Getting your player ready...
FLINT TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Don’t ask Mattie Caldwell how many candles go on her birthday cake. “I don’t remember,” she said. Medicare records indicate Caldwell’s birth date is March 5, 1901. An old family Bible gives the same date but three years earlier, in 1898. And there’s no legal record of her birth because she was born at home.
In any case, Caldwell is celebrating this week with friends and family at her home in Flint Township, about 55 miles northwest of Detroit.
The great-great-great-grandmother to at least seven grew up on a farm in Mississippi, and relatives say she never learned to read or write.
