Ida Robinson, 100, sharp as ever
Surrounded by colored balloons and scores of friends and
well-wishers, long-time Morgan Hill volunteer extraordinaire Ida
Robinson joined a select but rapidly growing group of oldsters
Tuesday when she celebrated her 100th birthday.
Surrounded by colored balloons and scores of friends and well-wishers, long-time Morgan Hill volunteer extraordinaire Ida Robinson joined a select but rapidly growing group of oldsters Tuesday when she celebrated her 100th birthday.
“I’ve been able to do everything I wanted to do,” Robinson said between greetings from a constant stream of people, including Mayor Dennis Kennedy and former councilwoman and mayor Laurie Barke.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 37,000 centenarians in the country in 1990. Today, according to the agency, the number of Americans 100 years of age or older tops 76,000.
After visitors sang Happy Birthday and she blew out candles on a cake, Robinson offered her toast:
“Here’s to it and to it again. If you ever get to it, don’t do it. Let me do it. I’m used to it.”
Ida Jeanette Neves was born Jan. 7, 1903 in Sacramento and spent her childhood on a ranch, where she cooked and washed clothes for the hired hands. She later worked briefly as a maid in San Francisco hotels.
She would outlive three husbands and now has three children, nine grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
In 1925, she married Jack Daggett, a carpenter who worked many years for the Southern Pacific Railroad. The couple divorced in 1938 and the following year she married Wilfred Pidd, an employee of the Continental Baking Co. in Sacramento.
After that marriage eventually failed, she married Harold Robinson, a San Jose rancher who, her daughter Pat Pennington-Saler said, was the love of her life.
Robinson was a saleswoman for years for National Dollar Stores and also worked for Edelweiss Dairy. In addition to sales, she led school children on tours of the dairy.
Robinson moved to Morgan Hill in the early 1970s to be near Pennington-Saler, who had lived there since 1956.
Active until just recently, Robinson was a stalwart of the American Association of Retired Persons and the Morgan Hill senior center, for which she knitted hundreds of afghans to raise funds for its projects.
She was a 50-year member of Eastern Star, a 25-year member of Rebekah Lodge and a long-time participant in the Morgan Hill Flower Lovers Club. Robinson initiated the now years-old custom of offering a carnation to each visitor to the club’s annual show.
Perhaps Robinson was best known for her signature-gathering campaign in the late 1980s that helped the Mervyn’s department store chain place a store in Morgan Hill. The signatures forced the issue to be put before residents in the form of a ballot measure, which won approval.
The city council last year gave Robinson a proclamation acknowledging her contributions to the community.
Now, Robinson said, she simply takes life as it comes, enjoying what really counts — moments with family members and the games of 500, a card game similar to bridge, that she plays almost every night with two friends.
Winston Churchill summed up that wisdom: “The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.”
