JoCleta Retired Three Times. Then, at Nearly 100, She Was Still Working at a Hardware Store: "I Got So Sick of Myself"
Most people who make it to their late 90s have long since stopped setting an alarm. JoCleta Wilson still sets hers. Two mornings a week, the Louisville, Kentucky, woman worked the early shift at the Westport Road Home Depot, from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., according to a September 2024 report from WAVE . At the time, she was weeks away from her 100th birthday and was described as the oldest Home Depot employee in the entire country. She has a reason for picking the morning. “That’s when I’m 100%. After that, you only get 50% of me,” she joked to the station. Retirement was not new to her. It just never stuck. “I’ve retired three times, each time it was ten years, and I got so sick of myself, I couldn’t stand it,” she said in a report shared by NEWS CENTER Maine . So about two years before that interview, she went back to work. She told WAVE the job was about people more than a paycheck. “If you are not working, you lose your art of conversing,” she said. Wilson was born in Louisville in 1924. She spent much of her life as a professional dancer and
