“I’m a hundred years old. Can you believe that?”
Betty Negro kept repeating that question with a chuckle as she greeted everyone who came to a party in her honor Friday afternoon at Riverhead Landing.
“I’m a hundred years old! Can you believe that? I can’t believe it!”
Actually, she doesn’t look a day over 80, maybe 75. And she acts like a young 75, too.
Betty didn’t sit for a minute as she held court in the clubhouse, clearly relishing the attention of friends and neighbors, regaling them with stories and jokes and wisecracks — lots of wisecracks.
“People ask me how it feels to be 100. I tell them it felt better to be 99,” she said.
Her mind is sharp, her wit is quick, her humor saucy. “My hearing’s not what it used to be,” she said. “But I take very little medications. My blood pressure, my heart — all are good. The doctor said I’m going to live at least another five years.”
Betty laughed heartily when asked for proof of her age. “You want me to go home and get my birth certificate? I gave up my driver’s license. The roads around here are too complicated,” she said.
She moved to Riverhead a decade ago, after 18 years in Florida. She retired to the Sunshine State with her husband Frank, but after he and her friends there passed on and she found herself alone, she decided to move to Riverhead, to be near her niece.
Make no mistake, though. No matter where Betty lives, she is and always will be a Brooklyn gal at heart. She pines for the borough of her birth. Riverhead is “too sleepy” for Betty.
“There’s nothing much going on here most of the time,” she says. “I’m used to a little night life. To me, this is deadsville.” But she’s quick to add that she loves Riverhead Landing — especially the management, she says. Manager Maria Mazzone is “the daughter I never head.”
Betty lives on her own in the 55-and-over apartment complex. That’s something not many centenarians can boast of.
She’s a very social person. She belongs to “a club for widows, widowers and divorcees” — they threw her a big party Saturday at the Birchwood. “There were 90-some-odd people there,” she said. “It was a great party.”
She enjoys her friends, but misses the companionship of one special friend.
“I had a good man for 10 years,” she said. “He’s in rehab now and I’m not sure he’s ever getting out.”
Betty was married for 52 years to Frank. They met at the Knights of Columbus. She saw him at a social gathering there and told her friend, “See that man over there? I’m going to marry him.”
He had a career in the post office. She was the practice manager for two eye doctors, working for one for 22 years and the other for 20 years before retiring to Florida. The couple had no children — “He was shooting blanks,” she explains in a low voice.
“I have a reputation for saying what I think, what I like or don’t like,” Betty said. She credits that attribute as one the reasons she’s lived such a long, healthy life.
“I have no patience for stupidity,” she says.
“That and I drink a little red wine every day.”
Betty loves to read — and that’s how she spends most of her time when she’s not being a social butterfly.
She also loves to cook, especially the Italian dishes she learned from her mother and grandmother growing up in South Brooklyn.
Her friend Stephen Tamburrelli said Betty’s pasta fagioli was the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten.
“The Napoletani are the best cooks,” she declared.
Betty (born Bettina Morelli) is proud of her heritage and not shy about it. Her birthday cake was decorated with her photo, an Italian flag and the message, “Italian Stallion 100 Years Young. Happy Birthday Betty”
“Look at that. This says the Italian Stallion,” she says, shaking her head and pointing to the cake. “I don’t have that little thing, you know.”
The artwork on the cake is framed by 16 candles.
“Good thing they didn’t put 100 candles on it. We’d have the fire department here.”
The thought reminded her of the time she returned to her apartment building after a walk to find the fire department outside the building. Neighbors had been evacuated because of a gas odor. She heard someone had gone out and left one of the stove burners on, unlit.
“I said, ‘What kind of an a**hole would do a thing like that?’” She shakes her head, laughing. “Then I find out it was me!”
The group of friends encircling her break into laughter again. She clearly enjoys it. After cake and coffee, Betty holds forth again, opening her cards and telling jokes.
“This one’s a little raunchy,” she warns the gathering before telling a joke about two tipsy friends on a girls night out who needed to relieve themselves and found a private place in a dark cemetery as they walked home.
The next day their concerned husbands spoke on the phone, Betty says.
“‘I don’t know about these girls nights,’ said one husband. ‘Last night my wife came home without her panties.’” Betty’s face is animated as she builds up to the punch line.
“‘That’s nothing,’ replied the other husband.” Betty, with great comic timing, pauses an extra beat. ‘Last night my wife came home with a ribbon on her ass that says the fire department will always remember you.’” Eyes twinkling, Betty laughs heartily — so do the others in the room, many of them a generation younger than their remarkable 100-year-old friend.
“You have to love a 100th birthday party. Who’s next?” she asks. One woman is in her mid-90s. “I’ll be there,” Betty tells her. “Who else?”
Another woman is 85. “Fifteen years, so you’ll be 115 when I’m 100.”
Betty doesn’t skip a beat. “I’ll make dinner.”
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