In 2012, the Sun Journal published a cheerful story about Laurianne Cormier, a local woman who was still volunteering at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center at age 99. Cormier is 102 now and still putting in her time at the hospital.

Last month, the newspaper received a notice: Mrs. Marie Anna Blondin had celebrated her 100th birthday on May 4 by gathering with her family at  the Chick-A-Dee restaurant.

On June 5, Megan Skilling posted a photo on her Facebook page featuring herself and her great-aunt, Betty. “She turns 101 next weekend!” the post announced.

At Chapman House in Auburn, that kind of longevity produces yawns all around. Two of the residents of the house are 100 or older and there are a dozen or so ladies on their way to reaching the century mark. While living to be 100 used to be an elusive and unlikely dream, it happens all the time these days. Better still, most of the ladies at Chapman House remain clear-headed and able-bodied. They have reached triple digits yet they continue to live well.

Their secrets to longevity? It helps to be a woman. A little French doesn’t hurt, either.

There really ARE a few secrets to long life, but we’re not going to just blurt them out. We’ll let the seniors tell you, and if they want to take their sweet time getting there, it’s their right. Just don’t go thinking that these people reached vast age by living as teetotalers and skipping everything that’s fun. In fact, most of them spent their lives dancing and they continue to cut the occasional rug.

Some of them even indulged in the occasional vice.

“I smoked, but only a little,” says 101-year-old Grace Bernatchez. “Everybody smoked back then. It was the style.”

‘I didn’t expect to live THIS long.’

There’s a bit of an impish gleam in Bernantchez’ eye, perhaps because she knows what question will follow. Around her, more than a dozen other occupants of the Chapman House are squirming and grinning.

So, Mrs. Bernatchez. Did you do any drinking at all?

“I enjoyed a cocktail now and then,” she admits, and there is elbowing and razzing from her younger peers. Most of them admit that they enjoyed the occasional cold beer on a hot day, or a glass of red wine with dinner. And why not? Bernatchez is a lady who was going to school when the country was wallowing in the Great Depression. She was just entering the workforce when FDR told the nation that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. Bernatchez saw the introduction of things we now take for granted, like cars in every driveway, television, phones and airplanes flying all over the world.

“I enjoyed all of that,” she says.

She graduated from Edward Little High School in Auburn. She went to work as a switchboard operator at Bates Mill in Lewiston and raised a daughter.

“I lived an ordinary life,” Bernatchez says.

She didn’t set out to live to 100, but she wasn’t altogether surprised when that birthday came along, either. It’s in the genes, she says. Some families are just built to last.

“My oldest sister, when she died, was 104,” Bernatchez says. “She didn’t linger with sickness. We live long lives, but we live well.”

Around the table, the ladies of the Chapman House ponder this. Some are in their 90s and expect to live to 100. A surprising number of them, however, would rather not.

“I feel great right now,” says Anna Vitiello, an 85-year-old former Lewiston school teacher. “But I don’t want to live to be 100, thank you.”

“I didn’t expect to live THIS long,” says 91-year-old Rita Beaule, “never mind 100.”

I expect the others to scold the girls for the gloomy outlook, but they don’t. Most don’t wish to live that long if it means a decline in health, they generally agree. The quality of life, they tell me, is much more important than the length of it.

“Not,” says Beaule, “that I have any say in it.”

‘Just enjoy life.’

Then the ladies are tittering again and the mood is lightened. Activity Director Mitch Thomas had told me that the ladies of the Chapman House are sometimes like one big sorority. They joke and razz each other. They ponder aloud whether the jail guards across the street would make good dancing partners. Sometimes they bicker, but mostly they support one another.

At the end of the table, smiling faintly through most of this, is Thelda Dobbins. She has been quiet since I got there, but watching everything. I approach her cautiously. So, I ask her. You’re 100 years old?

Dobbins gives me an exasperated look. “Barely,” she says, and the others crack up again. A few of them even start to applaud.

So, she’s a young 100, fairly new to the concept. Some days she feels much younger, some days every one of those years seems to be piling on.

“Some days I really feel it,” Dobbins says. “I don’t feel 70 anymore, that’s for sure.”

