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Turning 104, she’s healthy, happy, witty
NORTH LIMA — “I tell everybody I’m four,” said Mildred Arwilla Brant with a laugh.
Mildred, 104 today, might be losing her eyesight, but she has not lost her sense of humor, nor her memory.
She was born March 20, 1905, in Youngstown to Catherine and Harry Luebben, and is the only one of their six children still living.
To put her age in perspective, she was born a little less than two years after Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first airplane.
Reared on Hylda and Earle and Indianola Avenues, she was 12 when the United States entered World War I, and a young working woman of 24 when the Great Depression struck in 1929.
“I remember the Depression; don’t mention it,” she said, shaking her head.
“We lived on potato soup because we got the potatoes free,” she said.
“Mom won’t eat potato soup to this day,” said her daughter, Marjorie Fergus of Boardman.
Mildred, who lives at Assumption Village, said her father always had a large garden and lots of fruit trees.
“We lived out of that garden,” she said.
Mildred married Charles Brant, who also grew up in Youngstown, on Thanksgiving Day 1928.
“We had a family dinner, then we went up to Cleveland to a burlesque show. We had to have a little excitement,” she said.
Charles and Mildred liked to go to Jay’s downtown and get a bunch of hot dogs, then go to Mill Creek Park and sit in the rumble seat of his brand-new Ford Roadster and eat them.
“We practically lived at Idora Park,” she said, and they enjoyed fishing and boating at Mosquito and Pymatuning lakes.
Before she married, Mildred worked several years at General Electric’s Mazda Plant on Woodland Avenue. Her formal education ended with graduation from Princeton Junior High School.
“I had to get a job and help out,” she said.
During World War II, she returned to factory work as a genuine “Rosie the Riveter,” welding tank treads at Truscon Steel in Youngstown.
Mildred and Charles had three children: Marjorie Fergus of Boardman; Shirley Curley of Ashland, Ohio, and formerly of Mineral Ridge; and Dorothy Powrie of Bradenton, Fla. Mildred has nine grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren; and six great-great-grandchildren.
Her husband died in 1986 at age 80. But before he died, they lived life to the fullest. After he retired 1963, they bought a travel trailer and headed west, something he had always wanted to do.
They visited 39 states, and were thinking about settling out west, but decided it was too far from the kids. Instead, they went to Florida, where they lived for 20 years.
These days, Mildred spends her days napping — “when they say nap time I’m right there” — and keeping the staff laughing.
“I’m always singing and humming, and once in a while I’ll tell a bad joke,” she said.
Mildred, known for her canning and baking, especially pies and raisin filled cookies, which she said were her husband’s favorite, says she doesn’t have any idea why she has lived for so long.
“It can’t be the beer, because I don’t drink anymore,” said Mildred, who readily admits to tipping a few in her younger days.
“I never thought I would live this long. I didn’t do it. It just happened. Just lucky, I guess,” she said.
alcorn@vindy.com