100-Year-Old Skokie Woman Credits Family For Longevity

SKOKIE, IL — Skokie resident Diane Cohen marked her 100th birthday Tuesday with four generations of her family, crediting them for her longevity.

The freshly minted centenarian celebrated with a drive-by parade led by a Skokie squad car, a 100-balloon garland, a decades-themed game of trivia, an inflatable tube man and lots of chocolate.

"I've been so lucky," Cohen said. "I have such a wonderful family that every single one of my birthdays was always a big holiday for them."

For the past nine years, Cohen has lived with Doris Hyman, the eldest of her three daughters. Cohen also has three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

"If every mother in this country had a daughter like mine, there'd be so many old people we would overrun the country," Cohen said.

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Cohen said she grew up poor on Chicago's South Side, but didn't realize it at the time. Her family would regularly invite less fortunate children for weekly dinner, and the tradition continued in the Albany Park home where Cohen and her late husband raised their children.

"When I grew up and had a house, we always had somebody that didn't have a place to go for Friday night supper. My house was full." Cohen said. "I had the most wonderful life any woman could possibly, possibly ask for, and it was because I had wonderful children, and if you have wonderful children your life will be fulfilled. And on top of it, you have to have a daughter named Doris."

Hyman, 81, said her mother has been the rock that has always held the family together.

"Until my children were teenagers and started complaining, every Friday night we went to my mother's for dinner," Hyman said. "It was a household [you could go] if you had someone who didn't have a place to go — you never knew who would be at her table on a Friday night."

After her children got to high school, Cohen got a job at a pharmacy. She rode the bus to work there for about four decades, her daughter said, and retired only after turning 80.

The close-knit family would regularly vacation together along with the family of Cohen's late elder sister, heading to Michigan during summers while Cohen's grandchildren were young and later in the mid-1990s on trips to Mexico.

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In recent years, Cohen still reads the newspaper every day and watches BBC News. Despite surviving four bouts of breast cancer, her mother never complained, Hyman said. One thing Cohen would change: finding some hearing aids that work for her.

"I just can't get accustomed to it. So that makes a big difference in my life, had my hearing been good my life would have been — which it is anyway — the most perfect life a woman could ask for," Cohen said. "Because I'm so blessed with my family, that all I can wish is that my family have the family life that I had."