Ruth Haas had no intention of acting her age.
A few weeks shy of her 101st birthday, Haas was still going to neighborhood parties, her daughter said.
“She didn’t like nursing homes,” Sally Haas said of her mother. “She said there were too many old people there, and that was when she was in her 90s.”
Barbara Corell, of Greenville, S.C., said her aunt had “a young soul,” adding, “She always liked to be around the young people in the family.”
Ruth James Haas, of Atlanta, died Sunday at Piedmont Hospital after a few days of declining health. She was 100. A funeral is planned for 11 a.m. on Wednesday. A private family burial will be held at a later date. H.M. Patterson & Sons, Arlington Chapel, is in charge of arrangements.
Haas grew up in Greer, S.C., where she cared for her five sisters and three brothers after the death of their mother. The family lived on a farm that covered more than 100 acres and all of the children participated in farming activities. That is, until Haas decided she wanted a different life.
“She was the first and only one to leave,” Corell said. “She was the only one who went to college.”
A Greer neighbor was a nurse and gave her a brochure about the profession, leading Haas to decide that she too would become a nurse, her daughter said. She graduated from Spartanburg General Hospital’s nursing school and worked as a private nurse before enlisting in the Navy in 1943. She served for a year.
After the Navy she returned to private nursing, where she met Edwin Haas. The two were married Dec. 7, 1945, and she moved to Atlanta to live with her husband. The couple eventually became parents to three children and had been married almost 44 years when he died in 1989. Their son Randy Haas died in 1993.
After Ruth Haas married, she left full-time nursing but volunteered whenever she could. On the evening of her first wedding anniversary, Haas was asked to lend a hand at the Grady Hospital morgue as the hospital received bodies from the Winecoff Hotel fire. She continued to volunteer until she stopped driving, which was well into her 90s, said her son, Ed Haas III.
“She was like the Energizer Bunny,” he said. “She just kept going.”
In a 2005 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about volunteerism shortly after her 93rd birthday, Ruth Haas told a reporter she’d recently renewed her driver’s license and would “keep going as long as I’m physically able.”
“Because she kept going, she surprised a lot of people, including her doctors,” Sally Haas said. “She did like to be where the action was and I think that kept her young.”
In addition to her son and daughter, Haas is survived by sisters, Doris McClure, Mary Pepple, Evelyn Bullock, and Louise Amo; brother, Carroll James, all of South Carolina; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
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