“It took a while to get her on Facebook,” Lisa said. “Back then you had to put in your date of birth and when they saw hers, they didn’t believe she was real person.”
Their skepticism was stuck in stereotype:
Who signs up for a social media account when they are that age?
“Go Go Grandma” — that’s who.
Iola wears that moniker hung on her by family members quite well.
She’s now 105 and still sharp and engaged and, well, ready to go go.
She’s on Instagram. She’s done five impressive YouTube videos in the past year and, as for Facebook, she’s on it every day, sometimes for eight hours.
“I’ve got over 1,300 ‘friends’ on Facebook,” she said with a grin.
“She’s on her second iPad!” Lisa laughed. “She wore the first one out.”
All those ‘friends” aren’t drawn merely by the novelty of her age. Her appeal is rooted in the fullness of her life and the stories she can tell.
According to the count she keeps on her refrigerator door, there are now 141 people in her immediate family and every year they throw a big birthday bash for her.
When she turned 100, the party was held at Sheridans Auction barn in Cedarville and over 300 people showed up. Everyone who attended was given a shirt with her motto on the front:
“Make each day a story worth telling.”
And does she ever have some stories!
“I rode a motorcycle when I was 98,” she said.
Not long ago she wrote a book on her late husband’s family.
Before that, when her lifelong church — the Bowersville Church of Christ — and another in Jamestown were doing mission work in Haiti and asking for clothing to bring to the children there in need, she sat down at her sewing machine.
“Over four years time I made over 1,200 pieces of clothing for girls and boys,” she said.
And yet, it is in the sports world where Iola most lives up to that “Go Go” tag.
This season she’s especially drawn to Wright State women’s basketball and not just because her granddaughter — Lauryn Fox, the 6-foot-2, former Cedarville University standout player — is a first-year assistant coach on Kari Hoffman’s staff.
Iola once was a baller of note herself.
That was nearly 90 years ago, when she was the starting center for the Jefferson Township Consolidated High School girls team in Bowersville, the small village in the southeast corner of Greene County.
Although she was just 5-foot-7 ½, she said she was the tallest girl on the Tigers team.
The game was different then. After every basket, instead of the other team inbounding the ball, there was a jump ball.
Players were relegated to permanent, half-court positions and she played offense, though she said you were allowed just one dribble.
“I got 20 points in the first half against Bellbrook one time,” she said proudly. “In the second half they put two girls on me, and I almost never saw the ball again.”
As she began recounting a few of her basketball tales the other day while she and Lisa and I sat at the table in her Jamestown condo, she reached for a team photo of the Tigers that showed her sitting in the middle of the front row holding a ball with 1936 on it.
Her team played the seven other, then-rural schools in Greene County that had girls programs: Silvercreek Township (Jamestown), Ross Township, Cedarville, Yellow Springs, Beavercreek, Bellbrook and Spring Valley.
Just four years later, on Sept. 1, 1940, the Ohio High School Athletic Association — as a result of member schools voting 2-1 to do so — did away with all girls inter-school basketball programs.
The ban would last 25 years and, even when the sport did return, it wasn’t until 1971 when girls were permitted to play full court. And it was another five years until a state tournament finally was held for girls.
“They said basketball was too strenuous for girls,” said Iola, who grew up working on her family’s farm.
She believes she and her teammates rebutted that belief and she certainly sees the folly of such a macho mandate when she watches the high school and college games of today.
Wright State isn’t the only team she follows.
Last Wednesday night, Lisa, who lives in Washington Court House, picked her mom up and they went to Wilmington College so she could watch her great granddaughter, Kendall Dye, a 5-foot-9 sophomore guard for Muskingum, play the Quakers.
A Saturday afternoon before that — after watching her great grandson, Luke Matson, play a game with his seventh-grade team in Washington Court House that morning — she was at Paint Valley High in Bainbridge to see her great granddaughter, Karris Dye, play for the Bearcats team.
Over the years, 13 of her family members have played various college sports, beginning with her son David, who played golf at Central State, and Lisa, who was a basketball and volleyball player at Kentucky Christian University.
For decades she has been a regular at college, high school and youth games.
“As much as people are willing to pick her up, she’s willing to go,” Lauryn said.
Asked what it’s like to now see her courtside at WSU games, Lauryn’s eyes began to glisten before she finally spoke:
“She’s always been so active in all our lives,” Lauryn said. “She’s watched me since I was playing at the YMCA when I was seven years old. She came to my high school games at Washington Court House and she was always there at Cedarville.”
If Iola felt a special kinship to Cedarville, it would be understandable.
When she graduated in 1937, she was the salutatorian of her class and got a scholarship offer from Cedarville.
“She still has the paperwork,” Lisa said.
Iola nodded: “It was a drive-in school back then — there weren’t any dormitories — but I didn’t drive or have transportation to get there, so I just stayed on the farm.”
“Tell how much it was for,” Lisa said with a grin.
“Well…. $25 a semester,” Iola said.
‘Let her play ball’
To fully understand how much change Iola has seen and adjusted to in her lifetime, consider that when she was born on Oct. 14, 1919, women still could not vote in America. That didn’t change until the following year with passage of the 19th amendment.
