Rochester, New York - When Frieda Neubert walks into the grocery store she garners attention. She pushes her cart with quick calculated steps. Her petite physique, keen gaze, and snow white hair bring immediate interest from other shoppers. Her shopping activity has become a bi-weekly ritual, especially that Neubert has shopped at the same store for some 50 years. Neubert has witnessed the many changes the store has undergone. Not only that, she has seen the growth and development of this city.
Neubert will turn 103 this year.
Unlike other centenarians, Neubert still does her own shopping; cooks her own meals; reads a chapter of a book for an hour every day; volunteers weekly at her church; and joins her friends for lunch at the Wellness Center on Fridays.
Born on Dec. 23, 1904 in the Province of Persia, Germany, Neubert is the youngest of eight children.
“There is no such place as the Province of Persia anymore. The place was given to Poland after World War II. I don’t know the new name of my birthplace,” Neubert said.
Her parents were both farmers. Neubert remembers the quiet life they lived on their farm when she was a little girl.
“My three sisters and I had to milk the cows everyday. We had 15 cows, four horses and pigs. The horses were used to plow the fields. There were no machines then so we had to do it manually. The pigs were fattened and sold at the market,” she recalls.
She said milking the cows was her favorite activity. “Sup, sap, surl! Pull the teats! I was an expert in that. However, 20 years ago, when I tried it again I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t have the strength in my hands,” she said.
ON A HONEYMOON, BUT NEVER WENT HOME
Neubert said her husband, Ernst, and she came to America in 1927, a year after they were married.
“We came here for our honeymoon and I’m still here,” she said jokingly. “We came to Rochester as there were no jobs in Germany because of the war. My brother was part of a group of Germans who were the first to immigrate to America.”
She said the day after their arrival in Rochester, she and her husband enrolled in a night class to study English.
“The teacher would point at an object and say, ‘This is a window’ and we’d say the word ‘window.’ That’s how we learned to speak the English language,” she said, though she has never lost that thick German accent.
Learning the English language was also their tool in obtaining jobs. Her husband was a truck driver for a company and used to be away for two to three weeks at a time. He traveled all over the US delivering goods.
“I stayed home and took care of our house. I did whatever a wife should do. However, in 1929 Depression came in America so I had to get a job. I worked in a nurses’ dormitory, Helen Wood Hall, at Strong Memorial Hospital. The Rochester of then used to be mainly farmlands,” she said.
When their two children, a boy and a girl, were born she stayed at home. Her husband built a house for them at Kiniry Drive in 1941. He also designed their furniture which Neubert still has in her apartment.
“My husband also used to make furniture for Hayden Company. There is no such company now but the furniture they sold was beautiful,” she said.
“My husband died of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 80. I am alone now for 28 years, but I have enjoyed it. Someone once said to me, ‘When my husband died I died, too.’ But I said within me, ‘When my husband died I began to live,’” she said.
She said men years ago were the boss of the family. Women were just part of the family. Husbands then would never do household chores.
“The best years in my life were in my 80s. I felt free,” she said.
SURVIVOR
Neubert, a grandmother of five and great-grandmother of 15, cannot exactly ascertain if good genes played a role for her to reach such an age. But she said two of her sisters lived into their 90s. However, she disclosed that one of her brothers died in World War II while another died of stomach cancer.
“One of my sisters died in the concentration camp,” she lamented.
She said she and her brother were two of the few people who did not get sick when the Spanish Flu hit the entire world in 1918. The influenza pandemic, records say, killed more than 40 million people.
“I was immune to the disease. We took care of the sick people,” she said. “Even now, I seldom get sick. I don’t take prescription medicines except two ibuprofen tablets a day for my arthritis. And don’t forget the laxative, the prune juice.”
As far as she is concerned, there are no secrets to achieving a long life. She eats all kinds of food. She likes eating seafood, especially salmon, which she cannot fix in her apartment because its odor lingers and spreads to the other apartments.
She said people are amazed to learn that she has passed the hundred year mark. She wishes that people would not make such a big fuss about her age.
“Don’t think that reaching this age is a blessing because it is not. My hearing is very bad. My sight is not as good as it was a year ago. My digestive system cannot take raw meat anymore,” she said.
“She embarrasses me sometimes with her terrific memory. She remembers the things I said to her last time. She can name each of her great-grandchildren and tell each
of their birthdays,” says David Smith, 60, her friend and companion when she goes out to buy her groceries.
Smith said Neubert’s day to day activities are routine – Mondays she does her laundry, Tuesdays she gets her hair done, Wednesdays she exercises, Thursdays she does the church Scroll and Fridays she visits the Wellness Center to be with her other senior friends.
“On Saturdays I do Bible study.” Neubert said her favorite book in the Bible is the Psalms. “The Psalms have so much promise in it. You feel such contentment reading them. I like Psalms 121.”
“I believe God is never angry at us. One of the pastors I know once said, ‘If you knew the Bible you’d never go wrong.’ I said, ‘Pastor, isn’t the Bible written by man? Man has funny ideas. Maybe it is wrong what you are doing.’ He said, ‘It is inspired by God.’ And I said, ‘Don’t you think that God would tell man to go and kill other men?’ God will never tell you to do that. Just for your own advantage? No, that’s not my Christian belief,” she said.
That is why, she said, she has never believed the war in Germany. This belief was also shared by one of her brothers who ended up in the concentration camp. She was lucky that she was already in the US when WWII happened. However, she also experienced discrimination because of her lineage.
“When my son was small he ran to me when he went home and said, ‘Mommy, mommy, the boy across the street called me Nazi. What is a Nazi?’ Then I explained it to him. He said, ‘Why would he call me that? What do I have to do with that?’ I said, ‘Because he is ignorant,’” she said.
There was a time when the war was still going on, a man was saying that it is great in Germany, she got irritated and almost told the man to back to Germany. Also, there was a time when a young man who delivered chicken feed to their home had involved her with activities connected to Hitler. And an old man had kept on checking on her because of that.
“I told the young man, ‘Why don’t you go back to Germany and work with the Nazis if you knew they were doing right,’” she said.
LIFE GOES ON
At the present, her time is occupied with reading a book about the Vanderbilts, the family who once owned the Grand Central Station when she and her husband first came to the US.
“Everything in life has a purpose. Life is what you make it. It is up to you what your life will be like,” she said. “It’s like a job: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
She said she’s an American now. Though she doesn’t forget the past nor deny her German heritage, but she has put the past behind her now.
She doesn’t whine that she is all alone in her apartment. “So what? It is the way you accept it. Who cares? Then I’d make it on my own. I have so much to be thankful for. At my age I can take care of myself yet. I can step in a bathtub and take a shower on my own. That is so much to be thanked for, too,” she said cheerily.
She said she is happy to see her grandchildren grew up and are successful in their careers, one of whom is an obstetrician.
“He has five children and his brother once said to him, ‘Haven’t you found out how babies are made yet?’” she said.
She said she can’t really give any advice to anyone because everybody decides for themselves.
“The future is ours to make,” she said.
(Published in Sun.Star Bacolod May 24, 2007 Lifestyle Section)
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