Hulda crooks biography of barack

By Jack Hoehn

In Loma Linda, California, is a park named for an Adventist woman who lived to be 102 years old. A bronze statue of a 90-year-old small woman with a broad-brimmed hat and hiking stick will tell you this park is named in honor of Hulda Crooks. It was modeled after a photo of her hiking Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the USA before Alaska became a state.

Hulda was born in Saskatchewan to German immigrants, and she and her older brother Edward became Seventh-day Adventists through public evangelism. This led to education in Adventist schools, and a medical degree for Edward, and a physician husband (Sam Crooks, MD) for Hulda. When she was a teenager, her father had a small store where she worked and often helped herself to candy from the shop. She admitted she was not a very healthy woman.

Adventism taught her vegetarianism and she tried to live what was then called “Health Reform.” But, frankly, until she was 60 she was not healthy. Her husband, Sam, died young, but not before he had gotten his wife interested in nature, and nature got her interested in the outdoors, and the outdoors required some hikes, little ones at first, but becoming longer and longer.

Beginning at age 60 Hulda found that the more she moved the better she felt, and her interest in trees and flowers and birds and animals took her on longer and longer hikes, and then up steeper and steeper mountains, until finally she summited Mt. Whitney, queen of California mountains. By the time I was a teenager Aunt Hulda (her maiden name was Hoehn; she is an older sister of my father) was already a celebrity for her multiple ascents of Mt. Whitney and other peaks.  The older she got the more famous she became.

She met President Ronald Reagan, she was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and she became an Adventist celebrity for healthful living—a vegetarian diet and exercise. She worked far beyond normal retirement age as a medical researcher for Dr. Mervy

Today's highlight in history:

On July 24, 1959, during a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous "Kitchen Debate" with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

On this date:

In 1862, Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a U.S. citizen, died at age 79 in Kinderhook, New York, the town where he was born in 1782.

In 1866, Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

In 1915, the SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolled onto its side while docked at the Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people died in the disaster.

In 1937, the state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the "Scottsboro Case."

In 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts — two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon — splashed down safely in the Pacific.

In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

In 1983, a two-run homer by George Brett of the Kansas City Royals was disallowed after New York Yankees manager Billy Martin pointed out there was too much pine tar on Brett's bat. However, American League president Lee MacPhail reinstated the home run. (The game was completed Aug. 18, 1983 with the Royals beating the Yankees, 5-4.)

In 1987, Hulda Crooks, a 91-year-old mountaineer from California, became the oldest woman to conquer Mount Fuji, Japan's highest peak.

In 1998, a gunman burst into the U.S. Capitol, killing two police officers before being shot and captured. (The shooter, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., is being held in a federal mental facility.)

In 2002, nine coal miners became trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania; the story ended happily

WHITNEY PORTAL, Calif. — The sun was just peeping over the Sierra Nevada on Sunday morning as 90-year-old Hulda Crooks waved and set briskly out toward the 14,494-foot summit of Mt. Whitney--for the 26th time in as many years.

Outfitted in her favorite old straw hat, a red T-shirt and gray slacks rolled up to the knees and wearing a pair of old garden shoes, the Loma Linda widow immediately set the pace for more than a dozen of her Seventh Day Adventist co-religionist climber-friends who carried supplies, tents and other gear for the four-day trek.

By mid-morning, the party had climbed 2 1/2 miles up the steep, rugged trail, arriving at 9,800-foot Lone Pine Lake, two-thirds of the distance to their first night’s destination at Outpost Camp.

But by mid-afternoon Sunday, the day that had started bright and sunny had turned cloudy. Thunderstorms were threatening the vicinity of the highest peak in the lower 48 states.

If she makes it to the top by Tuesday as planned--and she has only been turned back by weather three times since she first climbed this mountain in 1962--Inyo National Forest Rangers say they are almost certain Hulda Crooks will be the oldest person ever to have reached the summit.

The diminutive, sprightly hiker agreed with a wink, saying that while she had heard that a 90-year-old man had claimed the same distinction several years ago, there was no proof this had happened.

“No one saw him do it,” she said.

In her case, however, verification would not be a problem: Two newspapers and one television network have sent crews along to cover her climb, and before daylight Sunday one of the reporters was already interviewing Crooks as she ate her breakfast of fruit and hot cocoa.

A vegetarian who began mountain climbing and jogging when she was in her 60s, Crooks said she walks at least 3 1/2 miles every day. She said she arrived here at the trailhead four days early to get acclimatized