At 105 She’s Fesity and Loveable

By ANNE WARD ERNST
September 14, 2005

Jean Grove doesn't much care about food in general but her eyes and smile grow wide when she talks about eating slices of raw onion. She and the onion have something in common. They both are full of punch and zest. From the time she was a toddler and was kidnapped to the time she got kicked out of high school and through the many years she was a nurse, this 105-year-old has looked for the flavor of life. She still does.

At the Forum at Rancho San Antonio where Grove lives, she's known by the staff and other residents as the "Candy Lady." She tools around the halls of the retirement community where she has lived for the past six years passing out hard candies she keeps in a bowl in the top basket of her walker.

Balls of yarn and an in-progress crocheted afghan fill the bottom basket. Taking out the afghan--about 2 by 21/2 feet in yellow, orange, red and green--Grove smoothes over the stitches with her hand and says: "It's not done well. I recognize that. I don't drop stitches though."

Macular degeneration has blurred Grove's vision, so her eyes are no longer as keen as her mind, but crocheting remains important to her.

"This is a lifesaver," she says. "I never just sit and do nothing."

Among the blankets, sweaters and scarves she has knitted or crocheted, she has lived long enough to have knitted socks "for the boys" in both world wars. Her family says she is a virtual knitting- and crocheting-machine.

"If you spend any time with her she'll knit you [an afghan]," says her eldest son Richard Grove, who is 75.

"She's probably made one for everyone here," he says, looking around at the 40 or so people who joined Grove for her birthday celebration on Aug. 29.

Many of those at the party are friends or family, and several were residents or staff members who agree that Grove is "amazing."

"It's embarrassing; she's sharper than all the staff," facility director Ken Fullmore says.

Grove is among more than 50,000 centenarians in the United States, which is less than two-tenths percent of the population, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

There's no telling if eating raw onions is a secret to longevity, and the question 'What is her secret to long life?' Grove says it's a question that stumps her every time.

She didn't smoke. She tried and didn't like it. She drank alcohol in moderation in her younger years. She can't point to any specific ingredients in her lifestyle that would sustain long life.

She is healthy and alert and requires little care from the staff.

"She's feisty," her son says.

When she was 90, Grove chased an intruder out of her Menlo Park home. She was still driving and chauffeured other senior citizens from the Little House Activity Center in Menlo Park to the grocery store and helped them shop. Reminiscing, Grove gives a quick shrug of her shoulders, wrinkles up her nose, grins and holds up two fingers--the number of years she drove without a valid driver's license.

Maybe that feisty spirit was fostered early in her life.

As a toddler in Thessalon, Canada, a small town on the north shore of Lake Huron, Grove was snatched her from under her mother's nose by a local Indian tribe.

It was 1902 and she and her parents lived above the small grocery store they owned, which her mother ran. The store mainly carried staples and goods such as moccasins that the Indians brought to sell--Grove remembers wearing nothing on her feet but moccasins until she was about 4 or 5 years old.

One day her mother caught a little Iroquois boy stealing from the store and turned him in to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who took him away. Grove later went missing. The night passed, and the toddler still was not home. Her parents suspected their daughter had been kidnapped by a nearby Iroquois tribe in retaliation for turning the boy to the Mounties.

Grove's mother told the Mounties of her suspicion.

"My mother told me she looked out the window and saw the Mountie coming down the street with this teeny little thing perched high up on the front of his horse. It was me," Grove says.

She had been bathed, fed and well-cared for, and because her mother and father considered many of the Indians friends, once she was returned her parents were not upset.

That was just the beginning. Grove says she was a "runaway child" and on a whim she would take off and go exploring.

"I don't know why I did it. I was a rebel," she says.

Rebelliousness got her kicked out of high school when she and a boy got caught--for the second time--climbing out a second-story window to eat lunch on the ledge. The principal sent them home. Her parents sent her away to a girl's college preparatory school.

A good Canadian, Grove played ice hockey in the winter. It was making the best of what they were given, she says of the cold temperatures and iced-over lakes and ponds in the Midwestern region. Summertime brought baseball and any other adventure she could uncover.

Grove is the fourth child of a mother who suffered several severe illnesses, and the only child who lived past infancy. She says she is nothing like her mother and very much like her father.

"I should have been a boy," she says.

Following her parents to California in her early 20s, Grove--who would work as a nurse into her 70s--practiced her profession in several places, eventually landing in San Diego. After a couple more moves, she met and married a newspaperman, and the couple wound up in San Diego.

During World War II she was responsible for one of the country's first infant care centers--for children of women who worked on government aircraft.

Outliving her husband by more than 40 years, Grove has had few health problems. Outside of bursitis in her shoulder, she takes no regular medications and has never regularly taken vitamins.

A teacher friend once asked Grove to come and speak to a class of fifth-graders who questioned Grove about her childhood. They sent her a basket of yarn as a thank-you gift. She was asked to return again recently but a rare upset stomach prevented her from going. The class sent her dozens of handmade decorated cards left blank inside because they were told she enjoyed writing to friends and family and she could use them for stationery.

"I write like an engineer, she writes like an English major," Richard says of his mother's beautiful handwriting.

Her handwriting is intact and so is her sharp sense of humor.

Grove refuses to admit her own intelligence, insisting she always thought she was "stupid."

"You are too sharp," daughter-in-law Ruth Grove says.

"Oh, you're just being nice," Grove says, waving her hand at the younger woman.

Then with a wink and a sideways glance, she teases: "You're trying to get my money away from me."