopped cotton. We picked peas. It was hot and we didn’t have any electricity. We didn’t have any running water. We had to go to the pump, the well or go to the spring and look for the cattails to get the water. We had to toat water to wash.”

King has done a lot of traveling in her life. She has visited places, including Greece, Japan, Kentucky, and California. As a married woman, she moved to Okinawa Japan where she stayed from 1964-1966.

“It was nice to be over there,” King said. “You can’t speak their language. We had to learn their language. It was just nice to be over there. We had nothing to worry about. I could have stayed over there.”

When King first moved to Selma life was very different than the way it is now in 2023.

“When I first moved to Selma there was a bus run,” King said. “You would put your money in the front then go in the back door and stand behind the seats where the black folks sit at. A lot of the time you didn’t even go in the front door you went in the back door.”

Looking back on her life King had a simple piece of advice for the younger generation.

“Obey, listen, and try to be the best you can be,” King said. “Don’t be hard-headed. Old folk will tell you when they were children when old folk said to do something they got up and did it. Now you have to tell them two or three times. Old Folk used to tell you sit down I’ll go do it if you didn’t do it the first time and you knew what was coming. Children now I don’t know. Parents are not raising their children like I was raised. Children are playing their games and watching TV when they are out of school. They want to sleep for half of the day. My dad kept us busy every day with things to do on the farm.”