She remembers gas lamps, iceboxes and when a horse and buggy were still used as a transportation mode. Hilda Berry, a 10-year veteran of the Queen Anne Community Center’s dance aerobics class, celebrated her 100th birthday with a party at the center on April 11.
Berry told the members of her class that she had already received signed pictures from tennis great Andre Agassi and President Barack Obama for hitting the century mark. Apparently Agassi sends signed pictures to members of a tennis association on their 100th birthdays. As for the president, he secured at least one more vote with the gift.
“If he didn’t send me the picture, I wouldn’t vote for him,” said Berry.
Still sassy and as sharp as a tack, the New York City native who now lives in the University House in the Wallingford neighborhood, told family stories and reminisced about growing up in Brooklyn with her parents and three sisters. Two of her sisters were born in Europe before her parents immigrated to the United States. Berry and the third sister were born in Brooklyn.
“I was born three days before the Titanic sunk,” said Berry, whose father, a tailor from Czechoslovakia, was hoping that his fourth child would be a boy. “My father always called me “The Titanic” because it was a disaster that I was a girl.”
Berry talked about life before electricity and the automobile. The family didn’t even have a telephone.
“I remember the first time I turned the electricity on, I thought it was a miracle,” Berry said.
Berry’s father died when she was 12 and her mother, who was born in Hungary, became the sole breadwinner. Berry said her mother, who was a spunky lady with a “lively personality,” was a survivor and could always figure out ways to make a living, including working as a piano teacher even though she didn’t have much background in the instrument.
Berry, who took after her mother, entered Hunter College at 16 in 1928, right at the height of the jazz age and just as the world was about to change. When she graduated in 1932, the world was in the depths of the Great Depression.
However, she was able to find a job as an editor for a publishing company.
“Everybody was in the same boat back then,” Berry said of the Depression. “We didn’t feel sorry for ourselves. It was just accepted. We may have been deprived, but we didn’t know it.”
In 1938, she married Dwayne Berry, a descendant of the man some believed invented modern baseball, Abner Doubleday. She said she was 26 when she married and her family was beginning to get nervous that she might never tie the knot.
“We were opposites in every way,” said the very outgoing Berry. “He was a quiet, thoughtful man. But I think it was a good marriage.”
The couple raised two sons and, along the way, Berry changed careers to become a vocational rehabilitation counselor, a field she knew nothing about at the time.
“Like everything else in life, it was an accident, but it was great,” she said.
Berry, who has long lived as a widow, said she was content with her life in New York City. But in 2000, her oldest son, Tom Berry, who works as a policy analyst for DSHS in Olympia, moved her out to Seattle. Her younger son, Jon, still lives in the family’s former vacation home in New Jersey.
“I lived my whole life in New York City and my son just grabbed me and brought me to Seattle,” Berry said. “I’d never even been here before. But I liked it right away.”
Today, Berry continues with her aerobics class each week and runs a French conversation group at the University House.
And she even has a boyfriend. Berry is robbing the cradle by dating William Channel, who is only 92.
Channel is going to have to stay on his toes if he wants to keep up with Berry. She said for her birthday party, she slipped on a shimmering sequined baby blue dress and danced all night –a claim that her son verified as he shook his head in amazement.
“It was wild, I have to tell you,” Berry said of the dress and the evening. “It transformed me. That dress just speaks to me.”
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