Stony Brook resident celebrates more than a hundred years
One Stony Brook resident has more than a century to celebrate at the end of the month.
While she may not be the oldest resident in the Three Village area, Louise Wasilevitch has more life experience than most. On Oct. 29, she will celebrate her 107th birthday.
Wasilevitch said to enjoy a long life one should have a lot of interests — advice she has followed. In her lifetime, she has belonged to many clubs, made textiles with a floor loom, golfed, sang with a church choir, played the violin, led a Girl Scout troop, painted and enjoyed handcrafts.
Before her husband Julius passed in 1995, the couple traveled around the world to places like Japan, England and Scotland. Now, she enjoys visiting family and friends, watching golf, listening to classical music, rooting for the New York Yankees and traveling to New Hampshire on vacation with her daughter and son-in-law — Alice and Chuck Anderson.
She moved to Stony Brook in 2009 to live with her daughter and son-in-law, after living for nine years in East Northport and decades in Greenlawn, according to her daughter. Born in New Jersey in 1911, Alice Anderson said her mother, who grew up in Brooklyn, spent three years in Russia as a young girl when her father traveled back to the country to live with family due to health concerns and financial difficulties. Anderson said it’s interesting to hear the stories of living on a farm in Russia in the early 1920s when her mother would sleep in an alcove dug out of a chimney over the fireplace to stay warm.
She also worked during a time when many companies didn’t accept married women working. Wasilevitch was employed with an insurance firm called London & Lancashire on Wall Street, but when it was discovered she was married, she was asked to leave, according to her daughter.
With all the interesting things she has experienced in life, Wasilevitch said she finds the internet the most impressive thing she has seen. Her daughter said she loves that they can look up information whenever they have a question and write to relatives in Czechoslovakia.
Anderson, who is 78, said she always admired her mother’s knack with people.
“She just inspires me — I’ve always told her that — by just the kind of person she is,” Anderson said. “She likes everybody. She looks for the best in everybody and is always ready to help, whether it’s advice or money. She just loves everyone in the family, and I can’t think of anybody that she ever met that she hates.”
Anderson said when it comes to her mother’s upcoming birthday get-together, even her own friends want to be part of it, and Wasilevitch said it’s nice to feel wanted.
“I just like people,” Wasilevitch said. “I never met anybody I didn’t like. I really haven’t.”
Wasilevitch will have two big celebrations before the end of the year. In addition to her upcoming birthday party, her grandchildren, Heather, Jennifer and Emily will be home to spend Christmas with her along with their grandmother’s eight great-grandchildren.
