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103-year-old Margaret Maguire has watched Humarock change

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By Kaitlin Keane The Patriot Ledger Posted Mar 29, 2008 @ 02:00 AM

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SCITUATE —

The year Margaret Maguire turned 100, she watched the Humarock Labor Day parade roll by her Milton Street home while sitting beneath a banner that declared her “Mrs. Humarock, 100 years young.”

When neighbors and parade-goers stopped to ask her the secret to a long, full life, she told them: three ounces of sherry wine each day.

A local grocer later mentioned to her daughter, Maureen Maguire, that sales of the sherry had spiked.

Three years later, Maguire isn’t sure what she’s done right, but she feels good. She turns 103 years old on Saturday.

“You know what I think it is – I just never thought about it much,” said Maguire, perched comfortably in the living room of her one-story Humarock cottage, wearing a tiara left over from her 100th birthday.

Maguire and her husband, Frank, bought the land in 1947 and built the house as a summer getaway from their Jamaica Plain home.

After splitting her time between Scituate and Florida for many years, Maguire recently made Humarock her year-round residence.

The sleepy beach community has changed a great deal since the first years Maguire lived in the home, when there was no electricity or hot water and few homes along the beach, she said.

“We came here when there wasn’t anybody else,” said Maguire, who still spends her summer days greeting neighbors and watching her great-grandchildren scour the beaches. “They all came after we did.”

Soon the peninsula was packed with more tiny cottages and, later, more lavish homes with several stories and pricey oceanfront views. Maguire watched homes wash into the river during bad storms and has been around for three new Sea Street bridges.

Born in Roxbury and raised in Jamaica Plain, Maguire said every place she’s lived, not just Humarock, has changed a great deal.

While Maguire can no longer climb over the beach dunes at the end of Milton Street, she has no major health problems. A bout with shingles at age 99 worried doctors, and a bad fall put her in physical therapy at 102, but family members said she bounced back.

“I don’t expect to be perfect, or even half perfect,” she said. “I just don’t think about it.”

Maguire’s granddaughter, Kim Zielinski, of Marshfield, said her grandmother’s memory is equally sharp.

“She’s a book of knowledge,” said Zielinski, who still hears stories from Maguire about her grandfather, who died three decades ago. “She can remember a story, a dinner, a vacation.”

On Friday, Maguire reminisced about drinking Manhattans at the Bridgeway Inn while her children attended dances at the clubhouse.

“I think those days are gone forever,” she said.

But she’s still drinking those three ounces of sherry.