Like several I met at the Chapman House, Dobbins was a school teacher. She graduated high school at 16 and college two years later, all of this well before the start of World War II. She taught third-graders for many years. She did do some dancing in her time, but drinking and smoking?

“Oh, no,” she says. “When I was young, you weren’t allowed to do those things.”

When I ask for her secret to long life, that faint, almost sly smile reappears.

“Just enjoy life,” she says.

Secrets revealed

By golly, are we onto something here? Does a sunny disposition have something to do with it?

“You bet it does,” says a woman seated near the end of the table back at the Chapman House. She’s 96-year-old Ruth Troop, and it’s the first time I’ve heard from her. Once she gets started, she’s a sea of valuable information.

“You’ve got to have the right attitude,” Troop says. “Try to be happy. Be happy and you’ll be well.”

Again, the other ladies are nodding and murmuring consent. If there is one prevailing secret to living long, it seems to be this.

“Be good to everyone,” says Grace Libby, a youngster at 86. “I believe in positive thinking. A lot of it is through faith.”

“Yes,” agrees Betty Walker, a spry 92-year-old. “Positive thinking. No matter what, you keep the faith.”

Jeannie Curato, a 93-year-old retired dressmaker, is nodding emphatically. When I ask if she agrees, she looks at me like I’m a simpleton. “Positive thinking,” she says. “Yes, indeed.”

The ladies of the Chapman House seem to accept this as simple good sense, an idea so long embraced it almost doesn’t warrant discussion. You be as happy as you can, you treat others nicely and you stay optimistic no matter what. Duh, right?

But this is a characteristic later generations seem to have lost. We grumble incessantly about our jobs. We complain throughout our days even as our lives get easier. Where the aging population tends to appreciate everything they’ve had, we younger folk just keep wishing for more.

Not that a happy outlook is all you need.

“Think positive and dance,” advises Libby, a woman who has had five hip surgeries and three on her knees. “I mean, really swing it!”

As I scribble furiously in my notebook, I’m aware that one lady is watching me with particular intensity. This is Esther Gyger, an 89-year-old who – forgive me for saying so – looks like she’s up to something.

In a very real way, she is.

“Curiosity,” Gyger says. “That’s what’s kept me alive. Curiosity. I’ve got to know what’s going on.”

She mulls this a moment. “I’m not nosy, just curious. There’s a difference.”

Gyger married a farmer and helped him tend the orchard while raising a family. Her father lived to be 100 and her mother made it to 96. She’s got good genes, no doubt, but she’s also got that hungry mind. I get the feeling that if I turned my back for just a second, she’d sneak a glance at my notebook to see what I’ve written.

“I read the paper every day,” Gyger says. “I watch things out the window. I just want to know what’s happening.”

From her window, she’s been watching a shop down the street. It’s been vacant a long time, she says, but recently there’s been activity there. She suspects it might be some kind of print shop. From her window, she marks the progress of the emerging business.

“I’m pulling for them,” she says.

Gyger offers further tips for staying above ground, but in a passing way. Nothing can compete with the burning curiosity that drives her.

“Moderation and variety,” she says. “In food and in life. Moderation has worked for me.”

A few seconds of silence. And then: “Mostly I’m curious.”

Wait, more secrets.

Murielle Turmenne, another youngster at 87, tells me: “I was busy all the time. I was everywhere. I always stayed active.”

“I liked sports,” says Beaule, the spry 91-year-old. “I was always doing something active. I exercised a lot. I still do.”

“The only reason I’ve lived this long,” quips 94-year-old Bernice Mushlit, “is because God doesn’t want me.”

“I liked my veggies,” says Troop. “I never ate between meals.”

If you’re searching for the key to reaching 100, there is plenty to find here. Of course, some of it is just plain wisecracking and some is pure nostalgia.

“I used to dance at the Montagnard,” says Yvette Mailhot, 92. “I still dance once in a while.”

When I ask Mailhot if she expects to make it to 100, she nods. “Oh, I think so.”

Grace Libby, too. While some express no desire to attain such an awesome age, Libby is determined to do it.

