'I live every day': Lake Alfred woman still sparkles as she reaches 107th birthday
The pebble-coated house on a dirt road overlooking Lake Haines presents a portal to the distant past.
The house itself, 99 years old and rich in period details, is evocative enough. It is the house’s occupant, though, who transports a visitor backward by a century.
Sitting in her home of 76 years, Lenore “Gundy” Costello vividly evokes an era when horses pulled carriages and plows, family farming still prevailed in the United States and children in public schools studied Latin.
Costello, who turns 107 on Sunday, has personal memories of events most Americans know only from history books: the stock market crash of 1929, Prohibition, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats and the attack on Pearl Harbor. As she speaks in extended and detailed anecdotes, Costello displays recall and mental acuity that many people decades younger would struggle to match.
She lists the crops her father grew on the family farm in Ohio. She names the boy who beat her out for valedictorian of her high school. She recites the prices of items available in the Great Depression.
Costello says she is the oldest resident of Lake Alfred, and she must rank among the oldest in Polk County.
“Imagine the things she's seen in her lifetime — you know, different technology and the changes that the country's gone through and the world,” Lake Alfred Mayor Nancy Z. Daley says. “It's just amazing.”
Costello still lives by herself in the two-story house and still uses the stairs, though her doctor has warned her not to do so when she is alone. She stopped driving at age 100 and began using a rolling walker two years ago. The petite, white-haired woman attends church weekly and often dines out with friends or family.
The past two years, friends arranged a strenuous array of birthday activities, and both times Costello wound up in the hospital afterward. She plans a more relaxed celebration this year, merely having lunch with friends after church.
Asked how she remains so active well past age 100, Costello ponders and replies, “I think a lot of people give up too soon. If you’re going to be here, you might as well enjoy it” — punctuating the statement with a satisfied cackle.
Does Costello think about how much time she has left to enjoy life?
“No, but I live every day. I'm not going to stop living.”
Upbringing on Ohio farm
Costello was born on Nov. 12, 1916, third among five girls, in the same room where her grandfather had been born in Sycamore, Ohio. The college moniker “Gundy” derives from her family name, Van Gundia.
With no boys in the family, her father, Harrison Van Gundia, relied on Gundy and her sisters to handle chores on the 120-acre farm in western Ohio — shucking wheat, husking corn and making hay.
Gundy did not milk the farm’s 12 Jersey cows, but one of her sisters did. The sisters rode a horse named Prince to deliver milk to neighbors before school, earning money for the family. Costello also recalls driving Prince as the horse plowed fields for the corn and wheat crops. The family also raised sheep and sheared them for wool.
Costello says the family did not suffer during the Great Depression because the farm generated all the food they needed. Her father maintained two gardens — one for the family and another, situated at the edge of farm, whose crops needy residents were welcome to pick.
“As I think about it, years later, it wasn't so bad,” Costello says of the Depression era. “We were taught how to discipline our money, and, of course, things were relative, too. I could buy a nice pair of shoes for $3.98. And gas was 11 cents a gallon.”
Costello earned a one-year scholarship to Heidelberg University, where she also joined a youth work program established by Roosevelt to cover her expenses. She recalls initially earning 11 cents an hour at a Woolworth five-and-dime store on the way to a degree in sociology and biology.
Soon after graduating from college, Costello landed a job as executive director for the American Red Cross in Wyandot County, Ohio. In that role, she met her future husband, George Costello, who was on the organization’s national staff.
Before they married, the Red Cross sent George on a mission to the Philippines. Unbeknownst to Gundy, George began traveling home and stopped at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 6, 1941, departing at 4 p.m. the day before the surprise attack. With the country at war, Costello ramped up activities for her Red Cross unit. Among other efforts, she and other women knitted surgical dressings and bathrobes for donation to veterans’ hospitals.
George and Gundy married on December 19, 1942, and promptly began driving through the night to Winter Haven, George’s hometown.
“And it was snowing,” Gundy said sourly. “It was not a very good night. Anybody that chose December for a wedding was crazy.”
Just before V-J Day in 1945, the Red Cross again sent George to the Philippines to help with reconstruction, an assignment that lasted 15 months. Though that left Gundy alone in a new home, she eschews any self-pity, noting that many other war brides endured similar fates.
After George’s return, the couple left Winter Haven for the house in Lake Alfred, buying from the family that had built it in 1924. The distinctive house contains four bedrooms, though the Costellos had no children. George would later serve as city manager of Lake Alfred for eight years.
In 1948, Gundy was selected as one of a dozen background swimmers for the Esther Williams movie “On an Island with You,” shot at Cypress Gardens in Winter Haven and also featuring Ricardo Montalban and Jimmy Durante.
Legacy with Girl Scouts
Winter Haven High School recruited Gundy to fill in for a biology teacher who had gone into the service, and she continued teaching as a substitute for five years before starting her “real” career, one that would gain her national prominence.
In 1951, the president of the Lake Ridge Girl Scout Council asked Costello to take a temporary position as executive director until the group could find a permanent leader. Though she had not participated in Girl Scouts as a youth, she accepted the offer and wound up leading the group for 25 years.
Among her many accomplishments with the Girl Scouts, Gundy seems proudest of her lead role in creating Camp Wildwood, a nearly 600-acre property in Sumter County. She revels in describing how she acquired the original 120 acres and repeatedly expanded the camp. The tale involves assistance from Henry "Bert" Schulz, a pioneer in citrus oils, and John A. Snively, a citrus titan, and a serendipitous bequeathal.
Costello recalls gaining financial support from the late Publix founder George W. Jenkins and the late citrus magnate Ben Hill Griffin III, who were impressed by her detailed plans for using their donations.
