One of New England's oldest residents dies at 111

Link : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/cpress/20041104/ca_pr_on_od/obit_111_year_old&e=3

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - One of New England's oldest residents, who died at 111, will be remembered Saturday with a champagne toast.



"I was digging out a magnum of champagne," said Gordon Muise, 81, of Westborough, Mass. He plans to bring it to a luncheon following a funeral mass for his mother, Virginia Muise. "It isn't often you have a mother who lives to 111."


Virginia Muise died Tuesday at the Grafton County Nursing Home in North Haverhill. A widow, Muise is survived by four children, 18 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.


Muise was born in Halifax on July 27, 1893. She was 16 when the Titanic sank in 1912, and remembered seeing coffins of the victims stacked on docks there.


"Her father worked on the docks and she actually watched (survivors) disembark," said Eileen Bolander, Muise's nursing home administrator.


In 1917, the family survived an ammunition ship explosion that killed about 2,000 people in Halifax. "The whole city blew out its windows," Muise said.


In 1923, the family moved to Boston - home of the Red Sox who were World Series (news - web sites) champions in 1918 - and Virginia Muise took a shine to baseball. She was a regular visitor to Fenway Park, taking advantage of ticket discounts offered to women.


Nursing home staff said she kept a Red Sox cap in her bed and was delighted when the team won the World Series last month. "She loved the Red Sox. She was passionate about them," Bolander said.


In Boston, she worked as a housekeeper and cook before becoming manager of the cafeteria at the former Boston Lying-In Hospital, where she stayed until retiring at 65.


Her husband, Charles Muise, was a blacksmith. He died in 1977 at 94.


According to a Los Angeles-based group called the Gerontology Research Group, Virginia Muise was the oldest known New Englander and No. 31 of the 59 oldest people in the world. The group keeps track of super centenarians - people over 110. There was no other New Englander listed, unless you count a 113-year-old man who was born in Maine and moved to New York.