LEWISTON — Jeannette Freve makes eight pounds of fudge every week, gifting it to people in her travels, a modern-day Johnny Appleseed with smiles, sweets and stories.

She proudly admits to having kissed two presidents on the cheek (the first was around 1935).

She met her second husband protesting a parking ticket — he took it back and asked her out.

Freve turns 93 in December and can be found every morning holding court with friends at the  Dunkin’ Donuts in the Auburn Walmart.

“I have a certain table there, everybody knows where I sit. I’ve been doing it for four years,” Freve said. She sips a medium coffee for two hours while they chat and catch up. “I never eat doughnuts, they’re too fattening.”

Freve was born in Lewiston, the 13th of 16 children. Her mother, Camille, was widowed young, with nine children still at home, and in many ways Freve’s mother has been her inspiration.

“I love to give,” Freve said. “My mother was a giver; she didn’t have nothing, poor dear. We were so poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.”

Her mom made the family’s clothes, baked and gave breads to friends.

Freve spent the first part of her life as an Army wife, living in places such as New Jersey, Georgia, Kansas and Germany. When the family finally moved back to Auburn, she opened a poodle-trimming business after getting compliments about her own well-coiffed Gigi and Buttons.

Her next career was as a private-duty nurse, which she kept up until age 75.

“(That’s when) I said, ‘I’ve had enough,'” Freve said.

She’s been married three times and outlived two husbands. Today, Freve keeps lots of routines. She drives to Dunkin’ Donuts every morning, and then Holy Cross Church for an hour after that. She walks 90 minutes on her treadmill every day and follows that with a 3-mile walk. She visits the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul twice a week. And she makes fudge, lots of fudge, none of which she’s able to eat; she’s been allergic for about 40 years.

She tapped a container of chocolate walnut on her kitchen table and said, “This is going to KeyBank.”

She attributes her good health to not drinking, not smoking, lots of vitamins and all that walking.

Freve had her first presidential encounter when she was about 15 and staying with her sister in Washington, D.C. She attended the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn and spied Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his wheelchair.  

“He was sitting there, laughing, what a nice man,” she said. “I said, ‘Mr. President, can I sit on your lap?’ He says, ‘Of course.’ I gave him a kiss on the cheek. Mrs. Roosevelt was laughing, she got a kick out of it. My sister said, ‘Boy, you have nerve.’ There’s nothing wrong with that.”

She met then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy in what’s now Lewiston’s Kennedy Park, when he visited the city in a campaign stop in 1960.

“I shook his hand and I gave him a kiss on the cheek,” she said. “I said, ‘I want this for a memory.’ He asked my name. I said, ‘You know, I’m going to vote for you.'”

Know someone everyone knows? Contact staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or kskelton@sunjournal.com

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