QUINCY – It is a story that Agnes Mullay has enjoyed telling for years.
When she was 10 months old, she was so sickly doctors thought she might die and sent her to the Floating Hospital for Children, a ship in Boston Harbor. She had surgery to remove two ribs. Later she had tuberculosis.
She got better. And so does the story, every year, as more distance is added between then and now. At her 105th birthday party Sunday, even the staff at Marina Bay Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center were repeating it.
“God doesn’t want me and the Devil won’t take me, so I’ve got to stay here,” Mullay said with a chuckle.
Her family had a small party for her at the nursing center, where she greets each day with a smile and likes to sit in the lobby for her morning coffee and watch the people go by.
In a family room, her daughters, Agnes 86, of Waltham, and Jane Foti, 72, of Wilmington, her son, John Jr. and his wife Barbara Mullay of Wollaston, her grandson, Kevin, 44, from Pennsylvania and a family friend, Kay Collins of Braintree, celebrated the 4-foot-eight-inch centenarian- plus- five.
They brought in special Italian meatballs and pasta, topped off by a strawberry and cream birthday cake from a bakery in Cambridge.
That is where Mullay raised her family, where her late husband John Sr. worked in the chemical industry and where her mother had the other half of the family duplex. Her mother ran a small neighborhood restaurant, Troy Lunch, in the basement level of their duplex near Central Square. Agnes worked at the restaurant and later brought the same discipline to her children.
“She was very strict,” Foti said. “She had a list of what I had to do every day and I couldn’t go out until it was all checked off.”
Walking down to her party on a walker, Mullay was dressed in a matching red outfit she picked out herself. She eagerly ate ravioli, a piece of her cake, and smiled at the attention. “I’m very old,” she announced, not seeming to mind.
“She insists on choosing her own clothes and is very particular, even about the jewelry ,” her daughter-in-law Barbara Mullay said.
“How do I look?” Agnes asked. She had applied her makeup herself.
She says she can’t remember so well anymore, but the childhood recollections are there. One of her happiest memories is “hanging out the window in the South End waiting for Santa Claus to go by. . . That was a long time ago. A hundred years ago.”
Her family expected her to live a long life. She was always so active, cheerful, thrived around people and in her 100th year, she was still alone in her own apartment, went to bingo every week, to bean suppers, the spaghetti dinners, on bus trips, did all her own shopping.
At 105 she is not that active, but she gets around the nursing center and enjoys certain perks that come with age.
“Every night the nurse gives me a nice rubdown,” she said. Especially her dry elbows.
Sue Scheible may be reached at scheible@ledger.com or follow on Twitter@SueS_Ledger.
- Born March 12, 1912 at home in Boston
- Grew up in the South End on Dedham Street
- Left school to work in Rustcraft greeting card factory
- Lived in Roxbury and Cambridge
- Eloped at age 16 to marry John Mullay Sr., who worked at W. R. Grace Co. and died in his 80s
- They were married 60 years
- Raised two daughters, Agnes and Jane, and a son, John, in Cambridge
- Lived in senior housing at Clay Street in Quincy at age 100
- At age 102, moved to Marina Bay Skilled Nursing Center
- Favorite food is lobster
- Has 12 grandchildren, 32 great-grandchildren, 24 great-great-grandchildren and 1 great-great-great-grandchild
Agnes Mullay’s 105 Years