“Oh, I plan to be 100,” she says. “Every year on my birthday, my son gives me a check in the amount of my age. He says, ‘Ma, are you going to live to be 100?’ He says I’m going to bankrupt him.”

The ladies of the Chapman House seem remarkably fit. There are health problems, of course, but there is very little hobbling and complaining as they gather in the parlor. Ruth Troop, the 96-year-old, seems particularly fit.

“She’s got the body of a youngster,” Libby says of her housemate. “She’s so trim and fit, it’s unbelievable.”

A girls club?

It may occur to you that there are no men on our list. The easy conclusion to make would be that men just don’t live as long as women, which is, of course, a scientifically proven fact. According to several studies, of the people who reach 100, 85 percent are women. For men, it seems, longevity just isn’t in the card.

If he were still around, Alexander Imich might have something to say about this. The New York man died in early June at a home in Manhattan. Born in 1903, Imich was was certified as the oldest man in the world this April by the Gerontology Research Group of Torrance, Calif.

Imich aside, men just don’t climb to 100 and beyond in the numbers that women do. They are more prone to heart disease, for one thing, and some argue that they experience more stress.

The 100 Club, locally at least, is dominated by the ladies. But man or woman, whenever somebody reaches that once-unlikely milestone, it’s natural for the rest of us to go poking for the answers. How? How do they defy the odds, living not only long, but well?

“Having cared for the elderly for over 20 years,” says Bonnie Waisanen, of Lewiston, “I have often asked my 100-plus-year-olds this very question. Most of the men have said something along the lines of a shot of whiskey a day, hard work and cigars. The women have almost always said their children, grandchildren, love . . . and hot toddies.”

As relative youngsters, we tend to have expectations of these people who have lived twice as long as the rest of us. We expect them to pinch our cheeks, send us birthday cards and live their final days in quiet reflection. Instead, I found groups of women who were at times mischievous, playful and even flirty. They crack jokes, take jabs at one another and don’t hesitate to tell a young whippersnapper exactly what is what.

“The 100-plus club is awesome,” Waisanen says. “They have nothing left to prove, and are glad to share their stories, with brutal honesty. And they will flirt with you, too, while doing so. I wouldn’t trade what I do for anything. I have been knocked out of my socks laughing at their downright humor, time and time again.”

At the Chapman House in Auburn, Mitch Thomas can relate. The ladies adore him and the feeling is returned.

“I’m the only dance partner they have right now,” he says. “It’s the best job in the Twin Cities.”

‘Aunt Betty,’101: Worked hard, played hard

Elizabeth Vickery turned 100 last spring. Yesterday, on June 14, she turned 101, and here again you find the tale of a woman who lived right, worked hard and has three digits in her age to show for it.

She played basketball, field hockey and softball as a youngster. She worked at Peck’s Department store in the linen department most of her adult life. She’s a member of the Sixth St. Congregational Church in Auburn as well as Casco Chapter Order of the Eastern Star. She spent many years supporting Lewiston Assembly International Order of the Rainbow for Girls receiving her Grand Cross of Color for outstanding service.

Like so many of the others, Aunt Betty was a rolling stone, gathering no moss.

“Aunt Betty never had any of her own children,” says Megan Skilling, Betty’s great-niece. “She was like a second mother to my mom and like my grandmother. She lived across the street from us my whole life. Sometimes we would come home and she would be playing basketball in our back yard – and I remind you she was in her late 70s early 80s at the time.

“She never missed a performance or an assembly or anything that my brother or I had,” Skilling said.

Work hard, play hard. If Aunt Betty has other secrets to longevity, she’s keeping them to herself.

“She never shared as far as we know,” says Skilling. “She kept it to herself. Her sister, Agnes, lived to be a few months shy of 101 as well before she passed away.”

“Betty now lives at Bolster Heights in Auburn where she continues to bring smiles to the staff, family and friends on their visits,” writes Skilling.

On her Facebook page, Skilling posted a photo of herself posing with her great-Aunt Betty. The older woman is seen trying to plant a kiss on her niece’s cheek.

