‘Work’ is 105-year-old’s secret of longevity

Mary T. Bihl’s secret to longevity might come as a disappointment, but apparently, she knows what she’s talking about.
“Well they should work,” Bihl - who recently celebrated her 105th birthday - said, without missing a beat when asked her advice for living a long life.
Wrapped in a powder blue blanket while seated in her wheelchair at Fitzpatrick Pavilion for Skilled Nursing Care adjacent to Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica, Bihl reminisced about her 58-year career working at that hospital, which began the same year as U.S. entered World War I - in 1917.
Hailing from Hartford, Connecticut, she began working in the hospital’s dietary department at the age of 15. Although the advent of jet travel and computers has made the world a much different place since then, Bihl admitted that some things are eternal - like complaints about hospital food.
“Well some did [complain],” she said, adding in a conspiratorial tone, “I made them what they wanted.”
But it wasn’t until three years later at the age of 18 that Bihl, one of three daughters born to a German mother and an Alsatian father, discovered her true passion.
She was dissatisfied in the dietary department and unsure of what to do next when one of the hospital’s nuns overheard her tell a colleague, “There must be something else I can do besides nursing,” as she contemplated her next move.
The next thing she knew, Bihl was offered a position as an x-ray technician.
“Nobody else wanted it,” she said, explaining how her colleagues were fearful they might be harmed. She was not.
“I didn’t use any protections at all,” she said, admitting only to once having had a malignant growth removed from her nose but no major illnesses.
“I don’t even remember where it was,” she said dismissively, gesturing toward her face (washed twice daily with soap and water in her younger years) where hardly a wrinkle can be found.
Bihl never married, preferring instead to dedicate herself to her work at Mary Immaculate until she retired in 1978. “I wasn’t interested in marriage, I didn’t have time,” said the devout Catholic who still goes to church each Sunday in the hospital’s chapel.
Bihl continued to live at her longtime home in Glendale until six years ago when she had a bad fall - an incident she remembered clearly despite her advanced age.
“I fell on March the first, I was on my way to church,” she said. “I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden I have a broken leg and a broken arm.”
Although she wanted to go home, she never did. Instead, she returned to the fold of Mary Immaculate by moving into the Fitzpatrick Pavilion.
And true to her devotion to the church, she donated her home to a Catholic missionary organization, she said.
Asked how often she prayed she stopped to think before responding, “My work was my prayers.”