Nancy Pelosi mailed her happy birthday wishes. So did Vice President Joseph Biden, Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Mayor Adrian Fenty…. and a pair of Obamas, Barack and Michelle.
And, of course, Willard Scott.
“How does it feel to be 100?” asked Gertrude Lerch of Chevy Chase, who reached that milestone on March 11. “No different than any other time. I’m slower, I suppose.”
Slow has never described Gertrude Lerch, and it still doesn’t.
Although she uses a walker and doesn’t travel much any more, she still recalls 90-year-old details as if they happened yesterday. And after 73 years of living in Montgomery County, she is as committed to community service as ever.
About 40 years ago, Lerch served as volunteer president of the Health and Welfare Council, a forerunner agency to today’s United Way of the National Capital Area.
She had already served several years as the Girl Scouts’ representative to the Montgomery County Community Chest.
She has been a donor to United Way, or its ancestor agencies, for more than 70 years.
She is so dug into the local community that she has the same phone number she obtained in 1945, when she and her late husband reunited after his overseas service during World War Two.
“I’ve always wanted to volunteer,” said Lerch, who has three sons, eight grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and a six-month-old great-great-granddaughter. “I’m still a Girl Scout. I went to a meeting last night.
“And I’ve always liked giving to United Way. I’m still a donor, but not anywhere near what I was. I still think it’s a good way to go.”
Bobby Lerch was born in California, to a chemical engineer and a wife who traveled for three weeks from her native Germany to join him in the United States. The family lived in Wyoming, then for most of Bobby’s childhood in Ardsley, N.Y. She and her husband, Hank, met and married in the 1930s. He died in the early 1980s.
Lerch studied at Mount Holyoke College to be a chemist, but gave up her career to raise a family. When she first volunteered for the Montgomery County Community Chest, the upcounty area was totally rural.
“They had outhouses,” said Lerch, with an incredulous shake of the head.
She said she misses those days.
“The world went more slowly,” she said. “We didn’t have everything, or expect to have everything.”
Lerch celebrated her centennial with a luncheon at Columbia Country Club, just down the street from her apartment. All her living relatives except one were there—88 people in all. There were speeches, hugs, tributes from the Girl Scouts and her church, tears, kisses.
“It just happens to be good genes,” Lerch said that day—and repeated to me in her living room. “That’s a lot of it.”
But there’s also the spirit that says one can always do more.
Lerch came home from her 100th birthday party, rested a while—and then began to catch up on the reading she’s expected to do as a trustee of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Northwest Washington.
“It’s amazing how much has changed in my lifetime,” said Bobby Lerch. But some things have barely changed at all.
