In the nearly three years Willa Kocher has lived at Blair Personal Care Homes in North Sewickley Township, the former Hopewell Township woman has made at least 100 quilts, most of which she's given away to family and friends.
Colorful patches — floral prints and zigzag patterns — drape her lap. In and out, in and out, Willa Kocher pushes and pulls needle and thread in a neat straight stitch to bind each patch one by one.
The result will be a quilt — one of hundreds she estimates she’s made since moving about three years ago from the home her late husband, Thomas, built in Hopewell Township to Blair Personal Care Homes, an assisted-living facility in North Sewickley Township.
Nearly all she gives away to family, friends — even her doctor.
Petite, her pure white hair swept back in soft waves, she sits and sews in an easy chair in her cozy room filled with pictures of family and numerous cards celebrating her recent 91st birthday.
Sewing notions and supplies — ball head pins, scissors, thread, button, thimble — are at arm’s length on nightstand and windowsill.
A door decoration — a blue-green pouch dotted with yellow flowers and filled with thread spools, needles, yarn and other sewing implements — says it all: “The Seamstress.”
Residents know where to go if they need a button sewn on shirt or blouse, or a pair of pants hemmed.
“That’s my thing,” she says cheerily.
Early life
Kocher, the eldest of three daughters of the late Lloyd and Lydia Weathers, was born March 28, 1927, on a country farm in Wyoma, W.Va., an unincorporated village in Mason County on the western border about 40 miles from Charleston. A brother died in infancy.
She was delivered at home, right on the dining room table. It wasn’t an easy birth: Kocher’s left shoulder was dislocated; her mother suffered complications and was hemorrhaging.
Kocher, who weighed all of about 4 pounds, was quickly passed off to attending relatives; the doctor’s immediate concern was her mother.
But Kocher wasn’t breathing.
“They didn’t know what to do,” said Jeannette McCormish of Daugherty Township, Kocher’s daughter. “They dipped her in warm water, cold water, slapped her to get her breathing.”
About 10 days later, the doctor paid a visit to check on Kocher’s mother.
“Did the baby live?” he asked, somewhat surprised, Kocher said, when he heard her cries.
“Here I am today. I’m still living to tell the story,” she said.
Kocher loved her grandparents, loved the farm with its dairy cows, horses, pigs and chickens.
She liked helping her grandfather sow the garden but remembers as a child of 4 or 5 running from the field in tears to her grandmother, Isadore Ball.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ball asked.
For every onion bulb her grandfather set, Kocher pulled it out and laid it aside. Her grandfather discovered what she’d done only when he’d finished the row.
“I can tell you the spot today,” she said, imagining the field in her mind’s eye.
When her father got a job as an engineer with Aliquippa & Southern Railroad, a subsidiary of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., the family moved to Hopewell.
But nearly every chance she got, especially summers, Kocher was on a bus or train to West Virginia.
“I visited there many, many times.”
Her last, however, was bittersweet.
“The last time I went, the house had burned down. I fell over in the yard and cried.”
Her grandmother taught her to sew.
“If she was doing it, I wanted to do it,” Kocher said, estimating she was about 6 when she picked up needle and thread.
One of her most treasured possessions is Ball’s treadle sewing machine made by White Sewing Machine Co.
“One day, I came home from school. My mother said, ‘Something important came in the mail for you today.’
“I said, ‘Oh, what was it?’”
“‘Turn around. Look right behind you.’
“I fell over and cried. I was just so happy. There was the sewing machine in the living room.”
McCormish now has it in her home.
Kocher still has a baby dress Ball made for her out of a feed sack.
A giving person
Kocher married her childhood sweetheart, Thomas Kocher. They lived on the same street, attended the same schools and rode bikes together.
After graduating from high school, Thomas served in the Navy in World War II. But within two weeks of returning home, the couple married in 1946.
He was handsome, Kocher said.
“There were a lot of other girls he might have picked, but he picked me.”
The couple built their home across the street from her parents and raised four children: McCormish, Barbara McDanel of North Sewickley Township; Thomas Kocher of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; and David Kocher of Hopewell.
Kocher’s husband, who died in 2002, worked in the blooming mill office at J&L and was a volunteer fireman; she was a stay-at-home mom and active in the fire department’s women’s auxiliary.
She’d take orders at fish fries that firemen hosted as fundraisers.
“By gosh, she knew everybody’s name,” McDanel said. “She just loves to talk to people.”
“You never met a stranger,” McCormish said. “We can be shopping in a store, and she just starts talking to someone. Pretty soon, she knows where they were born, what relatives they had.”
“I was always inquisitive,” Kocher said.
She sold Tupperware products, sang soprano in the United Presbyterian Church choir, belonged to a card club and served as Brownie Troop leader.
She taught her children to be caring and compassionate and led by example.
“She would enlist our service to go door to door for March of Dimes and muscular dystrophy,” McCormish said, canvassing the neighborhood for charitable donations.
McDanel tears up remembering the time Kocher invited a family of five that had fallen on hard times to share a meal.
The mother stopped by to drop something off and commented on how good Kocher’s bean and dumplings soup smelled.
“Mum, you said, ‘You’re all staying for supper. I’ll just put some more beans in the pot,’” McDanel said.
When her children outgrew their clothes, games and toys, Kocher boxed them up and gave them away.
“She taught us to be who we are,” McCormish said. “We’re always helping other people and donating.”
“She’s probably one of the most giving persons I’ve known,” McDanel said.
Kocher made many of the clothes her children wore, including prom dresses for her girls.
“Instead of buying a pattern, we picked what we wanted, and she made it herself without a pattern,” McCormish said.
And she made dresses for flower girls in McDanel’s wedding.
Kocher didn’t start quilting until the 1970s. The family has a camp in West Hickory, Pa., in Forest County near Cook Forest State Park. One weekend, she attended a quilt show there and was awed by the beautiful pieces.
“‘I think I can do this,’” McCormish recalled her mother saying. “She just went crazy for these quilts.”
Her husband built her a quilting frame, and she taught herself how to quilt.
Her first was for first granddaughter, Kerrie Kocher Brosky, who lives in South Heights.
“She always taught us there is nothing we couldn’t do,” McDanel said. “You can do whatever you want to do, and usually she was right there helping us.”
Since she doesn’t have a sewing machine at the assisted-living facility, Kocher’s quilts just have a top and back — no cotton batting in between. “Summer quilts,” she calls them. The back is usually a piece of flannel or cotton sheet.
Family and friends supply her with fabric.
“She will not waste anything,” said McDanel. “If you give her a little wee piece this wide,” she said, holding her fingers just inches apart to demonstrate, “she’ll work that into a crazy quilt. I think that comes from the Depression.”
Most of her waking hours, Kocher hand-quilts.
“She has a little bit of arthritis,” McDanel said, “but it doesn’t slow her down.”
“I forget that I have anything,” Kocher said. “I just do what I have to do.”
Kocher said quilting is a peaceful, relaxing hobby.
She cuts fabric into 5- or 6-inch squares and spreads them on her bed to come up with a pattern.
“I just do it the way I want to do it,” she said, making sure identical patches aren’t next to each other.
Then, she pins patches together before stitching.
She makes lap quilts, pillow tops and bed quilts.
Kocher has eight grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren, and each has a quilt, as do many friends and anyone who admires them.
“She just gives them away,” McDanel said, reducing most recipients to tears when they receive one.
Quilting is a lost art, Kocher said.
“People don’t do this anymore. When they see a handmade quilt, they go nuts. … They hold it. Just cherish it.”
Kocher has no answer for her secret to longevity.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve always kept busy.”
“She’s just full of love,” McDanel said.