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By Jed Duvall
Special to the Rappahannock News
The lady is now in her 21st leap year. She is Sarah Latham of Amissville, one of the stalwarts of that community’s volunteer fire and rescue organization since it was founded in 1952.
Latham, who was born Sarah Elizabeth Cockerill almost 83 years ago, is too tough to be called shy. But she is the last to claim the spotlight. She’s first to step forward to do the hard work on any project, and first to enjoy a laugh about it.
Hers is a life of seeking work, getting it done and enjoying the moment.
She says, with evident pride, “I was a tomboy.” Little Sarah was one of seven children in the Cockerill family of Floris, Va., a community between Herndon and Chantilly. There were two boys, and four sisters.
Of those sisters, Latham says, “They were all sissies.” They liked to stay indoors and dust while she was outside, working or playing. As soon as she was big enough to do so, she carried firewood into the house, fed the chickens, chopped com, helped with the harvest and killed chickens for freezing. How did she kill the chickens? “Just whacked their heads off with the axe.”
While her sisters were inside, she was outdoors, headlong into sports— basketball and dodge ball. “Oh, how I loved dodge ball.” She could change a flat tire on a car, too, and even today, would not hesitate to do so.
Sarah Cockerill graduated from Herndon High School in 1938 and two years later was married to Armistead Clifford Latham, Jr., “AC”, whose parents ran a store Svay out in the country, in Amissville. That’s where the young couple went to five, above the store.
In 1941 the first of four daughters was bom. And Sarah Latham made a smooth and easy transition from the work of the Cockerill farm to the Latham household, as a mother and as a clerk in the Latham’s general store.
“I loved storekeeping” she says. Of her husband, she adds, “He didn’t like it so much. He’d rather work on motors.” Indeed, “AC” soon had pur" ' chased a small building along Route 211, and made his life’s work the “Amissville Garage.”
The young couple had been married 16 years. Their youngest child, Susan,
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