Costello also developed a strategy, “the greening of Sumter County” (referring to the uniform color) for establishing new Girl Scout troops in the racially mixed region. One of her former Scouts, Kathy Brinton of Winter Haven, recalls that Gundy faced resistance when she took a group that included Black girls to camp in the Ocala National Forest, but she insisted that the troop would not only camp in the public space but also visit a local museum the next day.
Brinton says Costello was responsible for integrating the Girl Scouts in the area, and the Girl Scouts of West Central Florida recently revived her "greening" plan to boost participation.
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Gundy landed a grant to support the Sumter County initiative from Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the daughter of President Richard Nixon. The two women later met at Walt Disney World and rode together on Cinderella’s coach in the Main Street Parade, Brinton says.
Following Costello’s retirement in 1976, the Girl Scouts renamed a lake at Camp Wildwood in her honor — Lake Lenore (she would have preferred "Lake Gundy"). A painting of the lake hangs on a wall in her home. Costello said that owners of The Villages, the city-sized senior community that sprawls across three counties, have offered millions to buy Camp Wildwood, but the Girls Scouts have declined.
Among the many activities offered at the heavily wooded camp is an equestrian program with about 30 horses.
The day after her retirement, Costello arose and hurled her alarm clock across the room. Yet she has remained involved with Girl Scouts since then, sometimes attending national conventions. When the organization held its annual gathering this year at Walt Disney World Resort, officials honored Costello as the oldest living Girl Scout in the country.
“I'm just the oldest of everything,” she says.
For more than a decade, Gundy and George regularly led coed groups of local teenagers, dubbed "the Wayfarers," on six-week camping excursions through Europe. Brinton took part in one such trek, starting in Luxembourg and finishing in Switzerland.
Gundy also regularly shepherded Girl Scout groups on four-day backpacking trips along the Appalachian Trail in Maine. She took girls to the British West Indies to teach swimming to locals following a ferry accident in 1970s that claimed 233 lives. Two daughters of a local woman with whom Costello worked in the West Indies visited her in Lake Alfred last summer.
Gundy served for years as Florida president of the American Camping Association, a position in which she visited Puerto Rico and Switzerland to inspect camps there. She and George spent so much time in tents that she once asked him why they even bothered to own a house.
In 1960, the Costellos spent three months traveling through Europe with future Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick, a Winter Haven native, and his wife, Joanne. George decided to buy a Volkswagen camper for the trip, and he had it shipped home afterward.
More than 30 years later, George pined for a return to Switzerland, but Gundy worried they didn’t have the money available for such a venture. George had ceased driving at that point, and Gundy marched him to the garage to point out how they could pay for the trip — by selling the camper. George reluctantly agreed and found a man in Iowa to buy the vintage vehicle.
Gundy displays a model of a VW camper on a table in her extremely tidy home, along with water buffalo figurines George brought back from the Philippines.
'Always has a smile'
Following George’s death in 1997, Gundy remained as active as ever. Having hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail many times, at age 90 she trekked up Mount Le Conte in Tennessee, at 6,593 feet the third-highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. On her 100th birthday, she paddled a canoe around Lake Elbert in Winter Haven.
Gundy has finally slowed a bit the past two years, but she remains independent and self-sufficient. She says her neighbors keep an eye on her, and one calls every morning to make sure she is all right, as does a niece. She also receives visits from medical helpers.
Costello has broken both hips, an ankle and a wrist, yet she says she has not developed any arthritis.
Mementos of her travels and her Girl Scouts experience abound in the bright, spacious house. A large, knitted display of the Girl Scouts symbol from 1976 hangs on a wall, near a framed needlepoint declaring, “Make new friends; but keep the old. The new are silver, the old are gold,” lines from a song Girl Scouts traditionally sing in round style.
A framed proclamation from the city of Lake Alfred, signed by Daley, the mayor, in honor of Costello’s 105 birthday, sits on a table in the living room. Daley says the city threw a party for Costello after the meeting at which she received the proclamation.
“She wore the tiara and the banner, and she was the party girl and it was really heartwarming,” Daley says. “She always has a smile on her face. She's just the sweetest person, and she's just great to talk to.”
Gundy offhandedly discloses that she is now blind in one eye, yet she retains her lifelong habit of reading hungrily. On a recent afternoon, a copy of “The Imperial Cruise,” a history of American policy in the Pacific Ocean under President Theodore Roosevelt, sat on a chair. Costello said she has learned much about World War II from another book and just completed one about hiking the Appalachian Trail. She also reads books of Christian inspiration but avoids “those cheap novel things.”
An older sister taught Gundy to knit when she was 12, and she can’t even guess how many garments she has made since then. These days, she fashions caps for chemotherapy patients at Winter Haven Hospital, sitting in her favorite chair and twisting yarn as she watches Tampa Bay Rays baseball games or Duke University basketball games on TV. Two baskets overflowing with yarn in an array of colors sat beside her chair.
“I might have to take some of that to heaven,” she says, noting the optimistic supply.
Costello’s sister, Minette Hull, just turned 105 and still lives in Ohio. But two of her other sisters died of cancer in their 50s. Does she have an explanation for her uncommon longevity?
“I always exercised — always, climbing mountains,” she says, “and my dad didn't have a car for years until I was out of college, and I walked where I wanted to go. I think people are not exercising now. They're playing with their telephones.”
Gundy, who does not own a mobile phone, adds that she ate healthful, organic food as a child living on a farm.
A member at Beymer Church in Winter Haven for decades, she admits that on some Sunday mornings she is tempted to remain in bed.
“But then I go get dressed, and I go, and I get home and I'm fine,” she says. “So I make myself do things.”
She adds with a laugh: “I always say to myself, ‘You can die in church as well as you can die at home. Or you can die at the restaurant as well as you could die at home.’ ”
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Lake Alfred woman remains active, independent as she reaches 107
