HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY, BARBARA MULHERN!!

It’s not unusual these days to celebrate the birthdays of friends and relatives who are entering the decade of octogenarians. In point of fact, a baby born in this country today is fully expected to reach the age of eighty, and while it is definitely a pleasing milestone birthday, it is less of an “achievement” than it was half or even a quarter of a century ago. While the same cannot be said of nonagenarians—YET—there over two million Americans today who are in their nineties and their numbers are increasing. Each of my parents died just a few months shy of their ninetieth birthdays, and I felt they were robbed of a celebration they had nearly earned. And then there are those on the top rung of the ladder—the centenarians. Until last year, the closest I had come to engaging with a centenarian was some thirty-one years ago, when I was tickled pink to take a picture of my six-month-old daughter in the arms of Mrs. Swain, a family friend’s mother who was celebrating her 101st birthday.

That changed a little over a year ago, at a picnic on the grounds of the Glimmerglass Festival campus in Cooperstown, New York, when I found myself sitting next to a fellow opera lover and picnicker. “Hello,” she said, as she held a glass of white wine in one hand and a toast point spread with foie gras in the other, “I’m Barbara Mulhern.” A little bird had let me in on the secret that my dinner companion was ninety-nine years old, and I had been prepared to meet a fragile woman of small stature, with a dowager’s hump and a cane, or maybe a walker. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Barbara was the picture of robust health and could have passed easily for twenty-five years younger. In short order, I learned that she drove her own car to the grocery store, was partial to a Scotch—her favorite being “Isle of Jura”—and enjoyed throwing dinner parties that she cooked herself.

When a month later, I received a thank you note from her for some books I’d sent her way, I was astonished at the beauty of her penmanship—her small print was straight and strong, and her grammar and punctuation perfect. The logo above her name was an artistic rendering of the golf cart she tools around in when hopping from one cocktail party to another over the rolling hills of Cooperstown. The six degrees of separation emerged when Barbara, after reading one of my books, sent me an email to let me know that the doctor who had been so influential in my achieving pregnancy at the age of 45 had grown up in the house next to hers in New Jersey and was her son’s childhood playmate.

Barbara was gracious enough to allow me to interview her a few months ago, and what struck me most was her humility and honesty. She found nothing extraordinary about her life or her achievement of genuine longevity. Born in New York City while her father was a resident at Bellevue Hospital, she recalled, with her prodigious memory, when the family moved to Cooperstown—she was not more than four years old at the time—and her father began his medical practice at Bassett Hospital. The Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932, when Barbara was just seven years old, is seared in her memory. Inspired by the Episcopal nuns who taught her in elementary school, Barbara became an avid reader and as she entered her teenage years in the mid to late 1930s, she devoured the Weekly Reader, a publication that allowed school-age children to learn world affairs—she followed the rise of Hitler and the social upheaval in Europe with great concern. When the U.S. entered the war, both her father and her brother were called to duty and fortunately returned home safely.

Smith College was Barbara’s destiny, as it had been for her grandmother and her mother. Marriage at the age of twenty-four to an Irish Catholic lawyer, Arthur Mulhern, in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, was the start of a new and joyous life. She reveled in her large family of six children. When I asked about some of her favorite memories and adventures as a mother, Barbara had her answer in a heartbeat. “I have driven across the U.S. five times.” She went on to explain that she and Art, with all six children (and no nanny) in tow, had driven across the country one summer in an RV. After time exploring the far western U.S., when it was time to drive back east, Art was needed back at his law practice, and it fell to Barbara to make the 3000-mile return journey as the solo driver. The experience must have been both psychically and physically rewarding, as she chose to repeat it again and again, including three times alone. Long after her children were out of the house and out of college, she became a licensed ski instructor, at the age of seventy, and carried on in that role into her late 80’s.

In 1986, she returned to her childhood hometown of Cooperstown and threw herself into supporting the Glimmerglass Opera (now Glimmerglass Festival.) When a fire destroyed the organization’s records, her monumental brain became an invaluable asset, as she re-assembled from memory the organization’s donor base data.

When I asked Barbara to capsulize her life, she said simply, “I feel blessed. I am an optimist. All my children are alive and well.” Did she have a secret to her longevity? “No. I don’t know why I’ve lived so long.” There was a pause and she said, “I did drink a lot of martinis and I still drink wine.”  Was she on medications? “Not one.” What has sustained her through her long and active life? “The values I learned in childhood: a passion for reading, good manners, a love of learning and an intellectual curiosity.” She has lost none of those cardinal virtues as she reaches the one hundred year mark. What does she think of the world today? “It is tragic to see the world in such turmoil.”