EXETER NEWS-LETTER

'I've had fun my whole life'

Exeter's oldest resident shares a century's worth of wisdom, humor

Emma Franklin Henterly
ehenterly@columbusmonthly.com
Anne Kane, Exeter's oldest resident, at 102, recently sat down with the News-Letter after being awarded the Boston Post Cane by town officials. Photo by Erik Hawkins/Seacoastonline

EXETER — The key to a long and happy life, according to 102-year-old Anne Kane, is keeping an open mind and always having fun.

Kane, a self-described “die-hard” New England Patriots fan and political junkie who lived through the Great Depression and raised three boys on her own after her husband’s passing, was recently awarded the Boston Post Cane by town officials after being named Exeter’s oldest citizen.

“It doesn’t feel any different to me, except it was such a wonderful adventure and fun,” Kane said during a Saturday interview with the News-Letter when asked how it felt to receive the cane.

As she shared some hard-won wisdom and anecdotes from the many odd jobs she’s held over the course of a century, Kane brandished the gold-tipped ceremonial cane proudly and drank cranberry-pomegranate juice from a wine glass she was very particular about using.

Born on Nov. 28 1913 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Kane moved first to Durham to be closer to her sons, then eventually to Exeter, where she resides at the RiverWoods active retirement community. “When I first moved here, Exeter wasn’t much of a town,” she said, adding that there was a single men’s clothing store she would go to sometimes “just to have fun.”

Although Kane has lived through innumerable times of tumult in the world and the United States, she said that no single event has ever really “rocked” her.

“It was always just one more of those things in the flow of life,” she said.

Kane recalled some of her antics while working in a Drake cake factory in the 1930s with a smile as “just like in Dickens!”

“We were deep in the bowels of the Earth where the ovens were and there were all these cookies coming on the (conveyor belt) and they had to be taken off the belt and you had to tie a bow around them,” she said. “Well eventually I had a whole slew of cookies and I didn’t know what to do with them. So I ate them.”

“It really was just like in Dickens,” she said, recalling how a supervisor would walk down the line with a sort of iron bar, knocking on the belt and trying to move the process along before telling Kane that they were “going to have to put me upstairs in spongecakes.”

“I said, ‘OK, well at least I’ll see the sun up there!’” Kane smiled. “I could never care too much about it, I just kept going.”

Kane worked in a variety of places in the years following her days at Drake’s, including a wallpaper store where, though she was a top salesperson, she would sometimes tell customers they didn’t really need any wallpaper, Kane said.

“Every job I ever had was interesting,” she said. “I liked to work where there was interest and diversity and human nature, human foibles. I just had fun my whole life.”

Kane’s outsized personality followed her everywhere, and she recalled working in a music store as a young woman, when older women she thought were music teachers would come in and buy sheet music. “They had faces like sour grapes,” she said.

Kane added that on one occasion a gentleman came into the music store looking to buy “a G-string.”

“I said, ‘What?’” Kane said, laughing. “I was in hysterics. I just about had to go under the counter.”

Raising three boys on her own, Kane said she never remarried after her husband’s passing because of her dedication to her sons. “I really could write a book,” she said, regarding all of the “trouble” her sons, one now a successful Seacoast lawyer, used to get into.

Having been very tuned-in to politics her whole life, Kane said that she admires President Barack Obama greatly, and has written numerous times to both Obama and his wife Michelle. According to Kane, the president has written her back twice.

“I love what he stands for and his ideals,” she said. “I loved him and I still do.”

Regarding her sense of the 2016 Primary so far, Kane was concise. “It’s awful. It’s just terrible,” she said.

“That (Donald) Trump guy – when I first listened to him, he made a little sense, but not enough sense to be sensible,” she said. “He’s out. That (Ben) Carson, he’s out too.”

And the most important thing in life, according to Kane?

“I think it’s most important thing is being very curious and always looking at both sides of a question. And the best part of all: always having fun,” she said.