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Video of 99-year-old Lake Oswego woman with iPad goes viral
By Lynne Terry, The Oregonian
April 21, 2010, 7:28PM
A 99-year-old Lake Oswego woman stars in a YouTube video that’s gone viral.
In it, Virginia Campbell sits on a sofa in her apartment in Mary’s Woods Retirement Community.
She never looks up at the camera. She’s totally focused on her new her toy: an iPad.
“It’s changed her life,” said Ginny Adelsheim, one of her daughters.
Campbell, who graduated from Reed College in the early 1930s with a bachelor’s in English literature, has always been an avid reader. But she suffers from glaucoma, making it difficult to read.
Now she’s reading books on the iPad and writing limericks on it as well.
“The thing that’s so neat is there’s nothing between you and the screen,” Adelsheim said. “You can enlarge the print, and it has a much brighter screen so you can read on it more easily than with a regular computer screen.”
Campbell, widow of former Lake Oswego Mayor C. Herald Campbell, has never owned a computer before — or a Kindle.
But when she heard all the hype about the iPad she wanted one.
Her daughter Corinna Campbell-Sack and son-in-law, Bob Sack, went and stood in line the first day they came out.
Campbell has been writing and reading on it ever since.
“She’s writing all of her poetry on her iPad now,” Adelsheim said. “Her handwriting is so scratchy. It’s so much easier because she can actually read it. Others can read it, too.
Campbell actually wrote a tribute in appreciation of her newfound freedom from the frailties of old age.
To a technical ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer.
“She’s so into it,” Adelsheim said. “She shows it to everybody. People come to her apartment and she entertains the masses by showing them how to use the iPad.”
-- Lynne Terry
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Video of 99-year-old Lake Oswego woman with iPad goes viral
