By Angel Perkins Correspondent
BOURBON — Edna Kitch thinks keeping busy is a virtue, one that has kept her well and active.
And she may be proof of it as she has lived all her 93 years with very little illness. “I’m not sick very often,” she said. “And I’m out every day unless it’s bad weather.”
The lively and lovely senior also has very few wrinkles on her face and none that would be considered “deep” by any comparison. This she attributes not to keeping busy or the use of fancy or expensive creams or treatments, but to keeping happy. “If you let things make you sour, you’re sour all the time and it shows in your face,” she advises. “Nobody believes me when I tell them my age. My mom’s word to say was always ‘pushing.’ She was always pushing and I’m pushing.”

Kitch grew up on a farm in Madison, Ind. and moved with her parents to South Bend when her father Joe Horn got a job at the Studebaker plant when she was in the fifth grade. Her mother Lulu took her to the United Methodist Church in South Bend (now the Broadway Christian Parish) on Sundays when she went to volunteer giving out meals to the needy. “Mom picked the seniors up and I’d go with her to help,” Kitch said. “They had a big turnout.”
Keeping that servitude was something she continued as an adult after she retired. First, she was a housewife with two children and she and her husband Bob worked at cooking pies and baking cakes, cookies and other tempting treats at their business, Bob’s Bakery. They also worked together at the restaurant in Etna Green for 10 years, she a waitress and he a cook and she also had experience in food service working at Penguin Point in Warsaw. She additionally spent 11 years working for Bourbon Orthopedics.
“When my husband died 23 years ago I knew some people that came here (to the Bourbon REAL services site) so the first year after he was gone I started to come,” she explained. Since then she has come twice a week for more than 21 years, volunteering her skills at serving and cleanup for the local seniors—which many of a younger than she is.
“I started when it was above the firehouse,” she said. “And again when they were at the (Bourbon Community) park but we didn’t have much room.” The initial, local, senior food program started as a community service of the church which is now the First United Church of Christ on Main Street in Bourbon, but which name it carried at the time is something few in attendance at the new location could recall or agree upon.
But REAL Services Inc. Director George Hawthorne said that the local program officially started up in 1968 as a pilot program, the initiative begun by co-author of the The Older Americans Act (and then REAL Services board member) John Brademas. “We first opened up in Bourbon at the park Nov. 2 of 1993 and moved to the new location (the Matchett Square Senior Center) Dec. 8 of 2003,” Hawthorne said.
Kitch worked at all the local sites and said the present one is the best due to its size and convenience to area seniors. As of the food program itself she said the menu has now a larger variety, bigger portions and the food tastes better. “It’s a good meal,” she said. “And Jan (Ulmer, local site manager) does a good job here. There is always something to do.”
She encourages seniors to take advantage of the nutritious meal (that a donation of $3.50 is accepted for — or the recipient can eat for free if having financial disadvantages) and friendly faces. “You need to have friends and be around people, not shut up from everything,” Kitch said. “That’s what it’s for. This part of life is made a little easier with this (the meals being served). I don’t know what I’d do without friends.”
Not only does the Etna Green resident volunteer at the Bourbon senior center, she regularly drives herself  where she needs to be, does all her own yard work and mowing, attends the Etna Green Methodist Church and goes dancing twice a week  at the Moose and America Legion halls in Warsaw. “I love all music and I like the rock and roll,” she said. "But not much of the newer stuff. I took dancing lessons when I was 16 and I like to waltz. Sometimes I dance with my sister (Nancy McIntyre) or I get a partner. I dance with Bill Peckham sometimes.”
Kitch is also very proud of her vegetable garden.
“I don’t know what I’d do without my garden,” she explained. “I grow cucumbers, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, endive (a type of lettuce) and little peppers. I do my own canning and have apple and pear trees. Last year I made 36 pints of pear butter!”
Kitch said she will be 94 on Nov. 13 and advises that good health and longevity come with how you look at things and how you spend your time. “If you sit around worrying about things, fussing about your aches and pains, well…you turn sour and get stuck,” she said. “Everyone has aches and pains. But the more you sit the stiffer you get.”
Others that volunteer at the Matchett Square Senior Center for REAL Services meals (served at 11:30 Mondays through Fridays) include (in no particular order): Sharon Sheaks, Lois Baker, Lola Miner, Marcia McCartney, Ann Yarian, Grace Augustine, Jane Cain, Brett Myers, Everett Beagle, Jake Everett, Linda Sanders, Joann Kehoe, Doris Hammon, Norma Lemler, Kay Mason, Janet Maurer, Sue Winkle and Barb Shearer.