Happy birthday, may you live to be 100. So goes a popular birthday wish that spans generations and cultures.
For Laguna Woods resident Helen Weil, that wish has come true. In fact, she recently turned 101.
Hale and healthy and mentally sharp enough to outthink many far younger seniors, Weil credits her longevity and health to a positive mindset. “You’ve got to have a sense of humor,” she says.
Weil’s life has not been without challenges, but her unflagging optimism has served her well in overcoming them.
Weil was born in 1921 in Garzweiler, a town not far from Cologne, Germany, that was cleared away to make room for a coal mine in the early 1980s. She was just 17 at the time of the 1938 “Kristallnacht,” or the Night of the Broken Glass, when Nazi stormtroopers rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods throughout Germany and Austria, destroying synagogues, homes and businesses and assaulting residents who, to them, appeared Jewish.
“I was still in Germany during the Kristallnacht when our synagogues and everything else was on fire and totally destroyed, without fire brigades or anyone else doing anything about it,” Weil said in a recent interview at her home.
Weil eventually lost her parents and older sister when the Nazis deported them to a concentration camp.
Weil herself survived. Though she was too old for the “Kindertransport” program that evacuated thousands of Jewish children from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe to the United Kingdom, she was able to escape to England with the help of the family dentist, who had moved there and procured a visa for her after she contacted him, she recalled.
“I stayed with a family who owned a barbershop/beauty parlor in Hull, in the Yorkshire region,” she said. “I helped out in the shop since my visa did not allow me to take a job.”
After 18 months in England, she got a visa number for the United States and landed in New York at age 20. She wound up staying with her aunt Fanny and her family.
Weil’s younger brother, Erwin Levy, survived thanks to the “Kindertransport” and also wound up in the United States.
“My brother also lived here in the Village; he lived to be 96,” she said.
While in New York, she met and married Adolph Weil, who had changed his name to Al Weil. The couple lived with her in-laws for 10 years, she recalled.
She worked in the Manhattan garment industry as a dressmaker, fitter and designer.
“I loved that work, making dresses and making people happy,” Weil said.
When the couple moved to New Jersey, she changed course again and worked in her husband’s hardware store in New Milford, learning “all about screws and nuts,” Weil said with a laugh.
After 23 years, they sold the hardware store and moved to California when their son, Franklin, now 77, did his medical internship at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The couple wound up in what was then Leisure World, where they had friends.
Al Weil lived to be a 101; Helen Weil still lives in what was their apartment. She has four children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “We do Facetime together,” she said.
Besides maintaining her positive disposition and attitude, Weil stays active. She plays accordion and piano and is an enthusiastic member of the Topic Masters Club, a social club where members discuss a variety of subjects, answer questions and challenge one another’s general knowledge.
“I’ve been a member for six years,” Weil said, adding that because she no longer drives, someone picks her up and takes her there.
Weil is also a member of the Vision Club, as she suffers from what she calls “short vision” and macular degeneration.
When Weil was in her 90s, she enrolled in the 90+ Study, a UC Irvine program initiated in 2003 to study “the oldest-old.”
The program started in 1981 as the Leisure World Cohort Study, in which Leisure World residents in their 90s filled out surveys about what contributed to their longevity.
Now, 90+ participants are given initial MRI and PET scans showing electrical impulses of the brain and its overall function.
“When a friend and I heard about the program, we signed up immediately,” Weil said.
UCI researchers visit participants every six months to chart their physical health and memory functions. “They would ask us to recite letters backwards that were read to us and how many animals or kinds of foods we could name in a minute, for example.”
(The study is looking for new participants. To find out more, visit mind.uci.edu/research-studies/90plus-study.)
Weil’s age group, 90 and above, was featured in CBS’ “60 Minutes” with Leslie Stahl, first in 2014 and again in 2020.
Weil said she told Stahl how she maintains a positive outlook: She wakes up every morning with Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, whom she asks each night to set an alarm at 6:30 a.m.
“I am full of pep when I wake up and, since I am a very optimistic person, I know it’s going to be a very good day,” she said.
These days, Weil watches “Jeopardy” and loves the TV show “Frazier.” She enjoys sitting on her balcony and watching golfers hit balls on the small golf course below.
“I like to sit and converse or walk around just to meet people to talk to,” she said. “If I find someone just glued to their phone, I pass them by.”
