C R Y D E R P O I N T 10 JUNE ‘DEAR ROSE’ AT AGE 102, SHE HAS A JOB, SWIMS, WALKS THE STAIRS BY MICHAEL SHAIN “Look,” says Rose Girone, pointing to the letter she got a few weeks ago. “See what that says? Now I am on a first-name basis with the President of the United States.” The letter was indeed from President Obama – signed not only by him but First Lady Michelle, too – and it began: “Dear Rose.” “Not bad,” says Rose, who – not to complain or anything -- turned 102 way back in January. Actually, the President apologized in the letter for his lateness– “Happy belated 102nd birthday,” it reads – but Rose figures he had other things on his mind. The President doesn’t know what he missed. Born in Poland in 1912, raised in Hamburg until the war and her religion drove her out, Rose is a quirk of nature. She doesn’t own a walker or cane – in fact, takes the stairs to her fourth floor apartment when the elevator is on the fritz. She hears almost perfectly, does her own cooking and cleaning and still swims. And she has a job. That’s right, a job. On Tuesdays, Roses teaches in Port Washington at The Knitting Place. Four or five students during a full work day, 10 am to 4. The owner worked for Rose when she owned a knitting store in Forest Hills. Rose drove until age 96, when a truck plowed into her car making a left-hand turn somewhere on Long Island. The trucker got so shook up, he told cops at the scene that the whole thing was his fault. “But after that, the kids took away the car, no more driving,” she says. The secret to her longevity? “Lots of chocolate.” Dark chocolate or milk? “I eat every kind of chocolate,” Rose says. “When I was a kid, I bought the cheapest chocolate you could buy, thinking I could break myself of the habit. Never happened.” The only concession to quality she makes is that fancy chocolate tends to go quicker. A friend brought back big box of the imported Belgian stuff few weeks ago, she says. “Know how long it lasted?” Rose asks. “Two days. I ate them instead of dinner. Chocolate made me live this long.” The chocolate thing is a fun answer for people who ask about her secret. But you could argue that Rose was spared the usual trials of old age for another reason. Perhaps it is because a higher power figured Rose had had enough trouble in the first half of her life. In 1938, Rose, her husband and their six-month old daughter, Reha, fled Germany for Shanghai, China – one of the only places in the world in those days willing to take Jewish refugee. The Japanese, who had occupied the city a few years earlier, were the unlikely rescuers --- if you could call them that -- of 20,000 Jews from Europe who had nowhere else to run. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese herded the Jews of Shanghai into a run-down district on the city’s north side. She, her daughter and husband lived in a bathroom -- the tub and toilet pulled out -- for the remainder of the war. The turning point for Rose came in the chaotic months after the Japanese surrender when the father of her best friend in the building noticed Rose’s gift for knitting. Throughout the war, she’d turned out sweaters and jackets for her daughter, shawls, tops, comforters for friends. Like cars coming off the assembly line. “You should go into business,” he told her. “I told him I knew nothing about business. So he offered me a deal: ‘You teach my daughter to knit and I’ll teach you everything about business.’” By the time her U.S. visa came through in 1947, Rose had built up a stash of $80. “I was rich!” she recalls. By then, $10 was all China would permit the émigrés to take out of the country. “So I knitted the money into the buttons on a sweater,” says Rose. “After all the work I’d done, I was not going to leave my money behind.” In New York, after years of working in other people’s yarn stores, she opened her own place, Rose’s Knitting Studio, in Forest Hills. She remarried and discovered Cryder Point by accident in 1968 after giving a ride home to a stranded customer who lived here. “I thought it was a beautiful place from the moment I saw it,” she says. “The view, the gardens, I never wanted to move.” 10 CRYDER POINT COURIER | JUNE 2014 | WWW.QUEENSCOURIER.COM Rose Girone and the letter she got from President Obama. (Inset) Rose and daughter Reha on the ship to Shanghai, 1938.
CP062014
To see the actual publication please follow the link above