She’s traveled many places in 100 years

Jeanne Mancke is a world traveler. She’s been everywhere from France to Thailand and visited every state on the mainland, but what Mancke enjoyed most was something far more simple and close to home.

Every night, when her husband, Dick, came home from his Western Union job, the two would pack up dinner, head down to Point Lookout and enjoy a romantic meal together, enhanced by the soothing sounds of crashing waves and the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean horizon.

Though Dick has been gone for nearly 40 years, Mancke — who celebrated her 100th birthday on March 1 — remembers those dinner dates like they were yesterday. The two moved from Allentown, Pa. to Valley Stream in 1942 when Dick landed a job in Western Union’s New York branch. “I remember driving our Model T Ford to see a model house in Valley Stream,” Mancke said. “We loved it, but it was the Depression, so we didn’t have a lot of money. So we asked my father to give us $500 for the deposit.” They later bought the then Green Acres section home, for $5,000.

Besides her love of traveling, Jean loves to dance. As a child, she took piano lessons, but Mancke’s instructor told her that her hands were too small to be a successful pianist, so she took up dancing. She later owned a dance studio, studied ballet in New York City and even performed at Carnegie Hall.

But it was one crazy night of fox-trotting in 1930 that changed her life forever. Dick’s family lived on the same street as Jeanne’s, and one night, Dick asked her to accompany him for night on the town. “I remember he came to visit one night, and we went out that night to a hotel to go dancing,” Jeanne said. “After that, I knew that was it. I was in love.” The two went dancing every Saturday after that. They married in 1936.

The couple later had two kids, Peter and Linda, both of whom attended Clear Stream Avenue School and South High. One summer, the couple decided to visit some family in Washington and drove cross country. They traveled through the northern part of the country, she said, and returned through the south, though her husband felt something was missing. “Dick said we missed the middle states,” Mancke said. “He said we had to go again.”

They later visited the “middle states” they had missed, and then took their travels abroad. The couple toured Europe, visited Japan and traveled to Thailand; a country Mancke described as one of the most fascinating places she’d ever been.

Mancke also recalled life in Valley Stream during the Great Depression. “Food was rationed back then,” Mancke explained. “I remember going to the meat market on the corner of Rockaway and Roosevelt avenues and the butcher had this wonderful ham. I told him I didn’t have the money for it, but he gave it to me anyway.”

She added that during the Depression, gasoline was also hard to come by. “We got a phone call in the middle of the night, and a friend told us a gas station on Sunrise Highway had gas,” she said. “ So we rushed down there, and there was a line a block long to get gas.”

Though Mancke said she thinks one of the keys to living to 100 is by having good genes, she also said people should appreciate the little things. “You have to enjoy life to the fullest,” she said. “Do things you enjoy. Do what makes you happy.”