Helen Hannah always seemed to march to the beat of her own drum. In the 1920s, as a high school student, she decided photography would be her career. In the 1930s, she turned down a marriage proposal so she could travel to Europe. After she'd operated her own business and traveled the world, her suitor asked her to marry him again, and she said "yes," at 35, after which she enjoyed raising four daughters.
Mrs. Hannah was "fiercely independent," said daughter Archer Hannah, and drove her car to water aerobics when she was 100. She lived independently, until the beginning of this year, just before her 102nd birthday. While chatting with Ms. Hannah around February, the centenarian told her daughter she sensed a change in her heartbeat. Being the dutiful daughter, Ms. Hannah reached over to check her mother's pulse to make sure she wasn't in distress. To her dismay, she couldn't locate a pulse. She then tried to take her own pulse, but failed to find it too.
"So I looked at her and said, I don't have a pulse and you don't have a pulse, so we must be dead and we just don't know it," Ms. Hannah said. "And she said to me, 'You think so?' and I said yeah, and then she said, 'Then, I think we should have a glass of sherry.' And we did."
A few weeks later, Helen Ruth Rhodes Hannah, of Atlanta, was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She died Thursday, at her home. She was 102. Her body was cremated and a memorial service is planned for 11 a.m. Monday at the Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta. The Cremation Society of Georgia was in charge.
In Mrs. Hannah's hometown of Lynchburg, Va., she was the premier portrait photographer in the 1930s, said Dot Addison, who grew up next door, and has since moved to Atlanta.
"You can't understand what it was like to see a woman running her own business then," Mrs. Addison said, who is 13 years younger than Mrs. Hannah. "I watched everything going on next door, and I loved what I saw."
Mrs. Hannah had a portrait studio in Lynchburg until she and her husband, Archer Berry Hannah, moved to Atlanta in the late-'40s. The couple was married for nearly 25 years when Mr. Hannah died in 1969, on New Year's Eve.
On her 100th birthday, Mrs. Hannah was honored with the first, and only, exhibition of her portraits at the Fauber Art Gallery in Lynchburg. It was an honor long overdue, said Mrs. Addison, who got a chance to see her friend's work up close five or six years ago when Mrs. Hannah wanted to go through some of her negatives.
"When I looked at those negatives they told me a story about how she had worked with the person during the sitting," Mrs. Addison said. "She didn't just take pictures of faces, she told stories."
Mrs. Hannah is also survived by three additional daughters, Sheila Duggan and Beverly Booth, both of Atlanta and Susan Hannah of New York; brother, Bill Rhodes of Lynchburg; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
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