Published: September 27, 2008 12:01 am            

Still laughing: 98-year-old stays busy with crafts, cards and poetry

Hanging on Rachel Hanlin’s door is a sign that reads: “We don’t stop laughing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop laughing.”

It’s a motto the 98-year-old woman tries to live by each day.

And no matter what she’s doing, you can be sure she’s doing it with a smile on her face.

“I can tend to talk too much,” she admitted with a hearty laugh from her apartment in Valley Pike Manor in the

8th Ward section of Johnstown.

Hanlin isn’t content to sit back and let life pass her by. In fact, she finds something to do every day, whether it’s working on her arts and crafts or playing cards with friends.

“I like to play solitaire and go to the (Johnstown) Senior Center and play bridge twice a week,” she said. “I also like to work my crafts because, you know, at 98, I need some hobbies and something to keep me busy.”

In her small but quaint apartment are Hanlin’s crafts that are a vast collection of hand-crafted pictures – mostly of flowers that she sees in magazines – all framed in decorative wooden and metal frames.

“I love the colors,” she said. “I don’t sell any of them. This just keeps me busy.”

Hanlin also has a menagerie of birdhouses that she builds. They line her living room floor.

“I just keep buying stuff and adding to what I have,” she said.

“I look around here and say, ‘Look at this place, it’s a mess.’ But my daughters tell me to just keep doing what I want to do.”

If that isn’t enough, Hanlin also had a book of poetry published a few years ago called, “Rays From Rae.”

“I thought there were like

50 or 60 poems. But when my daughter was having it put together, she said to me, ‘Do you know how many poems you have? It’s more like 297,’ ” she said. “I was so thrilled.”

She added that she received a lot of cards of congratulations when her book was released.

“It pumped me up,” Hanlin said.

Hanlin does not have a television – for good reason.

“I haven’t had a TV for 25 years. I hate that thing,” Hanlin said. “My kids had a fit when I got rid of it, but I’ve never missed it one day.”

She knows that might seem somewhat odd, but she said she sees many of the residents in her apartment complex wasting their day staring at the tube.

“I just think, ‘How boring,’ ” Hanlin said.

Maybe what keeps Hanlin going strong is her work ethic: She retired at age 88.

“I worked 15 years at the Senior Center,” she said.

Her long road of employment began in high school when she worked as a seamstress for $1 a day. From there, she took office jobs at Bethlehem Steel, Penn Traffic and Johnstown City Hall and even worked as a receptionist in a local hospital.

For years, she worked with her then husband at the former Cookie Jar, a cake and decoration store, on Main Street.

“I worked like a dog there,” Hanlin said with a chuckle.

“From cleaning floors to making sandwiches, I did it.”

But now Hanlin chooses to enjoy the simpler things in life like her three daughters.

She only sees them a few times a year because one lives in London, another in New York and a third in Arkansas.

“I couldn’t have asked for better kids,” she said proudly. “I’m also a grandma of eight and a great-grandma of eight.”

At the end of the day, Hanlin believes she wouldn’t be where she is today if it weren’t for her faith.

“I have the Man upstairs,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing upward. “The good Lord has never let me down.”

        

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