Bryan Pace for New York Daily News
Ann Morofsky has seen a lot of changes in Brooklyn in her 101 years.
She’s one tough birthday girl.
Fiery Brooklynite Ann Morofsky turned 101 on Wednesday, but she’s not going to tell just any idiot what that’s like.
“Use your imagination,” Morofsky said.
The cantankerous centenarian has lived for four decades in the same Kensington apartment building, since returning to her native borough after a 17-year stint in the Bronx.
Brooklyn has changed for the better since the trolley car days of her Williamsburg childhood, Morofsky said. Fewer slums. Safer streets. Even the buses seem fast and quiet compared to the old streetcars.
“I’ve seen it all from the beginning,” she said.
RELATED: CENTURY OLD? SHE DOESN’T LOOK A DAY OVER 80!
And she isn’t impressed by much.
The moon landing? It was “expected.” The first days of television? “Amateurish.” Republicans? They’re simply “crooks.”
Oh, you want to put her picture in the paper?
“Big deal,” Morofsky says.
She’s survived repeated hospital stays, a hip replacement and multiple bouts of life-threatening pneumonia since the age of 92. Her stories don’t always hew to the facts, but she tells them with as much fire as ever.
You don’t live 101 years by growing soft and doubting yourself.
RELATED: 100-YEAR-OLD MAN SKYDIVES FOR HIS BIRTHDAY
Behind this gruff, tough-talking exterior, Morofsky has lived a generous, if plain-spoken life, relatives said.
Niece Mindy Schonberg, 63, of Staten Island said Morofsky and sister Millie Tepper used to take her on trips to Radio City Music Hall.
Marriage eventually pried Morofsky out of Brooklyn, if only temporarily.
This is how she describes meeting her future husband: “It was a blind date. I was blind, and he saw me.”
They lived in the Bronx after wedding in 1955. She stayed on after his death in 1963, but couldn’t live away from her hometown forever and moved back in 1972.
“She’s a Brooklyn girl,” Schonberg said.
And for all her Brooklyn wisecracks, she was so excited about her birthday she woke her home health care aide, Marisa Greig, at midnight to sing “Happy Birthday.”
“So we sang from 12 until 5,” Greig said.
Yahoo Local News – New York Daily News
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=18158
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
No comments:
Post a Comment