Neville Place Resident Turns 100

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As seen in the Cambridge Chronicle - Though they’ve never met, Cambridge residents Edward McGowan and Louise Macnair will always share a page of the city’s history.

Last week, McGowan reached a milestone few in this world are fortunate enough to achieve: he turned 100. Macnair did the same, five years ago, and recently celebrated her 105th birthday.

“They’re taking good care of me here,” McGowan said of the staff at Neville Place retirement home. McGowan moved to the North Cambridge retirement complex earlier this year. The path that brought him here, he said, crosses the Atlantic Ocean — twice — and stretches from an arms factory in Connecticut to a prison camp in Germany.

In another part of town, Macnair celebrated her 105th birthday two weeks ago. Living largely on her own on Walker Street, where she’s lived since Harry Truman was president, Macnair said her secret to a long life is really no secret at all.

“I’ve tried to live a life of moderation,” Macnair said.

Though reaching your 100th birthday is still something of an anomaly — in 2004, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was about 78 years, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention — McGowan and Macnair are not the only centenarians in town. According to Mary Ann Dalton of the Somerville/Cambridge Elder Services, there are at least nine people living in Cambridge above the age of 100.

Born Dec. 7, 1907, McGowan immigrated to America from Donegal, Ireland, in 1929. He found work in the Winchester Rifle Co. factory making guns and ammunition, a trade that could have kept him out of World War II altogether, had he wanted it to.

“The first time I got the draft notice, they told me, ‘You’re already working for the government, we need you here,’” McGowan said. “But the second time around, when I got a second notice, I decided I would just go.”

Just months later, McGowan found himself hurtling into the history books aboard a landing craft pointed at Omaha Beach. Then a corporal, McGowan was part of the second wave of Allied soldiers to land on the beaches of Northern France on D-Day in 1944.

“I was one of Patton’s boys,” McGowan said, referring to the famed general George Patton. He wasn’t scared as he and 90 or so of his U.S. Army brethren approached the shoreline, though McGowan said the sight of fallen soldiers floating in the water near the beach is just one among a collection of ghastly scenes he carries with him to this day.

“I was down at the back of the boat, and I was watching the waves from the propellers,” McGowan said. “The next thing I saw was an American soldier coming up from under the boat. He had his rifle still on his shoulder, and his gas mask. I still have nightmares.”

Once ashore, McGowan and his unit were charged with the task of retrieving Allied soldiers who’d been captured, among them Patton’s son-in-law.

“Patton got the idea that the Germans were going to kill all the soldiers,” McGowan said. “So he picked my company to go out and get all the prisoners.”

Along the way, McGowan said his unit ran out of ammunition, and was captured in a small town outside Hamburg, Germany. He was a prisoner of war for a little more than two months. Though he doesn’t recall where he was held in Germany — soldiers tended not to pay too much attention to geography, he said — McGowan does remember the reception he and his unit received upon their return to “Camp Lucky Strike” in France.

“We had these big beards, we were a mess,” McGowan said. “When we got on the plane to go back to the camp, the pilot reached under his seat and put a gas mask on. He couldn't stand the smell.”

McGowan said the war, while certainly important, is not the central fact of his life. In 1932, 11 years before he was deployed to the European Theater, he married his steady girlfriend, Mary Bohan, a union that would last 75 years. Their two children, Mary Ellen and Thomas Patrick, both graduated from Boston University.

“We had a wonderful life together,” McGowan said.

Though not technically a native of the city — her family brought her to America from England in 1905 — Louise Macnair has always thought of Cambridge as her hometown. It’s hard to imagine, but Macnair remembers a cobblestoned city that moved quite a bit slower when she was a girl.

“It’s quite different now,” Macnair said. “There were no cars then. We had a telephone, but radio didn’t come in for quite a while. We had our first one in 1928. It’s incredible. We wore out an awful lot of shoe leather in those days.”

A 1921 graduate of the Cambridge Latin School, Macnair went on to Radcliffe to study Romance languages.

“Not a terribly useful thing,” Macnair said. “I had thought I was going to be working as a translator, but that never happened.”

After graduating from Radcliffe in 1925, Macnair worked in the Brookline Public Library for three years before marrying her high school sweetheart, Luther Knight Macnair, then a teacher at Harvard University.

“My husband must have worn a path in the bricks from Cambridge to Brookline,” Macnair said, adding that she still remembers their first date.

“I met him on the stairs of the high school, and paid no attention to him, particularly,” Macnair said. “At the end of the year, we all went down to the Charles River, to the skating rink on the other side of [Harvard Square]. My friend Constance and I were putting our skates on, and Luther came over and said, ‘May I help you put those on?’ After we got the skates on, he said, ‘May I skate with you?’ Neither of us knew much about skating, so we said it was fine. It was a gorgeous moonlit night, and we all had a wonderful time going up the river and back again. When we were done, he asked us if he could help us get our skates off again, and then he asked me if he could see me home. That was the beginning, the first date.”

Luther and Louise Macnair were married in 1929, the same year the stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression set in. That year, the couple was living in New Hampshire, where Luther was teaching at a junior college in Tilton.

“We had very little salary,” Macnair said, noting that she and her husband subsisted on about $500 a year during the Depression. “But we had a place to sleep and food in the dining room, and we considered ourselves exceedingly lucky. There were many people with no jobs.”

Luther and Louise stayed in New Hampshire for 11 years, before moving to Vermont, and then back to Cambridge in 1943 — back to the same street Louise had lived on as a young girl. In the 1950s, Luther found work with the then-fledgling Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. As the civil rights movement picked up momentum nationwide, Macnair said she remembers many a tense night waiting for her husband to come home.

“I always had the feeling that I had to look over my shoulder, to see if anybody was coming,” Macnair said. “But [Luther] loved every minute of it. He was in there all day, trying to enlist young lawyers and students, and he gathered in a lot of volunteers.”

Invariably, both McGowan and Macnair are asked to impart on younger generations the secret of their respective longevity. Macnair said the trick, as Bing Crosby used to say, is to accentuate the positive.

“That old saying, smile and the world smiles with you, weep and you weep alone,” she said. “Remember that. Time is always wasted spent in anger.”

While there can be no doubting a positive attitude has gone along way in sustaining her vitality, McGowan said the key to living to see one’s 100th birthday ought to be fairly obvious.

“There’s one thing you’re not supposed to do if you want to live to see 100,” he said. “Don’t die.”


As seen in the Cambridge Chronicle.

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