4, there were just 21 Americans that it verified as being 110 or more (which the GRG calls “supercentenarians”). The organization - which researches and tracks the world’s oldest living people - reports that as of Oct. 16th, where she expects about 80 guests, including her sister who is flying in from England.Īccording to the Gerontology Research Group at UCLA, Boggs will be in elite company when she marks that occasion. Oswald is planning an open house to celebrate her mother’s 110th birthday on Nov. She loved to travel and had a lifelong passion for bridge, which she played every morning until hearing and memory loss took a toll on her game last spring. She also was fluent in French and was an avid reader of nonfiction books in both English and French. After the war, her husband built an art studio in their basement where she taught painting classes for many years.īoggs was an accomplished portrait and still-life artist and many of her oils hang on the walls around her Carlsbad house. Like many women of her era, Boggs gave up working when she married, but during World War II, she was called on to work as a high school art teacher when many of the male teachers were drafted into service. Clifton retired in 1960 from his job as an accountant with General Motors and the couple moved to Rancho Bernardo in 1972.
They married in 1929 and had two daughters, Joanne, and Carol, now 76, a retired lawyer who lives in London.
She later enrolled at the University of Oregon, where she met her future husband at a dance. With her savings from the library, she booked passage on the USS Manchuria in 1923 and sailed alone (with her parents’ blessing) through the newly completed Panama Canal to San Francisco. When her family moved to Syracuse, she enrolled at a the city’s university but hated the cold winters so much, she decided to make her way west. “The flies loved to swim around in the milk, and I remember when I got home, we just scooped the flies off the top and drank it,” she said.Īs a teen, she worked in one of New York’s Carnegie libraries, where she was paid 10 cents an hour to wash the pages of the books with soap and water (people didn’t wash their hands as often then). A horse-drawn cart brought coal to heat the house each week, and during one particularly brutal winter, she remembered fetching on foot a pitcher of milk from a nearby dairy. She got her first kiss at age 7 (she beat up the boy who administered the unwelcome peck), and at age 8, her favorite pastime was following the man who lit the gas streetlamps on their block each night. As a 2-year-old, she tossed her mother’s precious teacups and saucers out the window, and in grade school, she watched the world pass by from a precariously perched rocking chair that she dragged on to the second-story roof of the family’s home. While watching the hourlong video, Boggs nodded her head and laughed uproariously at some of her stories from childhood.īorn in 1903 to Navy chief petty officer Robert Ross and his seamstress wife, Leona, Florence said in the video that she was a mischievous child. “If she was difficult, it might not have worked out so well.”Īlthough Boggs now has a hard time remembering details from her long life, Oswald and Evans got her to tell her life story in a home video five years ago. “It helps that she’s such an agreeable person,” Oswald said of their life together.
After her father, Clifton Boggs, died in 1992 at the age of 87, Oswald devoted herself full-time to her mother’s care. “She’s a positive person,” said Oswald, 82, a retired General Motors shipping clerk who moved from Michigan to Carlsbad in 1985 to be closer to her parents. Oswald said her mother was always a quiet person, though she’s less talkative now than she used to be. In an interview at her home on Thursday, Boggs spoke very little. Her daughter Joanne Oswald - who has cared for Boggs in a home the’ve share in Carrillo Ranch for the past 13 years - said that up until this past year, her mother was playing bridge with friends every morning, painting oils each week and traveling the globe on 66-day cruises.
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