Head held high, hands firmly gripping her walker, Mary Arnott, 99, shuffles with dignity through the women’s changing room at the Etobicoke Olympium pool, past the teenage girls who have been blow-drying their hair for half an hour, into the mist of the showers, then out the door and first one into the heated pool.
She bobs over to the shallow end, stopping to talk to friends – everyone knows Mary here; she swims twice a week – about their children, the viciousness of bridge and their health.
“I don’t know what we’d talk about if we didn’t have our aches and pains,” Arnott tells one of them, although she suffers remarkably few aches and pains herself. She takes an occasional anti-inflammatory for arthritis.
“I’ve outlived my hip replacement,” she says.
In fact, Arnott is an exception to the exception. Not only has she lived 20 years past the average lifespan for Canadians, she’s healthy, her mind is sharp and she lives independently.
The 2006 census pegged the number of centenarians in Canada at 4,635 – but frailty among the very aged is the norm.
“Very few are swimmers,” says Marlene Awad, president of the Ontario Gerontology Association and administrator for the Regional Geriatric Program of Toronto.
Studies show most people who go on to become centenarians are healthy and independent up to the age of 95, says gerontologist Dr. Robert Butler, author of The Longevity Revolution: The Benefits and Challenges of Living a Long Life. Quality of life tends to drop off afterward, especially for women.
“Occasionally there is going to be a fortunate 100-year-old who is healthy, including mentally,” Butler says. “We should celebrate those individuals.”
Arnott has never been one to turn down a party invitation. The black-and-white pictures that tumble from her old photo albums show her among groups of smiling friends, climbing in the Adirondacks and lounging on the beach in Atlantic City. She’s the short one with the bright eyes.
“I can eat pie off your head,” friends would tease her.
Born in Brooklyn on May 28, 1909, Arnott was raised on Staten Island. She survived scarlet fever, helped bring up four siblings after her mother died when she was 14 and worked as a secretary in New York City for 12 years, earning $35 a week and a $150 bonus at Christmas.
For a while, she rented an apartment near Grand Central Station with her sister, one room with a kitchenette and a bathroom in a building with a doorman, for $40 a month.
She met her husband, Bruce, while vacationing at Virginia Beach. He was a Canadian mining engineer. She liked the way he kissed and how comfortable it was to be with him. “This one’s for me,” she remembers thinking.
She was 31 when they were married in October 1940 by a priest at St. Michael’s in Toronto.
“A lot of girls – you couldn’t find anybody, they weren’t marrying. The men didn’t have jobs, a lot of them. Normally, they would have said you were on the shelf, but not at that time.”
They had two children and a happy marriage, despite frequent moves to such locations as Timmins, Sioux Lookout, Bissett, Man., Algoma Mills and Sault Ste. Marie, before finally settling in the new suburb of Don Mills.
Arnott was always taking night courses to improve her mind and skills, everything from business courses to journalism. She temped; she ran the Easter Seal campaign for the Rotary Club when the family lived in Sault Ste Marie. She travelled with her husband when she could.
Bruce died in 1973, a few months after their 30-year-old son, a Canadian Air Force pilot, was killed in a crash.
“They called it a stroke. It was brought on by a broken heart,” Arnott says.
Her daughter, Lynn Sutherland, says her mother’s resilience was remarkable. “A lot of people you run into wear their grief on their sleeve. Mom doesn’t do that.”
Instead, Arnott moved to San Diego. She hooked up with friends and they threw pool parties and bridge parties. When she moved again, she became “secretary of everything” at her mobile home park.
She travelled to Tunisia, Sardinia, Jamaica, Sicily, Greece, England, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador and Lima. Back in Toronto, she worked into her 70s at her daughter’s store, Frankly Scarlet, on Yonge St., where the Bay-Adelaide Centre is now.
Now she’s happy living in a one-room apartment with a kitchenette and a bathroom in her daughter’s house. She wears a hearing aid, does the cryptic crossword with a magnifying glass, follows the Blue Jays and can’t really explain why she has lived so well so long.
Until recently, she liked to credit red wine – she used to drink two glasses before supper each day. It’s more likely genes, she admits. Her interest in other people and life in general may have had something to do with it. Asked if a Star photographer can take her picture at the pool, Arnott seems pleased.
“I look good in a swimsuit,” she says, nodding her head firmly. “I look better in a swimsuit than I do in pants.”
From Mary Arnott’s memoirs
My first recollection of life on this Earth is being carried down the stairs, along with my younger brother Paul and baby sister Gertrude to a waiting horse drawn vehicle to be taken to the isolation ward at Staten Island Hospital. We all had scarlet fever, frequently fatal in those days. Paul and I managed to come through, but we lost Gertrude (about 6 months old).
