The mayor wished them happy birthdays. So did their congresswoman. And their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Even Oprah sent them a video message saying happy birthday.
It’s not every day that someone turns 100 years old. And it’s really not every day that three childhood best friends hit the centenarian mark together.
On Saturday, three D.C. women, best friends for nearly a century, celebrated reaching triple digits during a ceremony at Zion Baptist Church in the 16th Street Heights neighborhood of Northwest Washington — the church they have all regularly attended since childhood. They were all born in June or July of 1916.
They had hoped a fourth close friend, Leona Barnes, would be able to take part in the festivities, but she died in May, two months shy of her 100th birthday. The ceremony paid tribute to Barnes, and a large portrait of her sat on the church bench beside her friends throughout the 90-minute service.
“This was so exciting and joyful,” Bernice Grimes Underwood said of her birthday celebration, which a couple hundred people attended.
“I never thought I would get to this age,” said Gladys Ware Butler, the centenarian nicknamed “the quiet friend.”
Barnes, Butler, Underwood and Ruth Hammett met as children growing up in Southwest Washington, where Zion Baptist Church was originally located. They played jacks and hopscotch and jumped rope together. Three of them had babies in the same year, 1933.
They built careers for themselves and remained close friends through adulthood. They remember the race riots that ripped through the city in 1968, and they recall hearing the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They mourned together when they each buried their husbands and elderly children.
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