Marguerite Robertson and her friends at New Westminster’s Kiwanis Care Centre agree – it’s “ridiculous” that she is turning 110 years old Saturday.
When Robertson was born in 1907 in Lunenburg, N.S., the first Model T Ford hadn’t yet been built, and the idea of sending long-distance radio signals across the Atlantic was still brand new.
She was four years old when the Titanic went down and already 56 when U.S. president John F. Kennedy was shot.
More “ridiculous” yet, perhaps, is the fact Robertson lived alone in her own Sapperton home until she was well over 100 and only moved into the Kiwanis Care Centre about a year ago.
“I came with my little suitcase for a weekend and didn’t tell my family,” she told the Record. “And then I thought, ‘Yes, I could live here.’”
To Robertson, her age is a lucky accident.
At 110, she is in good health and keeps her mind busy with reading – mostly mysteries and adventure stories.
The topics make perfect sense; Robertson has had her share of adventures over the last 110 years.
She was born Marguerite Heisler to a sea captain and his second wife.
Her father had a ship named for each of his daughters, and one of Robertson's earliest memories is of christening her own.
“I remember being five years old and breaking the champagne over the Maguerite H,” she said.
Later, Robertson vividly remembers knitting socks for soldiers fighting in the First World War.
At age 20, she made a trip to Vancouver to visit a sister.
Here, she married a young doctor, and the couple spent five years living in Tofino, when that town was just a tiny fishing village populated almost entirely by Norwegian and Japanese fishermen and their families and the inmates of two Indian residential schools.
The only communication with the outside world was a CPR steamer that came by every 10 days.
“I really grew up because I couldn’t let him down in anything,” Robertson said of that time with her husband, “so I did everything – to the point that we had an appendix out on my dining room table, and I was the only one who helped.”
After more than a century, such life experiences have changed the way Robertson thinks, she said.
“I look at things differently,” she said. "I look at every side. When I was young, I used to think ‘I want it. I do this. I like to do that,’ but now I look at both sides."
These days, Robertson relies on the New Westminster Public Library to deliver her latest adventures.
“Life is still interesting,” she said. “I don’t know what I would do without books.”
Besides eating well and avoiding milk (“I wasn’t fond of milk,” she said), Robertson believes there’s one more thing that’s led to her long life.
“I was well loved,” she said.
