Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press

Sister Reinholda Eder prepares for the evening meal at the Sisters of St. Francis in Savannah, Mo.

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Sister Reinholda Eder isn’t always content just to sit.

She wheels herself down the hall, past the elevator with the buttons strategically covered to keep her from using them. This limitation is for her own safety; there simply are certain things an almost-103-year-old shouldn’t be allowed to do by herself.

So she keeps going, past the elevator to a room at the end of the hall. There, at a dead end, she stops, and she’s still.

Still is something Sister Reinholda, a member of the Sisters of St. Francis in Savannah, Mo., rarely has been throughout most of her life. For decades and decades, she poured herself into service to God and others — a commitment that, perhaps, is what has kept her going long enough to reach the 80th anniversary of her religious vows. She is the first in her congregation, which at one time contained more than a thousand members, to reach this milestone, and she is the last living member of her class.

“She’s a history lady,” declares Emo Hwang, a woman from Korea who works as a housekeeper at the La Verna Heights provincial house in Savannah and helps care for Sister Reinholda. “She’s No. 1.”

No. 1 in age, Emo means — but it’s clear that Sister Reinholda’s long history of hard work has earned her a status of honor in other ways, as well.

Her fellow sisters can tell the story of how Sister Reinholda, born Katharina Wurmseder on Oct. 28, 1905, in Lower Bavaria, Germany, grew up the oldest of 13 children. She worked diligently on her family’s farm and as a caretaker for her younger brothers and sisters before entering the Franciscans of Vöcklabruck congregation in Austria in September 1926.

“She just felt that one way she could give herself to God was to become a (sister) in service to others,” says Sister Kathleen Reichert.

In the years before she took her vows, Sister Reinholda was trained as a surgical nurse and worked long hours in a hospital, sometimes taking on night shifts without any compensating time off the next day. She professed vows on Aug. 20, 1928, and, just weeks later, came as a missionary to the United States.

After traveling by ship and by train, Sister Reinholda and the others with her traveled the last leg of their journey to Conception, Mo., in a horse-drawn, mud-drenched wagon, enduring the warm weather in heavy wool habits. One of her first orders of business after arriving and beginning to learn English was to shorten her last name to Eder, due to the fact that Americans pronounced Wurmseder “Worms eater.”

She spent her first few years in the U.S. ministering at a college, at a home for homeless boys and in various other places as needed — showing that, in addition to being “kind of a card” with a “strong, joyful personality,” she was “first and foremost both flexible and capable,” says Sister Christine Martin.

But serving the sick was Sister Reinholda’s ministry of choice, and her first long-term mission was in Marceline, Mo., where some sisters were starting a hospital. When St. Francis Hospital opened in October 1946, she was chosen as its first administrator and even learned to administer anesthesia — something she did for decades without ever losing a patient.

Sister Reinholda served at the hospital for more than 30 years and in that time oversaw the establishment of a more modern facility. Also in that time, she returned for the first time to Germany. Both of her parents had died, as had a handicapped sister who lost her life to the Nazis during World War II. But Sister Reinholda was glad to reconnect to her surviving siblings and returned for several more visits.

Her life here had become her home, though, even after she had to retire from her work at the hospital in the 1970s due to increasingly complicated government regulations. She moved to La Verna Heights in Savannah when she was 71, but her so-called “retirement” didn’t last long, remembers Sister Catherine Braun.

“She kept on working,” Sister Catherine says, adding that Sister Reinholda took on a laundry job next door at La Verna Village Nursing Home — not feeling at all that it was beneath her to go from a career as a hospital administrator to one as a laundress — and worked from 3 to 11 p.m. five days a week until she was 80.

She was able to help out wherever she was needed in the provincial house well into her 90s and could dry dishes even at 100.

“She still folds clothes,” Sister Kathleen says, “and they’re as neat as can be.”

Of course, after a century of helping others, Sister Reinholda needs a lot of help now. After a century of recounting her stories, she needs others to speak them for her. And after a century of almost always being busy, she’s finally sitting still.

She’s sitting now with a smile, holding one of Sister Kathleen’s hands as Sister Kathleen details all the things she still does: She enjoys people, likes color, watches cartoons, eats well.

She still gets mail from people she’s known throughout the years, still looks at the monthly newsletter she receives from her diocese in Germany, still knows what she wants — even if it’s food off someone else’s plate.

“And she’s still really in good health,” Sister Kathleen adds. “She has a strong heart.”

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.