I remember the shaved heads and the peeling. We couldn’t come home till we’d peeled thoroughly, all the dead skin from our arms and legs. I must have been about 31/2 years old and Paul about 2. My mother was only 29 years old at the time and had already had six children — twins Charles and Bernard, Margaret, me, Paul, and Gertrude – and I think must have been starting in on Ned (who died at about 4 years of age of whooping cough in the heat of the summer).
My next memory was being carried downstairs again because the house was on fire. We lived over Mueller’s Hardware Store at 585 Bay Street on Staten Island. The days of costume balls were still sort of popular then and while my father worked for the telephone company, my mother ran a costume business from our home. The fire started in the costume room and I remember hearing my dad yell, “Get the kids out, May, we’re on fire!” All of us got out in a hurry. The firefighters must have gotten there in good time. The fire was confined to the costume room, but all we kids were taken care of by kind neighbours for a few days.
It could have been the insurance from the fire that made the down payment on the house we bought a year or so later at 198 Beechwood Ave. in Mew Brighton, S.I. Most of my childhood memories belong to growing up at this address. We went to St. Peter’s Catholic School and the worst part of it was once we reached Grades 7 and 8 was taking the Regents. The Regents were exams set up by the state to make sure the Catholics were getting as good an education as they might in the public schools. I guess we were, because all of us managed to finish Grade 8 in our 12th year.
I have such fond memories of the friends we had on this street, of the games we played regularly (on the street). There were few cars up and down in those days. We played ball a lot, and I can still hear Jimmy Darcy: “A foul on your last strike don’t count.” I’ve never forgotten it. Our Christmases were magic since we didn’t see the tree or gifts of any kind until we woke up at four o’clock on Christmas Day, running downstairs to see a beautiful tree all lit up and presents galore under it. We’d dash upstairs to show my parents what Santa Claus had brought us (they’d probably only just gotten into bed), but I guess this is why I believed in Santa Claus till I was 12 years old or thereabouts. My parents must have done all this after they came home from midnight mass.
However, life was not always fun and games. Margaret and I being the oldest girls, we did a lot of housework both before and after school. We did the breakfast dishes before, lunch dishes if we’d come home from school, made beds after school, minded babies. There was always one in a carriage on the front porch, and if he or she awoke it was up to one or the other of us to rock him or her back to sleep again. Charles and Bernard’s job was to sift ashes: take the ashes from the bottom of the stove, sift them, and then separate what was left of the good coals from the clinkers. I’m sure this didn’t do Bernard’s asthma any good; he had it all his life.
We were a musical family. My father played the mandolin, my mother and Margaret played the piano, and Charles and Bernard played various stringed instruments and the drums, and Charles taught himself to play the piano. I never did anything but sing alto in the school choir.
We loved the nights when my parents would both be out, 13 kids or no, they were socially active. My mother was the Grand Regent of Court Eileen Catholic Daughters of America, and my dad was Grand Knight of the Staten Island Council Knights of Columbus. What fun it was to make fudge when we were alone. Or more fun yet to get on the telephone and make all sorts of nuisance calls that we thought were hilarious – much more fun than sitting around the kitchen table doing our homework – or playing casino with aunt Mary. Aunt Mary was my mother’s disabled aunt who lived with us 75 per cent of the time.
She had her own room where she usually took two or three of the younger babies to sleep with her. The room was sort of a no man’s land, you stayed clear of it. It didn’t smell too good and was not a room that would be pictured in Better Homes and Gardens. But Aunt Mary was heaven sent, taking over the old as soon as my mother came along with the new.
My father, we were told, started the first taxi business on Staten Island. At first he started off with a fleet of five cars with day and night chauffeurs. Guess there wasn’t too much demand for taxis on Staten Island then, and it wasn’t long before the five were reduced to one with one person, himself, operating it.
HIGHLIGHTS OF MY LIFE AT 198 BEECHWOOD AVENUE
I’ll never forget the May parties. Margaret and her friend Mildred used to organize one just about every May. Invitations would go out, usually to the same dozen or more people, including: “Please furnish cookies, or maybe furnish sugar for the lemonade, or maybe sandwiches.” The group would collect at our place.
We had a maypole all decorated with crepe-paper streamers, one for each of the party. We had a king and queen, usually the youngest pair, all dressed in white with silver crowns for their heads, and one of the mothers usually volunteered to chaperone.
Each of us holding a streamer, we marched usually over to Pavilion Hill, where there was much space for more than one party to spread out and enjoy. I remember a spring with the loveliest cold water, it was a fun day. This is where we usually walked to when we’d have our two cents after doing the Sunday dishes. We’d pool our money and buy something which we figured would last a long time, and then we’d be off for a real Sunday afternoon walk.
