CALHAN •Jettie Grimes likes to read the headlines. If she remains a loyal Gazette reader much longer, she’s going to be the headline.

At 109, she’s one of the few babies of 1901 still breathing — and she’s within a decade of becoming the oldest person in the U.S. ever.

This slender lady in the blue polka-dotted housecoat isn’t ready to go anywhere. Not as long as there’s cake to be had. It took several cakes to hold all the candles on her recent birthday. She ate the biggest pieces.

When I went to her house last week, she was deep into her morning ritual: reading The Gazette.

Each day she reads the front page, features and obits. But not my column. Well, I hope to change that.

I sat on the floral sofa in the living room of the tidy, two-bedroom home in town that she and her husband, Bryan, built 40 years ago after he retired from ranching.

Jettie kicked back in the mauve recliner, where she spends her day reading and napping after eating her usual bacon for breakfast.

Her vision is just fine, but her hearing is shot. In a loud voice I told her I wanted to write about her.

She rolled her eyes.

“Just don’t make it bad,” she said, her voice crisp and full despite an oxygen tube.

The pressure is on. I can’t let down The Gazette’s oldest reader who, as a girl, read news flashes of the Titanic sinking back in 1912.

Jettie has lived from the era of Henry Ford’s Model T to the precious Prius. She still takes the wheel, driving a shiny red motorized scooter to go room-to-room. The marks on her hallway walls are proof.

“If we had a ramp, I bet she’d be taking off,” caretaker Terri Richardson said.

Jettie doesn’t deny it.

“Just sitting in a chair is no fun,” Jettie said. “I’d rather be taking care of all the things I used to take care of and be active.”

She makes do. Instead of going to the beauty shop, the stylist makes house calls weekly. Way more often than the doctor comes to visit.

Fashion plate Jettie reluctantly gave up dresses for housecoats when her arthritis go bad a few years ago. On her birthday, she wore the hot pink dress she’d picked out for her burial. It had hung in her closet long enough.

She can’t explain why she has lived this long. In fact, she wasn’t expected to survive in 1924 when she came from Missouri to get treatment for tuberculosis.

She spent two years in a Springs’ sanitarium. The cure worked. She outlived her baby sister, who died a year ago at 98, and her husband of about seven decades.

“I had a handsome husband,” she said, gazing at a wedding photo from 1919. The couple had no children.

Jettie’s not afraid to die. She’s got her dress, after all.

She’s more worried about the headlines. And lunch.

—Got a story?Go to gazettedev.gazette.com/yourspace

Jettie Grimes on her 109th birthday Photo by Photo courtesy of Ranchland News

Jettie Grimes with her favorite newspaper Photo by Andrea Brown/The Gazette

Andrea Brown, Your Space Columnist Photo by