Lafayette woman, turning 100, hopes she’ll see vaccine.
No party, declares Norma Ratto; just a John Wayne film fest
Living to 100, which used to be remarkable before a whole lot of people decided to do it, is something that happens if you hang around long enough. It’s happening to a Lafayette woman, who is as surprised as anyone about it.
“I do wonder why I’m still here,” said Norma Ratto. “I have no answer to that question. None whatsoever.”
Perhaps the exercising has something to do with it, Ratto acknowledged. Every afternoon in her living room, Ratto does 20 leg lifts, all while firmly grasping her walker to make sure she returns safely to the ground after each one.
“Seven, eight, nine, 10,” Ratto said, before switching legs. “You have to keep moving. You can’t just sit. You’ll get stale.”
Ratto, a retired Oakland hair salon owner, will join the centenarian club this month. Her 100th birthday is Oct. 24.
Ratto doesn’t credit her longevity to anything but dumb luck. It’s not the mushroom risotto she favors. It’s not the glass of Champagne she takes from time to time. It’s not the invigorating John Wayne movies she enjoys watching on her bigscreen TV. It’s not the laptop computer that she trained herself to use.
“I suppose,” she said, “I’m just patient.”
When Ratto was born, Woodrow Wilson was president, Prohibition was just starting and Al Jolson was singing “Swanee” on a miraculous new contraption called the radio. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was just ending. Fastforward 100 years, she said, and here we go again.
“It’s a goofy world,” she said. “Every country in the world has got this virus, but we’ve got it worse than anyone. Our president won’t wear a mask. Why is that?”
Ratto, born and raised in Oakland, remembers being drawn to haircutting early on. As a little girl, she cut the hair of her grandmother, and of her own dolls.
“My grandmother’s hair grew back,” she recalled. “My dolls’ hair didn’t.”
She graduated from Oakland Technical High School and began working as a hairdresser in 1939, when haircuts cost 35 cents. For two decades, she owned a hair salon at 19th Street and Broadway. Among her clients was celebrated television exercise guru Jack LaLanne, who ran a gym just down the street and who had to look good for his TV fans. Ratto obliged. To her, LaLanne was just another head poking out from under the smock in her chair. Hair is hair, she said, each head presents a separate artistic challenge, a blank canvas for the scissors.
“Every person’s head is different,” Ratto said. “Every single one. You just look at a person’s head and it comes to you, the best way to cut it.”
Maybe, just maybe, something about LaLanne’s mania for exercise seeped into her psyche, nudging her into the leglift regimen that she credits with keeping her going.
Ratto was married for 74 years to her husband, Leonard, a wholesale butcher who died in 2015 at the age of 99. The couple moved into their singlestory Lafayette home in 1945, and over the years, Ratto has hung all the wallpaper and refinished all the furniture. She can’t think of a reason to move out now.
Being patient, Ratto said, doesn’t mean sitting still. When she isn’t doing leg lifts, she likes to visit the supermarket and Costco. She buys sensibly. At Costco, they sell large quantities to folks who are in it for the long haul. For a centenarian, she said, it may not be the correct shopping strategy.
And there’s another thing about turning 100, she said. Other people want to make a fuss about it. Ratto doesn’t. Maybe because — with nearly 100,000 of them in the U. S. — the centenarian club is no longer that exclusive.
On her birthday, she plans to stay home and watch John Wayne. No party, no balloons. Her daughter, Judi, said she had planned to invite friends to drive by her mother’s house and to have her stand out front and wave. No thanks, said Ratto.
“If my daughter wants to stand in front of the house and wave to people, she can be my guest,” Ratto said. “I think it’s stupid.”
What will be worth celebrating, Ratto said, is the vaccine that will bring an end to the coronavirus pandemic. She plans to be around for that. She’s looking forward to getting one of the first shots.
“I’m waiting,” she said. “It’s not that hard being patient. I don’t have a lot else to do.”