When Mary Frawley says she saw Babe Ruth hit a home run in Boston in 1925, she’s not joking.
“I used to hear about him having home runs, but to see it like that was really exciting,” Frawley said Sunday.
The baseball game was just one of a flurry of memories she shared at her birthday party Sunday.
Frawley turned 106.
“I never thought this day would come,” Frawley said with a smile as she walked down the hallway of Quincy Place Retirement Living, where she lives.
The middle child of 11, Frawley grew up in a small town in Nova Scotia where she and her siblings hunted and fished and picked 10-quart pails of blueberries to sell for spending money. The family lived in the hotel her parents ran, and the kids cooked and cleaned for hotel guests.
One of those guests was an American engineer named George Vernon Becker. He’d come to help fix the local power plant and took a liking to Frawley.
“He turned out to be my husband,” she said.
After a two-year romance, the two went off quietly to Staten Island, N.Y., where they eloped one Saturday. They drove a Model T Ford to Denver, where Becker took a job with the Bureau of Reclamation.
The job lasted 30 years, and the couple never left.
They raised two daughters, Rachel Arkin, 70, and Carol Helfer, 66, who both came Sunday to celebrate their mother’s birthday.
The two had slightly different theories about their mother’s secret to a long life.
Arkin cited the copious amounts of blueberries her mother ate as a child and the natural fluoride in her drinking water. Frawley has never had a cavity.
Helfer said it’s her mother’s easy-going attitude. She recalled one day when her mother asked her what “this stress was that everyone was talking about.”
It’s not that her life has been without stressful events. Becker developed Alzheimer’s disease, and Frawley visited him daily before he died in 1979. She had a brain tumor removed at age 75 and a related follow-up operation at 102.
Frawley remarried when she was 83. She and Joe Frawley were married 11 years before he passed away.
Frawley has advice for young people.
“Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Help others all you can. Do for others as you wish others to do for you.”
Staff writer Michelle Wallar can be reached at 303-820-1201 or mwallar@denverpost.com.
