Don't tell that to the members of the Italian Club. Ohrnstiel isn't just the oldest member of the club--she has also been in the club more than 30 years, longer than anyone else.
She's the only surviving member of her family. Her daughter, Nora, passed away in 1984. Her twin sister died at the age of 99. She continued working into her 80s, and since then has spent much of her time raising roses in her garden.
But last year she fell and almost broke her hip. Now she has a live-in aide and uses a walker to visit friends and attend her weekly Italian club gatherings.
And she continues to speak her mind.
"I don't like selfish people," she says. "My whole life I took care of people who needed me. I learned that from my parents. Both took care of needy people."
She's lived a long life, she says, because she's always kept her mind on the needs of others, including her family members and a number of sick people in her neighborhood she used to visit on a regular basis before she started using a walker.
Ohrnstiel spent most of the second half of her life working. She escaped from her native Trieste, Italy in 1940, leaving behind a husband, Karl, who was trapped in Europe during the war. Like Ohrnstiel, he was Jewish. She believes he died in Auschwitz.
"Her husband and his whole family died," says Ohrnstiel's son-in-law, Norman Rogers. "There was absolutely nobody left. The exact fate of his other family members we aren't sure of. All we know is that they disappeared."
She moved to New York, and for the first time in her life had to earn a living. At the age of 50, she became a clothing and hat designer. She moved to Portland, Ore. and started her own hat shop in the late 1940s.
"In Europe, she was upper-middle class," Rogers says. "Upper-middle class women in Europe didn't work in those days. When she came to the United States she immediately started working. She kept her cool. She never complained. The work had to be done, and she did it."
She moved to Palo Alto in the 1950s to be closer to her daughter, according to Rogers.
"She came to California in the 1950s and worked out of her home," says Rogers, a retired Foster City physician. "She switched from hat-making to restyling dresses. She became quite successful at that."
Rogers believes her eating habits helped her live a long life. "She has always been a very prudent eater, eating small meals, eating lots of fruits," he says.
Ohrnsteil, however, thinks it's more her attitude that's kept her going.
"I'm very humble," she says. "I don't like being in the paper."
--Erik Espe
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