East Van’s Mae Irving celebrates 105th birthday
“Am I asking the questions or are you asking the questions?” Mae Irving said as a reporter joined her for birthday pie Tuesday, before she started asking the questions. “How old are you?” she asked. Irving, an east Vancouver lass, turned 105 on May 16. She celebrated at the South Granville Seniors Centre, where she is affectionately known to all as Gramma. Birthday bingo followed pie and cake. Pointing at a large slice of lemon meringue on the plate in front of her, she cracked: “I’m going to eat that pie if it kills me.”
When Irving was born in 1912 in east Vancouver, Richard McBride was our Conservative premier, Robert Borden our Tory prime minister and George V, with Queen Mary by his side, our king. The assassination of an archduke half a world away, a gunshot that would set off the First World War, was more than two years off.
The house she grew up in, still standing in Grandview, didn’t gain access to electricity until she was two years old.
Although Irving has spent half her life, on-and-off, in Vancouver, she has lived all over. Her husband Maurice worked for the Canadian National Railway and transfers took them throughout B.C., to Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Oregon and California.
“And Vancouver is the best place to live,” she said.
She’s proud to say she doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke — but hastens to add, “I don’t care if you do.”
Maurice was her husband for 58 years. He died in 1987.
“I’d do ’em all over again, those years,” Irving said. “I’d shoot him sometimes too, you know, but I didn’t want to lose him.”
Their only daughter died at age 69, four years ago, in a fall down the stairs. “You don’t ever get over it,” Irving said. Having grown up without a father, Irving said the successes she achieved can be chalked up to the lessons she took away from hardship.
“We love her,” Clemencia Gomez, secretary director of the seniors’ centre, said. “Gramma is such a role model. Being old doesn’t mean isolation: She’s part of society.”
Things are tight at the centre, with city and provincial funds frozen or cut back, so the seniors do everything they can to raise money on their own, such as raffles and an annual spring bazaar coming up June 3 at the centre, on 1420 West 12th Ave. Irving recently raised $50 on her own.
She lives with one of her two grandchildren by the PNE and has three great-grandchildren.
“People are very good to me, sir,” she said. “I don’t understand why. Today is such a wonderful surprise.” What does she look forward to? “Just that my family are all OK and I don’t have to worry about them,” she said. “Just the other day I said hi to my great-granddaughter — she just turned one — and she said hi back. I nearly dropped my teeth — the ones I have left.”