She would go through the Great Depression, World War II and after she turned 100, the isolating siege of COVID.
“She and some gentleman (98-year-old Alfred McDaniel) were the first people (over 80) in Ohio to get the COVID vaccine,” said Lisa.
It happened live at the Jamestown Health Center during a Governor Mike DeWine press conference.
Lisa said DeWine knows her mom and thought she’d be a fitting poster child to help fight the pandemic.
“Just imagine all the life she’s seen and adapted to,” said Lauryn. “When she first started school, she went there in a horse-drawn school bus. Now she’s on her second iPad.
“The thing that stands out about her is that she’s willing to learn. She’s not resistant to things. I think that keeps her young.”
And from the very start on that Sutton Road farm two miles outside Bowersville, she learned a work ethic that’s served her well.
“When I was about 9, my mom took me to the barn one day when my dad was out planting corn and she taught me how to milk cows,” Iola said.
Later, she’d pick up other chores, including shucking corn fields by hand.
When she was in seventh grade she had problems with her appendix and after that she said her mom was afraid to let her play sports.
But after she got to high school, she said her dad would go to the filling station in town and the guys hanging out there would “get on him.”
“They said, ‘That girl of yours should be playing on the ball team.’”
Finally, when her younger sister Martha was getting ready to go out for the team, Iola made a fuss: “I told my dad, ‘Oh no, not unless I get to play, too!’” She said her mom finally relented and took her to a doctor in Bowersville: “He said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. Let her play ball.’”
It wasn’t long before Iola became the leader of the team.
As we talked, she picked up the photo again, studied it and then went down the line, naming every girl pictured there.
“They’re all gone now,” she said quietly. “I’m the last one.”
She said when she shows this picture now, “Some people are surprised how short our shorts were back then. And for our tops, we went out and bought the material — it was a gray satin — and our mothers made them. The J on the front was red and our jackets were, too.
“And if my tennis shoes didn’t look white enough, I’d rub talcum powder on them.”
She motioned toward the image of her sister: “Martha was a guard and she was pretty tough. She told me she even blacked one girl’s eye one time. She didn’t aim to, but she hit her with an elbow.”
Every Thanksgiving weekend the team would travel 12 miles east to play Jeffersonville High in Fayette County. She said the girls there played what was called “three division” basketball. The court was divided into thirds, and you stayed in one area.
“We played half the game their way and half ours,” she said.
In those games, she played against Jim Creamer’s sister who was her age. Later she saw Jim again when he visited his grandparents who attended her church.
When Martha went with another family to the Creamer’s house for Sunday dinner, Jim’s brother Gene suggested he and his brother come over to Bowersville so they could take the sisters to church.
While Gene and Martha didn’t pan out as a couple, Jim and Iola were a different story.
He was three years older than Iola and had a car, a 1934 Ford convertible with a rumble seat in back.
“We used to tease him,” Lisa said of her dad. “He put lights all around his car like it was a Christmas tree. When he came down the road, his car was all lit up.”
“Blue and green lights,” Iola laughed.
Later they went to a church gathering in Kentucky and on the return trip, Jim had his cousin drive so he could sit with Iola in the rumble seat.
“That’s how they knew they hit it off,” Lisa chuckled.
When they married in 1938, Iola was 18 and Jim was 21.
A few months after they wed, they moved into a vacant log cabin across the road from her parent’s farm. Today that log cabin stands in the Pioneer Village at Caesars Creek. It has been turned into a general store.
Jim and Iola had six children. The oldest is now 85 and Lisa, the youngest, is 62.
Jim was a builder and constructed numerous homes, churches and commercial buildings in the Greene County area.
Iola raised the kids, did the bookwork for his company and was involved in several good deed efforts in the area.
“She is a true servant,” said Lauryn,
When she taught second grade at Cedar Cliff schools, Lauryn said her mom made all her students stuffed toy animals for Christmas.
Lisa said for years, her mom made baby quilts for every family in her church who had a new child.
Jim developed Parkinson’s later in life and died in 1997.
With her husband of 59 years gone, Iola was buoyed by her family. In 2005, she moved to the condo complex on the edge of Jamestown and after that, her children, all of whom live within an hour of her, each took a different day to come visit her.
Keeping up on social media
When COVID hit, the family was wary of coming over.
That’s when Iola’s next door neighbor, Delores Johnson, began making her daily lunches and has continued the practice every day since.
The lunch arrangement gives both women some communal time and it gives Iola a brief respite from her Facebook fascination, which begins early in the morning and might go all the way until 11 p.m.
Lisa types in the bigger stories about the past, but Iola handles all her responses.
“She is such a social person and Facebook has been a lifeline to keep her connected, even when she’s by herself.”
In the evenings and on weekends, her alone time gives way to gymnasiums filled with cheering people, her young kin out on the court and, the renewal of her nine-decade love affair with the game of basketball.
In the process, she’s picked up a new nickname Lauryn said:
“We called her Go Go Grandma, but the great grandkids have another name. The next generation calls her Grandma Great.”
And that’s also a fitting tag.
It’s another perfect answer to those once-skeptical Facebook folks.
Who signs up for a social media account when they are that age?
Somebody who is pretty great and continues to “Make each day a story worth telling.”
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