February 2, 2006

By Diane Chiddister

Jeanette Drake celebrated her 100th birthday at a party at the Senior Center.

On Friday, Jan. 20, longtime local resident Jeannette Drake turned 100.

Although Drake says she has no secret for her longevity, an hour in her company suggests that feistiness, a sense of humor, a love of life and the spunk to place a red bow in her snowy white hair must have something to do with it.

And it helps never to get sick. Just recently, she said, a friend asked who her doctor is.

“I said I don’t have one because there’s nothing wrong with me,” she said.

On Jan. 19 Drake was feted with a birthday party at the Yellow Springs Senior Center. The room was filled with well-wishers, evidence of her many longtime friends.

Ruth Ricket said she has been friends with Drake for more than 50 years.

“She’s a pretty sharp lady with an optimistic attitude toward life,” Ricket said.

While Drake has long said she plans to live to be 102, she has recently revised her forecast, her friend said. “Now she says she might live to be 114,” Ricket said.

If anyone can reach 114, it might be Jeannette Drake. More than anything, said Rodney Bean, the director of the Senior Center, Drake seems to enjoy her life and find pleasure in small things.

“She’s always got a chuckle, always sees what’s amusing in even the littlest of things,” he said. “She always has a twinkle in her eye.”

What makes her happiest, Drake said, is being her own boss. “I think” she said, “that I’ve lived this long because I do things my way.”

The world was a different place in 1923 when Drake came to Yellow Springs from Meadville, Pa., to attend Antioch College. She chose Antioch because her aunt had met the college’s president, Arthur Morgan, in Europe, Drake said, and “thought his ideas were wonderful.”

In her first job, as a proofreader, Drake was paid $19 per week, making her “one of the highest-paid students,” she said. And when she went to Europe in the summers to travel, she took along her book by Arthur Frommer, Europe on $3 a day.

She always loved travel, she said. “I’m a wanderer. If anyone says, ‘Let’s go,’ I’ll go,” she said. “Lately, it hasn’t been $3 a day.”

Drake met her husband, Jack, at Antioch, and after college she worked for Antioch for many years while her husband farmed and managed a grain business.

Jack Drake has been gone a long time, but Jeannette Drake continues to live on the farm. As much as anything, she takes great pleasure in simply gazing out the window.

“I love this farm,” she said. “I love every inch of this grass.”

Of course, there’s also the pleasure Drake takes in having proved her mother-in-law wrong. When she and Jack became caretakers of the family farm in 1927, her mother-in-law had a fit, Drake said.

“She said I was a city girl and would make a terrible farmer’s wife,” Drake said.

Proving people wrong seems to be something Jeannette Drake does again and again. However well-meaning they are, people are forever giving her advice on where to live, how to eat and all manner of things, she said. And she’s figured out a response that never fails to, well, shut them up.

“I look them in the eye and say, ‘How old are you?’” she said.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com