“She asked me if I would be her baby,” Skilling wrote, “and after saying ‘I love you’ to her about 100 times I got ‘I love you’ back.”

Marie Anna Blondin, 100: Picture of independence

On the other side of the river from the Chapman House, Marie Anna Blondin isn’t living with a group of her peers. She keeps an apartment near downtown Lewiston, preferring solitude to the sorority lifestyle.

“She likes living by herself,” says her daughter, Therese Plourde. “She’s very independent. She still cooks for herself. She likes her little apartment. She won’t go stay with other seniors – she says that’s for old people.”

You can understand the independent streak. If there’s one common thread among these ladies of advanced age, it’s that their early lives were not easy. Not by today’s standards, anyway. Instead of video games and iPods, many of them worked on farms in their earliest years. They contributed to their households in hard times, later moving away and starting families of their own, struggling to make things a little easier for their children.

Blondin came from Canada, marrying a lumberjack and moving to the United States with just a fifth-grade education under her belt.

“They told her, you go to America and you’ll live a rich life,” Plourde says.

It didn’t happen exactly that way. Blondin and her husband bought a farm in New Gloucester, but the man of the house had to keep working at Bates Mill, where he eventually died a young man, not yet 50. Blondin was left with five children and an apartment house in Lewiston.

She didn’t drive. She had to study to become an American citizen, something she was determined to do. Ultimately, renting out apartments provided enough money for Blondin to live on. And live she did.

“My mother started traveling,” Plourde says. “She went all over the world on ships. She went to Europe, Spain, Portugal, Hawaii. . . . She went all over the place. She even went to see the pope.”

For the past quarter-century, Blondin has lived in her little apartment near Elm Street in Lewiston. She’s 100 now and showing no real signs of decline.

How does she do it?

“She says longevity ran in her family,” says Plourde, herself 78. “She never had any kind of surgery. She has her tonsils, her appendix, everything. Her heart is good. Everything is good.”

Blondin was in the hospital only once, to deliver one of her children. She didn’t like the experience and vowed never to go back. The rest of the kids were born at home.

Blondin used to go dancing in downtown Lewiston on Saturday nights. Once she reached a certain age and all her kids were grown, she did what she wanted to. You know, in moderation.

“She never smoked,” Plourde says. “She drank very little. We always had good food, though.”

Being 100 seems to offer a strange perspective: A person 85 or younger will seem like young stuff. Somebody who has turned 104 seems ancient.

Plourde laughs. “My mother says, how do people live that long?”

Blondin had 18 siblings. It appears she’ll outlive every one of them, not to mention all the other people she came to know and love while she was living her life. That’s one of the downsides of living long.

“My mother says that’s the sad part of getting old,” Plourde tells me. “You lose all of your friends.”

Laurianne Cormier, 102: Surviving, then volunteering

When she was about to turn 100, Laurianne Cormier offered a shrugging sense of resignation about attaining that coveted age.

“It’s not my doing,” she said in an interview with the Sun Journal then. “You don’t choose to live a long time; it just happens.”

Born in Lewiston on July 12, 1912, and raised here as the oldest of six in a French-Catholic family, Cormier dreamed of becoming a nurse. But after her father died, and the Great Depression hit, money became tight. She abandoned her dream.

“When you’re the oldest one, you don’t always do what you want,” she said. “There were five behind me and my mother needed the help, so I went to work at 16. I would have had to go back to school to learn Latin (to become a nurse). I couldn’t afford that.”

She said all that when she was a mere 100 and volunteering at St. Mary’s Medical Center, coming full circle in a way, given her dreams of becoming a nurse. Now she’s about to turn 102 and still volunteering at St. Mary’s on Monday and Friday mornings. Hospital officials have estimated she’s logged nearly 19,000 hours there.

Several years ago Cormier left her Lewiston home — the upkeep had become too much for a woman in her 90s — and moved into an apartment at Maison Marcotte, a senior living facility run by St. Mary’s. Her apartment is directly across the street from the hospital.

It’s no surprise really that her friends and co-workers describe her as happy and positive — a trait common among such seniors. For Cormier’s part, she says she takes things one day at a time.