Hillsdale’s Centenarian Martha Kuehn
By Hannah Niemeier
Hillsdale’s oldest living alumna at 103 years old, Martha Jose Kuehn, has used her Hillsdale education in her roles as secretary, teacher, wife, and mother since she graduated in 1938. It’s an education she had to work for in the middle of the Great Depression; she first attended secretarial school and performed office work for the Dean of Women to help pay for college.
“Everybody had something going then,” Kuehn says. “Nobody had any money, so we worked to get scholarships.”
At Hillsdale, Kuehn majored in economics, joined Pi Beta Phi sorority, and edited the yearbook. Her favorite pastime was playing intramural basketball; in the 1930s, there were no collegiate women’s teams.
Classes were small and located mostly in Central Hall, she remembers. The community was conservative; students attended chapel every day at a Baptist church down the hill. The attitude of the College, even amidst the Depression, was positive: everyone worked to get by. “We survived,” she says.
Two years after graduation, Martha married Kenneth Maxwell Kuehn, an old friend from her church group.
“I guess that’s one of the funny stories of my life,” Martha says. She attended church one day during vacation, and a friend said, “Congratulations!”
“I said, ‘For what?’ He had announced our engagement in the Plain Dealer newspaper without telling me about it,” Martha says. “That’s just his sense of humor. We were together for 76 years, so I guess it stuck.”
Martha did interior design and banking work in Cleveland while Kenneth served in the military during World War II. After 1945, the Navy moved him around the country, but they eventually landed in Los Angeles, where he became a toy salesman and a friend recruited Kuehn to teach elementary school. She taught fourth grade for 18 years.
In 1999, the Kuehns moved to Washington, where Martha now lives next door to her son and daughter after her husband passed away three years ago.
Kuehn supports the upkeep of the Slayton Arboretum, where she remembers a failed attempt at ice skating on the pond with a boyfriend. Two years ago, she donated $50,000 to support scholarships for Hillsdale College students who struggle to pay for college.
Attending a Hillsdale luncheon in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on October 30, 2017, Kuehn says she was “thrilled to have a picture with Dr. Arnn, John Cervini, and a couple of other men from the office. They’re nice men, healthy and handsome, and they think good thoughts. You can tell that from their faces.”
Of her own health, Kuehn says, “I’m in good shape. I only take one pill a day, and I’m not shaky. I’ve learned that if you treat your body well, it hangs in there with you. I’ve been very fortunate.”
Printed in the Winter 2018 Alumni Magazine