“I wore red so you wouldn’t miss me,” says the tall, lanky woman in a strong voice that belies her 97 years. Dressed in a red sweater, red pants, and red-and-white striped socks, Nicoll is hard to miss.

She lives in the green-shuttered house that she bought after her husband died more than 50 years ago. Then a young widow, she raised two sons in the Salisbury, Md., home with a front door steps away from a placid tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. It is the same body of water where she learned how to swim as a little girl growing up in the nearby town of Berlin.

Her passion for swimming led her to attempt several national records in November.

“In the 100-yard backstroke we had to swim across the pool four times,” Nicoll says. “Before my last time across, I put my head down a little bit. Everybody was waiting to see if the old lady was going to give up.”

Swim coach Steve Hicks, who describes Nicoll’s backstroke as smooth and steady, wasn’t sure what would happen as seconds turned into a minute and she was still pausing at the edge.

“The people were holding their breath,” said Hicks. “It got quite quiet in there.”

But she had a record to catch.

“When I started again, they erupted in a roar. They stood up and shouted and cheered for me.”

She set national records for women ages 95-99 in the 100-yard backstroke and 50-yard freestyle. Coach Hicks also believes her time in the 100-yard backstroke set a world record, and paperwork to confirm the achievement is pending.

Nicoll’s watery blue eyes glow with pride tinged with curiosity as she slips the heavy champion’s medal over her neck and asks a question of her own.

“Do you like history?” she asks. “Because you’re talking to it.”

Nicknamed “Ginna” by her friends in the class of 1929, Nicoll and her brother Charles, who lives in a nearby nursing home, are believed to be the class’s only two remaining members.

Nicoll rattles off the names and graduation dates of the 20 members of her extended family who attended McDaniel College over four generations, beginning with her mother, Abbie White Holland, who entered the College in 1898 but never graduated.

For the spry nonagenarian, the College’s history is also family history. At the turn of the century, her mother lived in the College’s first building, Old Main complex. Although the last of the Old Main complex was razed in 1959, its bell remains to ring in the freshmen and ring out each new class of graduates.

In those days, proper young College women attended a social hour known as “parlor,” in which the men and women would sit on opposite sides of WMC Alumni Hall and talk to each other. That was as close as they were permitted to get.

“When I entered the school in 1925,” she says, “things were midway between being real old-fashioned and trying to be more up-to-date. Freshman girls were not allowed on dates but they could take a stroll with a boy around Hoffa Field.”

The College didn’t offer social events where the sexes mingled, but upperclassmen could attend dances at nearby auditoriums or stay overnight off-campus if a student’s parents supplied written permission. This is how Virginia was able to attend her first dance with a boy.

“Mother said I could keep up with the times, and she sent a letter saying I could go out to a dance,” Virginia says. “But I didn’t know how to dance. The boy was miserable, and I was miserable.”

Though unsteady on the dance floor, she was quick on her feet in the tennis court and beat all of her female classmates.

“When I was a sophomore living on the second floor of the new dorm, McDaniel Hall, boys learned I was a good tennis player. They would stand under my window and whistle to get me to come down and play.”

She continued to play tennis for decades, until her tennis partners all passed away. After that, Nicoll filled a bucket with balls and hit them over the net alone, she says without a trace of sorrow in her voice.

“I look on the bright side of life.”
 
Everyone knows Nicoll at her favorite restaurant, Chef Fred’s Chesapeake Steakhouse, in Salisbury. The servers greet her with a hug and pepper her with questions about her family. Nicoll opts for a table by a roaring fire and fills her plate at the buffet with roast beef and vegetables, before sinking into a big chair and back into college memories.

“At Western Maryland, you had to be really agile to get the food because the men would rush in and grab half of what was there. They often served mutton,” she says with a sour expression.

She is one of the few still living who remember the College’s namesake William McDaniel, recalling him as a presence on campus, although she was not enrolled in the classes he taught. She studied French, German, Spanish, English, history, chemistry, and mathematics. The former SGA president was among the first to pledge the newly created sorority Phi Alpha Mu. But Virginia is most proud of winning the Mary Ward Lewis Prize, which is still awarded to the top female in the graduating class.

After graduation, she taught high school English for three years before deciding to become a nurse. The young teacher attended nursing school at Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia and then returned to her hometown to work alongside her father, a surgeon. Back then, nurses cleaned and sharpened their own needles and made their own IV fluid, she says.

On March 17, 1937, a young doctor named Frederick Nicoll drove from New York to Berlin to discuss taking over her father’s practice, due to his failing health. He met the woman who would become his wife and never left. They married four months later and opened a maternity hospital in their home. Over the next five years, the couple delivered hundreds of babies. They also started their own family, with sons Don and Fred ’62.

In a black-and-white picture on the wall, the two now-grown men are little boys caught in mid-squirm. Today, Virginia has four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Her light melodious voice that ebbs and flows with thoughts that race in a thousand directions becomes as gravely as sandpaper when she describes losing her husband to stomach cancer after 10 years of marriage, when he was 40 years old.

“My sons know he was a good man, a special man.”

A collection of colorful glass vases and candy dishes lining a shelf near the ceiling cast a rainbow of afternoon sunshine onto a photo of a young Dr. Nicoll. He is distinguished in a suit, with chiseled features.

Their son Fred says even though his father didn’t live to become an old man, he touched many lives.

“People can accomplish a lot in a short life too. Mother doesn’t dwell on it. Life is meant to be lived, and you just go on,” he said, crediting his mother’s long and happy life to her ability to face adversity without becoming overwhelmed by the challenges.

Nicoll raised her two sons with help of her mother, and eventually became the director of nurses for the Wicomico County Department of Health. And while many in the Salisbury community know of her swimming achievements, still more remember her career as a nurse. The babies she delivered are now in their 60s and many are prominent members of the community. They often still recognize her in the mall.

“I’m just happy people remember me,” she says. “When you live this long, if you’ve got any gumption at all, people should.”