Halloween wasn’t the big to do that it is today. I remember we’d take chalk to school and try to chalk anyone who get within reach (I don’t know what this was supposed to mean), but at night we’d usually have a few friends in and bob for apples. An apple was dangled on a string and with hands behind the back each one got a turn at trying to get a bite out of it. If you got a bite the apple was yours and another got hung up. After that we’d usually have a bit of cake and hot cocoa.
Thanksgiving, next to Christmas, was the biggest holiday of the year. Margaret and I had usually spent the last two weeks or so helping my mother scrub the house from stem to stern. Everybody did their fall cleaning at this time, and got the curtains up. The curtains came down again in the spring, usually filthy, and once again the house got the usual spring scrubbing, Margaret and I being the able assistants.
On Thanksgiving morning we’d be up early and dress up as ragamuffins in the outfits we’d thrown together from what we’d found in the attic. We were allowed money for a horn and a mask each, and, with a bag of sorts we’d be off to collect what goodies we could. The streets were alive it seemed with ragamuffins, horn-blowing and ringing on doorbells asking, “Anything for Thanksgiving?”
We’d get pennies mostly, but when you know that anyone of us got for our Sunday money was two cents, a dozen or so pennies was real loot. We’d also get some fruit or a bit of candy and come home at peace with the world and sit down in the nice clean dining room with its clean curtains up to a delicious turkey dinner with all the trimmings.
Celery, olives and all, which was the only holiday treat in my youth.
I mention the dining room because it was only on such holidays that my parents dared to go all the way and heat both the living room and the dining room. Otherwise, all winter long we lived in the kitchen. Our bedrooms were always freezing cold. Great for sleeping under two or three blankets, but waking in the morning we’d just grab our clothes and make it for the kitchen. I guess we must have washed in the kitchen sink; I don’t remember. But I do remember the breakfasts of oatmeal and hot milk. We were allowed tea and coffee when we were twelve, that was always the end of one and the beginning of another era.
Thanksgiving seemed to start the real holiday season, and from then one could be caught whispering at any time or any place about what we thought would be an appropriate gift for this one or that one. The class usually decided it would be gloves for that sister, whatever her name was. I remember once all of us chipping in on a milk pitcher for my mother. Another time it was a comb. My father usually got elastic armbands that our aunt Mary made up for us. The big decision would be what colour they should be this year. The arm bands were to hold the shirt sleeves up. We weren’t the most imaginative kids but we were practical.
My dad’s mother, gramma Sachs, ran a boarding house in the summer months at Center Moriches on the south shore of Long Island, close to Montauk Point. It was on Seneca Creek which led out to the Great South Bay. My grandmother was a saint, and even though she totally disapproved of her son and daughter-in-law trying to populate the world, to us she was always the perfect grandmother.
She always made it appear as though we were most welcome there even though my parents would show up with a car full of kids plus aunt Mary at the most inopportune of times, unannounced and unexpected, practically giving her a heart attack. As I look back I can’t understand my mother doing such a thing. My father was spoiled from the word go. His mother thought he had a bad heart and gave in to him no matter what. I do remember one Labour Day holiday she did say no. She was absolutely full up in every nook and corner. And after saying goodbye to all our playmates at home and telling them we’d be away for a while we appeared back home the next day.
Paul and I spent a whole summer there, helping out where we could. I remember going to pick up the chickens that Mrs. Somebody-Or-Other killed fresh for our Sunday dinners. I can still see the chickens running around cackling with their heads cut off.
We were a meat-and-potatoes family, fresh vegetables in the summer, but in the winter nothing but carrots and turnips. The green veggies were not to be found in the stores or were available during the holiday seasons only. Our veggies consisted of five pounds of potatoes to be peeled and boiled every night. We were sent to the butcher shop regularly for 60 cents worth of round steak or bottom round chopped. I don’t know how many pounds we got for this but what I do remember is that occasionally I felt the need for a bit of a treat for myself and would ask the butcher for 55 cents worth of whatever. I’m sure the butcher was wise and probably gave me the full pounds anyway, and now I had a real sin to tell in confession.
I had received my First Communion and had to go to confession every Saturday afternoon if I wanted to receive Communion on Sunday. At that age we were not sinners and I wonder what Father Cassidy thought of the sins we were forced to make up, like “I disobeyed my mother five times,” or maybe, “I had bad thoughts,” or, “I used bad language three or four times.” I don’t remember what the penance was for stealing a nickel, probably 10 Hail Marys instead of the usual five, plus an Act of Contrition.
The steak and ground round were poor man’s fare then, and while the wealthier folks usually enjoyed chicken on a Sunday our usual fare was either roast beef or pot roast. This meant that if we were bringing our lunches to school it was roast beef on rye for the first two days. This we did not enjoy. We would much rather have had liverwurst or bologna, or maybe cheese.
How things have changed.
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