How sweet it is!
Gladys Sweett just turned 100 and got a new rescue dog. She’s part of Canada’s fastest-growing demographic.
Gladys Sweett turned 100 Wednesday. Still lives in her own home. Still as goodhearted as her name implies. Still healthy as a somewhat-wobbly-kneed horse. Still sharp as the proverbial.
The news is: that’s not news, at least not the way it once was.
It used to be that reaching 100 was a rarity, but now it happens with such frequency that the Queen — herself the 91-year-old daughter of a mother who lived to 101 — has had to hire extra staff to handle all the birthday greetings to which her centenarian subjects are entitled.
In fact, the 100-plus crowd is Canada’s fastest-growing demographic. The 2016 census showed 8,230 of them, a 41 per cent rise in just five years. That included 160 centenarians (130 of them female) in the capital region, up from 120 in 2011.
Indeed, Gladys is a spring chicken compared to Sooke’s Merle Barwis, who was the oldest living Canadian, the fourth longest-lived Canadian ever, and one of the oldest handful of people on the planet when she died in Langford’s Priory just a month shy of her 114th birthday in 2014.
And here’s a freaky projection: According to The 100-Year-Life, a book by a pair of professors at the London Business School, half of all Canadian children born in 2007 can expect to live up to age 104.
It’s all part of the welldocumented greying of Canada, a shift that has implications for everything from health spending to income tax revenue. We are already at the point where, for the first time, Canada has more seniors than children. Greater Victoria is particularly creaky: We have, relatively speaking, the fewest children of any city in Canada (just 13 per cent of the population is under age 15) and are top five in seniors (21 per cent). But all those are just numbers. Here’s the real story: Gladys Sweett is a treat.
At 100, she is good-humoured and kind, shaped by experiences most of us can only imagine. She has lived through not one but two world wars. Born Gladys Webb in London, England in 1917, she was still an infant when the family moved to Calgary, where she grew up.
She was an active youngster, liked dancing, even competed at the highland games (“I came fourth because my piper got drunk.”) In fact, it was at Penley’s dance hall that she met her husband, back in the days when the guys literally filled out the girls’ dance cards. “He would say ‘there’s not room for my name’ and he would cross everybody else’s out.”
She married Eddie (he went by his second name, because his mother had given all her sons the same first name, Albert) in June 1939, then lost him to the army when the Second World War broke out that September.
He was gone six years. Escaped Juno Beach unscathed on D-Day, only to be wounded later. Gladys didn’t hear a word for a long time. Then one day the postman came running down the street waving a postcard saying Eddie was coming home.
That’s when the marriage really began, when they had their three kids. Eventually, Eddie’s job with the CPR brought the family to Victoria, where he toiled on the E&N and Gladys worked for Kmart.
They were married 57 years before he died. “I wish he were here to celebrate with me,” she said Wednesday. She still lives in the house they built in 1966.
Bowling was a passion for both of them. (In fact, Gladys made the pages of the Times Colonist when she protested the closing of the Town and Country lanes a dozen years ago.) She figures organizing the bowling leagues, working out the stats, kept her mind sharp.
She emails and Skypes on her computer, gets a physical workout at Luther Court, does the newspaper puzzles for mental gymnastics.
She is also invested in the world around her, reads the TC cover to cover (bless ’er), watches the news, votes Green. Turned down a dinner invitation from daughter Bev Knapton’s last year because she didn’t want to miss the Hillary-Trump debate. Has no use for the U.S. president (“I hope I live long enough to see what happens to him,” she said.)
Not that she plans to go anywhere soon, though. Note that she just got a new rescue dog, Maggie.
That’s the difference today. Turning 100 doesn’t mean turning off a switch. It’s not a signal to fade away. Kirk Douglas used his 100th birthday last year as an opportunity to pen an open letter ripping Trump. Another screen icon, Gone With The Wind’s Olivia de Havilland, 101, recently sued FX Networks over the way she was portrayal in the TV series Feud — an action that showed faith in both A) her own longevity and B) the speed of the American legal system. (BTW, de Havilland’s father Walter lived in Victoria, where he was known as a chess player, in the 1940s and ’50s. It was here that he met his third wife, Rosemary Beaton Connor, who died in 2005 at age 101.)
Gladys’s advice? Eat healthily. Stay active. Stay positive. Don’t get dragged down worrying about things beyond your control. Also, a small rye and Seven helps.
As Greater Victoria’s newest centenarian — a 160-member club in a region of 377,000 — she is content.
“I’ve had a good life, a very good life.”