Centenarian starts to add on

Olga Korotki, of Wantagh, born on the fifth of July, will tell you she is 75 years old when she is actually 101. “I was born in the seventh month of the year and on the fifth day of the month. That makes me 75 years old, a mere youngster,” she said. “Not that anyone believes me; I don’t believe it myself.”

Korotki was born Olga Sitch on July 5, 1914, in a small town near Roscoe, N.Y., to Russian parents who immigrated to New York from Belarus around 1900. “I remember everything about the old days,” she said, “but not so much now.”

When Korotki was born, Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. She survived the flu epidemic, two world wars and the Great Depression. During her lifetime, people went from the horse and buggy to landing on the moon. She lived through good times and bad. “My mother has had a tough life,” Korotki’s daughter, Lorraine Eckert, of Seaford, said. “It wasn’t a bad or sad life, but my mother never had much and worked hard.”

Korotki’s family moved to Maspeth, Queens, shortly after she was born. There were few modern appliances, and stoves were heated with coal. Food was kept cold in an icebox.

“I remember how the ice man used to come with slabs of ice,” she said. “You could get a 10-cent or 15- or 25-cent piece. Then we’d jump on the wagon and pick up the slivers of ice and chew them.”

In 1931, at the height of the Depression, Korotki graduated from Newton High School and went to work. “My first job was in the neighborhood store, selling quilts,” she recalled. “I made pennies. Then I worked in a store that sold paper bags. I worked in a casket hardware store on Grant Street in Maspeth, and even worked for a short time cleaning the Empire State Building.” Eventually she landed a job at Pfizer as a machine operator. She worked until she was almost 70, Eckert said.

She was married briefly to John Korotki, but “things didn’t work out,” Eckert explained. “My mother was very independent, and she worked nights to take care of me and my brother.”

She raised her son, John, and Lorraine in Maspeth in a two-family house where she lived with her sister, Antoinette, her brother-in-law and their three children in one apartment, while Korotki’s mother lived upstairs. They spoke Russian at home.

“We had a coal stove in the kitchen,” Eckert recounted. “My mom would take our clothes and place them on the stove to warm them up before we went to school. My mother was always doing things for us. ”

Korotki liked to cook, and made many Russian specialties including homemade kielbasa, stuffed cabbage and sauerkraut soup. Additionally, in the little free time she had, she knitted, making Afghans for family members and baby sweater sets for her six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. She also knitted adult slippers and donated them to the A. Holly Patterson nursing home.

When Korotki turned 90, she moved to Seaford to live with her daughter. Then, five years ago, she moved to the Eastover Garden Apartments in Wantagh. When she turned 100, she became ill. “We thought we might lose her, but she survived,” Eckert said. “It makes you believe in a higher power.”

Korotki doesn’t remember being ill on her landmark birthday. “I’ve lived too long,” she said. “I’m useless.”

But her family cherishes her. On July 11, her family held a surprise birthday party for her at the gazebo at Eastover. There were about 30 people in attendance, including 20 of her family members as well as neighbors.

“I was mad,” Korotki said. “I don’t like people making a fuss. It’s my birthday and I give the gifts. I don’t want anything.”

“Well, she likes to be in control,” explained Eckert. “But it was still nice to have the family there.”

And what advice would Korotki give others on living a long life? “Don’t have sex after fifty,” she said.