By Victor Greto
When Mary Maslar was 14 years old, her mother asked her to go upstairs and feed and change the family‟s latest child, Helen, all of 5 days old.
“I went upstairs with the bottle and picked her up to change her and she stiffened up,” Mary says. “I came back downstairs and she was dead.”
In a perfect world, Mary might have had 10 brothers and sisters. But for the family of illiterate Yugoslavian and Croatian immigrants who lived in Phoenixville, Pa. – where her father, Anthony Benjacek, worked in a steel mill and her mother, Elizabeth Zglvanik, was a midwife – she ended up with only three siblings. The remaining seven died in infancy.
Helen died more than 92 years and four generations ago. Mary would go on to have five children, who helped produce 18 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren: That‟s 54 if you‟re counting.
Now 106 and a half – and everyone seems to be counting – Mary Maslar lives out of a suitcase, staying for months at a time in the homes of the four of her five children who remain. She spent part of the holiday season with her granddaughter, Theresa Deakins, of Bear.
During the Saturday after New Year‟s, the house was filled with five generations.
“I liked all of my life,” Mary says, “even at 106. I get a lot of attention.”
But she has no retinas in her eyes, she says (she suffers from macular degeneration), no cartilage in her knees (she gets cortisone shots every three months) and she‟s getting progressively weaker. “I need help to get up from the chair. But most other things I help myself.”
Her husband died more than three decades ago. Her mouth is grim.
“One time I dreamt of him,” about six, seven years ago, she says. “I asked him, „What do you want?‟ He says, „I‟m waiting for you.‟ „I‟m not ready to come,‟ I told him.”
She‟s still not ready.
A few years later she dreamed she met a man with a gray beard and she asked him if she could talk to Jesus. The man left, came back, and told her Jesus wasn’t ready for her yet.
Mary herself sits at her granddaughter‟s dining room table, a walker nearby, determined to talk, to tell stories that she must have told dozens of times.
But before the stories, she‟ll talk about why she‟s been able to live so long.
“I don‟t drink, I don‟t smoke and I don‟t worry,” she says. The only medication she takes is for her thyroid. She‟s been taking vitamins for more than 53 years. But that‟s everything.
She gambles, a lot, and if there‟s a heaven, it‟s a bingo hall.
“It don‟t hurt anybody and it don‟t hurt me,” she says of her love of gambling and the casinos, especially Delaware Park and Dover Downs.
Time doesn’t move very fast. It doesn’t need to. “I don‟t think about it,” she says.
That‟s the secret, says her son, John, 82. “She doesn’t internalize stress.”
Mary‟s grandmother, grandfather and mother all lived into their 90s.
Her days are filled with playing cards, casino, church and TV (game shows, westerns and “Days of Our Lives,” which she has watched for nearly a half-century), and the hairdressers, at least once a week.
Although she is fed breakfast and dinner, she makes her own lunch, six “sandwiches,” three of cream cheese and three of peanut butter, each between two large Sun Chips.
Although she can no longer knit and crochet (her hands are curled and stiffened from arthritis) – she has made hundreds of table cloths and afghans – she still bakes, including her nut-roll poppy seed cakes.
She doesn’t like tasteless food.
“I like a lot of butter and a lot of fat,” she says. “I don‟t like noises, people screaming. If I don‟t like a person, I just ignore them.”
She takes cat naps, but is the first up in the morning, and one of the latest to go to bed.
Most of the people she has known are all dead.
“I miss people who are gone,” she says. “Sometimes.”
But when son John tells her he got a letter from a woman, now 96, who used to work with Mary when she was a waitress at the Crystal Restaurant in Reading, she lights up.
Let‟s just say Mary is in control. She seems to have always been in control.
Take, for example, back in 1918, when she was all of 12 and got mad at her fourth-grade teacher for leaving the schoolhouse windows open when it was cold. The kids weren’t allowed to wear sweaters, but the teacher wore two of them.
“I raised my hand and told the teacher I wanted to go to the bathroom, which was outside,” she says. So Mary grabbed her coat and didn’t come back to school for a week. When she returned, she told the principal, who promptly told the teacher to close the windows.
But Mary had made up her mind. She stopped going to school, and even had the priest tell an employer she was 14.
“Weren’t your parents mad?”
“I never told them,” she says. They did find out – Mary had money now – and she got a slap. But she never went back to school.
She had actually run errands for neighbors at the age of 10 to earn a little money, but really started working when she left school, first at a hosiery mill, then at a box factory.
It was at the box factory where she became traumatized for seemingly the one and only time in her life, when the boss‟s son asked her to put her hands out and he placed five new-born mice in them.
She still hasn’t gotten over that.
The box factory was in nearby Reading, Pa.; she rode to work with two other girls on a motorcycle with a sidecar. Even in the snow and rain.
She moved to Reading in 1924, where she met her future husband, John, when they were both 18 (“I‟m 10 days older,” she says).
His church‟s baseball team was playing her church‟s baseball team, and he walked up to her and asked if she wanted a drink.
She said no and made fun of his hat – “The top was pushed in. It looked like a frying pan.”
But the following Halloween they made a date, and he was the first boy to ever kiss her.
Not that others hadn’t tried.
Before she moved to Reading, her father bought her a tabletop Victrola, and after church they would play records and she danced. And there were spin-the-bottle games, but she would allow no one to kiss her until John.
Three years later – the year Charles Lindbergh flew solo over the Atlantic – they married, but then embarked on what Mary calls the hardest time of her long life, living through the Great Depression.
“We had $100 in the bank and it closed in 1929,” she says. “We kept our jobs, paid the rent, but there was nothing left over.”
She gave birth to her first child, William, that first year of the Crash; others followed in 1930 (John), 1935 (Rita) and 1940 (Bobby).
She worked off and on and part-time as she raised her kids, and during World War II she worked in a clothing factory.
But she wasn’t done giving birth: At 46, in 1952, she gave birth to her final child, Philip; that same year, her first granddaughter was born to her son John, also named Mary Maslar.
It was her son John who was in the Air Force and who eventually moved to Delaware when he was transferred to Dover Air Force Base in the early 1950s. He now lives in Millsboro.
She worked as a waitress at the Crystal Restaurant in Reading from 1953 until she was 70, in 1976.
She still loves going to Mass, especially at St. Margaret of Scotland in Glasgow, where she has told the pastor that he can‟t be transferred anywhere else “until you bury me.”
She loves Mass. When she‟s not in church, she watches it on TV every day. “It gives me satisfaction,” she says.
What‟s the greatest problem or problems about American society today?
“Too much freedom and too many guns,” she says quickly.
By freedom, she says she means the recent parental trend toward letting children get away with and do things they shouldn’t.
“They need to tell their kids no.”
It was not like that back in her day, not with her kids, who recall kneeling in the corner when they were bad or writing 100 times what they shouldn’t have been doing.
“If I couldn’t read it, I‟d have them write it 500 times,” Mary says.
After her visit with Theresa and John, she plans on traveling to Oklahoma to stay with her youngest son, Philip, for a couple of months.
“It doesn’t matter where she is,” son John says. “She likes wherever she‟s at.”