Priscilla Weston and Mary Whitehurst of Temple were born days apart in 1925, that saw an educator put on trial in Tennessee for teaching evolution. The two ladies are friends, and on Saturday, Temple celebrated their longevity, as approximately 125 people attended an event at Town Hall.

Last week, Weston and Whitehurst shared what they’ve seen over a century and how they arrived at this milestone. 

“Move!” said Weston when asked how to reach 100. “I exercise an hour daily, and used to walk three miles a day.”

She added that having a positive attitude toward life helps.

“I’ve had setbacks, but it’s how you respond to them that makes the difference,” Weston said. 

The biggest changes she has witnessed in her lifetime?

“I’ve gone from kerosene to computers,” she said, recalling her childhood in Sanbornton without electricity or running water until she was 11 or 12 years old. When the prospect of a chimney fire loomed, as a girl she helped hand buckets of water to her father up on the roof. She’s glad for scientific and societal progress, but worries.

“Research, and women, have come a long way. Trump is destroying it all – we could get slapped backwards,” she said. She stays current with events by dining early so she can watch “The News Hour” nightly. She can’t believe that there are young people who deny that the Holocaust happened. 

Over the course of a century, she has never broken a single bone, which she credits in part to her mother giving her cod liver oil as a child to combat bowleggedness. She married a seventh-generation farmer who she met at 4-H, where her work raising a calf earned her a national laurel and a trip to Chicago. It was courtship by letter and phone, and at UNH during World War II, she worked in the greenhouse, and was happy they kept her on after the men returned from the service. She recalls a very stubborn horse on the farm on Coburn Road in Temple, and spent decades at the Mansfield Library in town.

Whitehurst didn’t seem fazed by this milestone.

“It’s just another year going by,” she said, adding that not much has surprised her in life, explaining that by way of “I had three brothers, and lost a husband in the Korean War.” In  World War II, Whitehurst did her part on the homefront while still a teenager. Born in South Carolina, during her high school years, she found herself in the basement of a post office in Wilmington, N.C., marking locations of aircraft spotted on a map. 

“We were tracking Japanese planes, which were off the coast there, which isn’t widely known. The government didn’t want to start a panic,” she said, explaining why such information never made news, adding that some unexploded Japanese ordinances landed in the Carolinas. A boyfriend’s brother had a plane that they went up in to look for them,

“We never found them, but it was exciting,” Whitehurst said.

As to changes and innovations that have surprised her, she said there are too many to mention.

“There’s been something new every month, it seems,” she said.  

About making 100, Whitehurst  is not quite sure how it happened.

“I’ve had some close calls, but had a good family, and good genes,” she offered, noting that both parents lived into their late 90s. She still does her own laundry, and has produced more quilts than she can count. One adorns a hallway wall, and a quilted pillow proclaiming “99 Years Loved” rests on a nearby chair.

When she found herself in Temple due to family there, as in World War II, Whitehurst  pitched in.

 “I was in the Lions Club, and the Temple Ladies Aid. People around me were very supportive. I’d try to fit in, and not dominate,” she said, adding that along the way, she and Weston became good friends.

“I’m here because I’ve been very lucky,” she smiled, but maintained that she doesn’t have a secret to long life, only that “if you just keep moving forward you can get through anything.”

Weston and Whitehurst will have something else in common after this summer. Whitehurst learned to fly a plane in her youth, even after losing an eye in an accident. She flew an open-cabin Ercoupe over her mother’s house. Weston will be in a plane herself in July, as having had a fear of heights all her  life, she will go skydiving.