By Graeme McNaughton/Active Senior’s Digest
Lucy Ayres is the queen of her retirement home. And that’s no exaggeration – she has the crown to prove it.
Ayres’ title as the prom queen of Amica in Whitby is just one of the many stories she can tell about her 100 well-lived years.
“They had a senior prom contest, and people here all put in ballots and I was the prom queen,” Ayres says with a laugh. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I know Lucy.’ I got my crown and my sash and the whole bit.”
Ayres recently celebrated her 100th birthday at Amica, and tells Active Senior’s Digest that she credits her vitality to keeping active.
“Keeping active, I think, is the main thing. You know, I was always active. I always liked sports. I still follow mostly hockey and baseball and football. Those are the three things I really follow,” she says, adding her favourite teams are the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Toronto Blue Jays. “I don’t follow the American football. I can’t keep up.”
Sports ambitions aside, Ayres also keeps active by taking part in different classes and activities going on at Amica.
“There’s something going on here all the time, and I take part in everything. I go to exercise in the morning and then we come down and have a social hour,” she says. “I did that since I first started coming here because that’s where you get to meet people. And that’s why I think I have so many friends here because so many people know me.”
Ayres also took French lessons at the home, rekindling something she had learned many years before.
“I took five years of French in high school. Before I started working, my first job was at the St. Catharines Chamber of Commerce because I used to do – it was all voluntary, I didn’t get paid, it was all for the experience – but because I knew French, we used to have letters come in from people from Quebec that wanted things, and I could answer their letters,” she says. So I stayed there for about three months until I got my regular job.”
That job would be working at a car dealership.
“When I graduated from high school, I thought I don’t want to be a nurse, I didn’t want to be anything. I had nothing planned,” she says. “So I thought, oh I’ll be a school teacher. I thought they get two months holiday in the summer, so I was thinking of the time off. And so I applied to normal school and my sister, who was a teacher, said ‘You will never make a teacher, you haven’t got the patience.’ And I thought that no, I really don’t want to be a teacher. So I went to St. Catharines Business College, and I really liked that. And that’s when I started working for this (Pontiac and Buick) dealership, and I stayed there until I got married.”
After she got married, Ayres moved with her late husband to Brantford, where she stayed until she moved to Amica. Unlike her days in St. Catharines, Ayres stayed at home.
“I never worked. In those days, they didn’t believe in you working. But before that, I worked in the Pontiac Buick dealership in the office, right up until I got married, right after I graduated from high school,” she says. “But my husband felt, in those days, that women didn’t work, where as now everybody does, of course. I just stayed home and raised my two boys.”
Now, living in Whitby and closer to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Ayres is making sure she stays active so that she can keep living the great life she has.
“As long as I can keep it up here, I’ll be fine.”
