Mrs. Agafia Garzey had a birthday on Sunday—her hundredth—at the Russian home for aged women at 1229 Rue Lafayette. She celebrated her birthday by walking from Rue Lafayette to Bubbling Well Road and back, aided only by her walking stick, Earlier last week she had walked from the home to Range Road for a spot of exercise.
This unusual old lady is as spry at 100 as many women are at 60. In fact, to the "North-China Daily News" reporter who visited the home yesterday, she did not look a day older than any of the other old ladies in the place. When the photographer asked her to sit for a picture she hopped spryly into her room to tidy up, looking more like an excited schoolgirl than a centenarian.
The other girls in the home are quite proud of Mrs. Garzey and pointed out that she does her own knitting and embroidering and occasionally helps with the housework. The old lady had little to say for herself; her memory has been failing somewhat during the past fifteen years so she was unable to recount any of her experiences during the momentous hundred years of her life.
Mrs. Garzey was born in Sebastopol, in the Russian Crimea, on February 18, 1840, but she moved away from that country before the Crimean War. She came to Shanghai in 1930 from Vladivostok and for the past seven years has been an inmate of the home, Shanghai's wars of 1932 and 1937 had little effect on her for she was in the midst of the bombardment of Crete during the war between Greece and Turkey in 1896.
The old lady was the recipient of many presents on her birthday, including gifts from Mrs. H. Cosme, Wife of the French Ambassador to China, and Mrs. L. Fabre, wife of the Commandant of the French Police.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.