Margaret Reidenbaugh (seated) of Wyandotte celebrates her 100th birthday with her daughter Nancy Phillips (left), son Robert Reidenbaugh, and daughter Ruth Goudos at Bishop Co-op senior community.
By SUE SUCHYTA
Sunday Times Newspapers
WYANDOTTE – Margaret Reidenbaugh, who was born March 26, 1922, in Alma, celebrated her 100th birthday March 25 at Bishop Co-op senior apartments, where she has lived for the past 35 years.
Family and friends feted her with a decorative cake, flowers, and abundance of balloons and a sparkly costume tiara.
Three of her four children – Robert Reidenbaugh, 73, Ruth Goudos, 72, and Nancy Phillips, 70, were on hand to help her celebrate, while her oldest son, George Reidenbaugh Jr., 77, who lives out-of-state, was unable to attend.
Margaret Reidenbaugh of Wyandotte celebrates her 100th birthday with family and friends at Bishop Co-op senior community.
Margaret Reidenbaugh, who has 12 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren, was married when she was 20 to her husband, George, who died in 1969.
Reidenbaugh said her family is why she has reached the century mark.
“They give me a reason to just get up,” she said, adding that she gets lots of phone calls and visits from family members. “And then friends – I have been very fortunate – I’ve been (at Bishop Co-op) for 35 years, and I think I am the luckiest person on the floor. There are great people here.”
Reidenbaugh’s family moved to the east side of Detroit as a girl, and she moved to Lincoln Park when she got married. Later they moved to Wyandotte, and then to Riverview.
“We needed a bigger house,” she explained. “Then we moved back (to Wyandotte) after my husband passed away.”
As a girl, Reidenbaugh would work in her grandfather and uncle’s store up north, in Long Lake Township, during the summer.
“I loved selling and doing things like that,” she said.
After she was widowed, Reidenbaugh went to work at the JCPenney in Lincoln Park, where she sold baby clothes, and later boys’ clothes, for the next 20 years.
“I loved that job,” she said.
Reidenbaugh said she was actively involved in her children’s school and at church, where she taught Sunday school at a Methodist church in Riverview.
“I just loved being a mother,” she said. “I think if I hadn’t been a mother, I would have taught school.”
Reidenbaugh said as things change in the world, you just go along with the change.
“You can’t complain about it,” she said with a smile.
Reidenbaugh said she smoked when she was younger, and drank a little, but not a lot.
“I was sociable,” she said.
After she retired, Reidenbaugh volunteered at a local hospital for 12 years.
What does Reidenbaugh think is the same over the past century?
“I think friendship stays the same,” she said. “If you have good friends, they stay the same.”