AUBURN – Moments after Gertrude Earley blew out the candles on her cake – celebrating her 95th birthday – her high school English teacher gave her hand a squeeze.

“She was an excellent student,” gushed Lola Waterman Sigel, 104. Then she gave an adoring glance to Earley, who turns 95 on Tuesday.

The pair, student and teacher, sat side by side Monday beneath a floating birthday balloon. They’ve been friends nearly all their lives.

And they still get together when they can.

“We both loved each other,” said Earley, who lives at the Auburn Home for Aged Women. Sigel lives with family in Sabattus.

They talk on the telephone, though both battle profound hearing loss. They meet when they can.

“We stayed in touch, always,” said Earley. “(Sigel) is a pretty special lady.”

They first met when Earley was a schoolgirl of 16. Sigel was her teacher when she was a junior and a senior.

“She always got A’s,” Sigel said.

Earley graduated in 1928, married a year later and began writing for Lewiston’s two daily papers, The Lewiston Daily Sun and the Evening Journal, forerunners of the Sun Journal. She covered town government, the schools, and odds and ends from the community.

The newspaper staff “handed me some paper and envelopes and told me to go to work,” said Earley, who also spent 24 years as Sabattus town clerk.

Meanwhile, Sigel was teaching. She left the area in the 1940s, following her husband to Europe in the years after World War II. But she came back, and the friendship stuck.

Sigel also wrote for the newspaper, submitting travel stories during trips abroad. And when Earley tussled with her editor, which happened only once, Sigel backed her friend. An editor said she had misused a word – “who” instead of “whom.”

“He was wrong, and you were right,” Sigel said Monday, decades after the error.

Earley still tells people that the secret to life is in the little things.

She has lived to 95 by “walking with the Lord,” she said. “He takes care of me.”

Faith means a lot to Sigel too, who smiled at the fuss over her friend’s relatively young 95.

“She can’t catch up with me,” she said.


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