Living to 100

Alice Grosjean ’27 believes in staying busy, eating right, and thinking positively.
It’s worked for her.

A wide bay window fills Alice Grosjean’s dining room with light, even on a grey day. Her favorite rocking chair, a wooden beauty that once belonged to her grandmother, sits beside the window.

"I used to think, ‘When I get old, I’ll sit here in my rocking chair and read the newspaper,’" says Grosjean ’27, almost wistfully.

The trouble is, on the eve of her hundredth birthday, Alice Grosjean has yet to grow old. Her health is good, her mind sharp. She can recall the days of traveling by horse and buggy, the first talking pictures, and the celebration surrounding Armistice Day in 1918. But she can also discuss the latest historical biographies and the psycho-babble of afternoon TV. After posing for a photograph, she hauls a heavy dining room chair, almost as big as she is, back into place.

Grosjean is allowing her children and grandchildren to plan a celebration for her May 18 milestone, but she seems to take her age in stride.

"I never thought I’d live to be one hundred," she says. "The time has gone fast."

Fresh air, whole foods

Walter Childs had definite ideas about raising his two daughters, Alice and Jessie, in Fremont, Ohio. By the time the girls were nine months old, they slept outside on a sleeping porch that their father built. Their diet consisted of whole grains, fresh produce, and no meat.

If Walter was zealous, he had good reason. Doctors had diagnosed him in high school with incurable tuberculosis. But the young man read in a magazine about Bernarr McFadden, a charismatic figure who advocated exercise and natural foods to cure ailments. Childs set out for McFadden’s camp in Pennsylvania to sleep in a tent, run every day, eat whole grains and vegetables, and avoid meat. He returned to Ohio healthy and fit – and lived to be eighty-two.

Consequently, Alice had to visit friends’ houses or her grandmother down the road to enjoy such things as white bread or cookies.

"It was an unusual household," Grosjean says. Her mother died when she was three. "I lived with a maiden aunt who made all our clothes, an adoring bachelor uncle, and a strict father. I was part of a large extended family. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by love."

Childs instructed his girls to breathe deeply on their mile walk to school and back. He forbade dancing and playing cards. "He told us, ‘When you get out on your own, you can do what you want.’"

"I only went to the doctor twice in my first twenty-three years. Once I caught my fingers in the springs of a horse-drawn buggy, and once they sent me home from school with swollen adenoids."

Walter Childs was adamant that Alice go to college. He chose Wooster as a good, strict Presbyterian school, even though Alice wanted to go to Ohio Wesleyan.

She made the most of her college days.

"The food was a shock, it was so good. We had gravy and white bread. I gained seventeen pounds that first semester. My aunt had to let all my dresses out."

In and around her studies – she majored in French, minored in English – Alice learned to play bridge and socialize. In her sophomore year, a friend told her that his pal, George "Shorty" Grosjean ’26, a football player, wanted to meet her. "I said he should just call me if he wanted to meet me. He was sort of shy."

The couple didn’t get serious until Alice’s senior year. That spring, on a canoe outing near Akron, George proposed. Walter Childs decreed, however, that his daughter must first work for a year, so that she would know that she could support herself. Alice taught school for a year in Orrville. On September 14, 1928, she and George married.

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