Permissions

Hoping I have the right place for this, as I could not figure this out, if need be I can delete and repost in the proper place if I can be redirected properly.

Okay, I have a bunch of old word '97 documents that I just recovered/found. I think because the documents are so old that the permissions have gotten wonky/degraded a bit. I have finally gotten them to a part where I can open them in TextEdit (Word 2016 though has difficulties recognizing it as such and does not want to open them), and do some editing IF I unlock the permissions for the document from WITHIN TextEdit. In Finder, the permissions all seem to be okay, I've searched high and low for a terminal fix, I think with the application MacPilot I was finally able to make the headway I have made so far.

With all of that being said, here is my problem:

If I first unlock the document within TextEdit, I can then go into word and edit and change it around as needed from there. However (and I did just do a test here) for some weird reason it seems that every time I close out of it I need to re-unlock the document permissions from within TextEdit.

Is there a permanent solution to this that does not require me copying and pasting these documents into new blank documents? (There's somewhere between 60-100 of them......)

And thank you in advance!