Cd'A woman turns 105

As Michelle Jutile sank a knife into the mammoth cake with three numbers on Tuesday, she recalled the recipient's dry reaction.

"She said, 'What did you pick me up a big cake for? It'll just get me fat,'" chuckled Jutile, activities director at Life Care Center nursing home. "I was thinking, 'No way.'"

Bertha South's worries did seem unlikely as she wrapped her lips around a forkful of gooey chocolate.

Because at 105, it looked like she could trump most anything life threw at her, sugar included.

"She wanted hot butter popcorn and Pepsi," noted her friend Cynthia Wikle with a chuckle. "Forget the cake."

On Tuesday, a crowd of nurses congregated in the Life Care Center to pile Bertha with desserts, presents and jocund anecdotes to which she retaliated with her usual deadpan remarks.

Someone asked if she could tell the story again of how she witnessed the flight of the Wright Brothers, her family waiting out in the sun for hours until the craft zoomed past.

When asked how it felt, Bertha replied, "How would I know? I wasn't flying it."

The nurses rattled off the many experiences the San Diego native has described, like witnessing the women's suffrage movement as a young woman, and surviving an influenza epidemic.

Bertha doesn't recall the incidents too clearly now, she said.

But she has passed on to her friends the key to longevity.

"Never exercise," she said.

Besides permanently boycotting a workout routine, Bertha has also remained devoted to her favorite beverage, Pepsi, which she used to wash down her cake on Tuesday.

"She drinks six a day," said nurse Lane Russell. "Seriously."

Bertha's son, John South, has his own theories to explain her long life and still quick mind.

"She's a tough woman," he said firmly as he stood watching the party. "She's strict. You never got away with anything. You step out of line, you were in trouble."

He added that he's never witnessed her succumb to worry, not since she was "born, baptized and raised" in San Diego, as she puts it, nor when she was rearing six children or when she worked at a nursing home after moving to North Idaho in the late '70s.

"The hard times came. The difficulties came," John said. "Where I'd worry about it, for a moment it upsets her, then everything is fine."

She has remained a stalwart Catholic through it all, he said.

"If you're not, look out," he said, adding that he still occasionally takes Bertha to Mass at the Immaculate Conception Church in Post Falls.

Wikle, social worker with River City Hospice who sat smiling by Bertha, noted that the post-centarian still recites her entire rosary every day, taking roughly 20 minutes.

"I was there the other day. She had to stop at one point and said, 'Oh, I think I forgot,'" Wikle said. "So she backed up and went right along all the way through."

Bertha's greatest accomplishment has probably been her family, John said.

His brother brought a slew of her grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to visit this weekend, he said.

"There were like 40 of them. And there's still more," John said, admitting he didn't have the total offspring produced by all his siblings. "There's a ton of them."

Bertha's husband, Charles South, died of a heart attack in 1969, he said.

"In the Souths, the women live into their 90s, and the men seldom into their 70s," he said, adding that he can't explain why he just turned 80. "We're short."

Still chortling with a facility staff member as the party dwindled, Bertha said she had no gems of advice on how to live a good life.

"How would I know? I lived what I lived when I lived it," she said. "I just went along my own way."