Mark Woods: On 100th birthday, she got her wish — a motorcycle ride

Family and friends asked Mary Litwhiler what she wanted for her 100th birthday.

“I don’t want anything,” she said.

When they said they had to do something for such a momentous birthday, she thought about it and said all she really wanted was to spend some time with family. Watch the great-grandkids swim in the pool. Eat a piece of pizza.

“How about skydiving?” someone at church suggested.

“I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy,” she said.

She mentioned that maybe she would like to go for a motorcycle ride. It had been decades since she had been on a motorcycle. But she still has fond memories, the kind that end up as fading color photos in an old scrapbook, reminders of when you were younger, when everyone was younger.

Her two sons, David and Lance, owned motorcycles. She remembers hopping on the back, wrapping her arms around their waists and going for a ride.

“Maybe I could go for a motorcycle ride again,” she said.

Her family told her they’d throw a party on her birthday. A pool party, with pizza and cake.

They didn’t tell her they arranged for a motorcycle ride.

Lance and his wife, Sheila, own Open Road Leathers, a motorcycle accessories shop on Beach Boulevard. They live in the Beachwood area, just north of Beach Boulevard. “Grammy,” as they call Lance’s mother, still lives on her own, in her home a few blocks away.

One of their neighbors is Peggy Bourne.

Bourne owns a 2017 Harley Tri-Glide, a three-wheled motorcycle. When she arrived at the party, they told Grammy she was going for a ride.

Lance put a helmet on his mother. She hopped on the back of Bourne’s bike, grinning and waving as they went for a ride through the neighborhood.

“It was wonderful,” Mary Litwhiler said. “I loved it.”

Living to be 100

That’s the gimmicky part of the story: Local woman goes for motorcycle ride on her 100th birthday.

But after sitting at the table in Mary Litwhiler’s house, hearing more about her life up to this point — and how she lives at age 100 — it made me think about how Jacksonville recently became the latest city to kick off a Blue Zones Project.

If you haven’t heard of Blue Zones, the organization grew out of demographic work identifying places all over the world with the highest concentration of centenarians. They called them blue zones. And demographers and researchers found that while these areas were quite different in many ways, the people living in them had shared lifestyle habits — some related to food, but even more tied to activity and interaction.

Move naturally. Live with a sense of purpose. Shed stress. Belong to groups. Remain connected to friends and family — particularly between generations of family.

To make it to 100, the Blue Zones website says, you have to have “won the genetic lottery.” But the idea is that if places replicate these areas and their habits, people anywhere can live longer, healthier and happier.

As an area, Jacksonville still has a long way to go. But — back to Mary Litwhiler — she was checking off many of the blue zone boxes long before such a project existed.

Walking, talking and blueberries

She walks every day, often twice a day, waving to neighbors and stopping to talk.

When her daughter–in-law takes her grocery shopping on Thursdays — particularly when they used to go to a Publix where all the staff knew Grammy — Sheila Litwhiler knows that the process, full of hugs and hellos, can take a while.

One frequent purchase: blueberries.

Her daughter-in-law says with a laugh that blueberries might be the secret to Grammy’s longevity.

“She has them every morning with breakfast,” Sheila Litwhiler said.

“Sometimes you can get three boxes for $10,” Mary Litwhiler adds. “The nice, big berries. So I’ll always get three boxes, eat from one, wash the berries in the other ones, dry them off real good, and put them in the freezer.”

What’s the old joke about being at an age where you don’t buy green bananas anymore, for fear you won’t by around by the time they’re ripe? At age 100, Grammy is buying ripe blueberries and freezing them for the future.

She still does her own cooking and cleaning. She only recently stopped mowing the lawn.

At 100, she’s talking about learning new things. A neighbor gave her a ukulele and she’d like to take lessons at the senior center.

Her husband, Edward, died six years ago. He was 95. They had been married 73 years.

“And he was the best man on the earth,” she said. “In all the years we were married, I can’t remember him saying one unkind word to me.”

They both grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He served in the Army in World War II. Mary remembers getting letters from him while he was in Europe. Paper was so scarce, sometimes he wrote on toilet paper. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, came home and almost never talked about it.

There was one time when, late in his life, someone recorded his oral history for the Library of Congress. Even then, he was reluctant, maybe because some of his memories involved recovering bodies from the beaches of Normandy.

He spent much of his life as a vocational technical teacher. Mary was a nurse.

They retired to Melbourne, Florida. For about 25 years, they square danced, traveling to Europe several times for events. They also had an Airstream travel trailer and, along with other Airstream owners, made treks to everywhere from Canada to Mexico.

When a hurricane hit their mobile home park in Melbourne, destroying some of their neighbor’s homes, they moved to Jacksonville — joining the family that already was here.

She goes to St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church – and being a part of some type of community group is something else that Blue Zone leaders found to be a common denominator for centenarians.

She also might be someone who won that “genetic lottery.”

She has one sister who is 97 and another that is 99 — and still drives.

Mary Litwhiler never liked driving. So she doesn’t miss that. At 100, going for a motorcycle ride was plenty.

And while she told her family she didn’t want any birthday gifts, they did give her a few, including a t-shirt says “Made in 1923” and a sign with some lists from her birth year. (Gas cost 14 cents a gallon. The Canton Bulldogs were NFL champions. Celebrity births included Hank Williams, Estelle Getty, Rocky Marciano, Chuck Yaeger and, now 99 years old, Bob Barker.)

While those gifts are about celebrating making it to 100 by thinking about yesterday, she also got something that, like frozen blueberries, is more about tomorrow.

A new pair of walking shoes.

mwoods@jacksonville.com

(904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville woman celebrates 100th birthday with motorcycle ride