By Elizabeth Maker
A typical day for Madeline Smith includes playing nine holes of golf, an hour of tennis, kayaking around Lake Waramaug, and walking two miles through Hidden Valley Preserve in Washington. In winter, it’s indoor tennis in Kent, yoga with friends, cross-country skiing through Steep Rock and line dancing in New Milford.
Smith is 97. She turns 98 on December 13. She’s never used a cane, walker, or wheelchair. She doesn’t wear glasses. All of her joints, bones, and bottom teeth are “the original make and model,” she says with her signature rosy-red-lipstick smile. She washes, cuts, and colors her own hair, manicures her own nails, cleans her own apartment—all three floors—and does her own laundry and gardening. “The only time I’ll get my nails done is if I’m going to be traveling, which I’m about to be doing a lot of.”
It was late October, and Smith was offering guests coffee and pastries at her Bee Brook Crossing apartment, contemplating what to do for Christmas. “I have three children, and they’re all vying for me to visit them;” a son in North Carolina, a son in Arizona, and a daughter in California.
“Christmas was always so special,” she says, remembering the 55-acre farm where she and her family lived since 1965 on Scofield Hill Road in Washington. “We’d always have a big Christmas Eve dinner and mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Washington. Then my husband and I would stay up all night wrapping presents. We went crazy with gifts for the kids!”
She recalls her days traveling the globe as a Pan Am stewardess from 1946-1951 and her romance with pilot Charles Smith. “We fell in love and were married within six months. I had to leave my job because back then girls had to retire if they got married!”
Her husband died in 1989, “and that’s the only time in my life I have been stressed or depressed,” she says. “I don’t dwell on myself. I don’t have a computer, I don’t have email. That way, I can sleep at night!”
Smith has been a Lake Waramaug Country Club member since 1971, and has become a legend with her impressive sports scores and effervescent love of life. “Once when Madeline was 90, she said, ‘you know? I’ve never swum out to the dock,’” says club beach manager, Mo Van Moffaert, one of her closest friends. “So we swam out to the dock. Then she said, ‘I’ve never been on a kayak.’ So we went kayaking. She hasn’t stopped since.’”
Van Moffaert shares the same birthday as Smith, December 13, “except I’m 35 years younger, but you’d never know it, the way she goes. She’s always dressed to the nines: high heels, gorgeous dresses, gold jewelry. But at the same time, she’s humble and kind. A real class act.”
Club tennis pro, Dillon Sullivan, says his daily highlight is hitting balls with Smith. “We usually hit for an hour. She won’t miss. She’s incredibly consistent. Then she’ll go play nine holes of golf. She literally turns heads.”
Her secret? “I take a multivitamin, a biotin, a zinc, and a blood pressure pill every day. I eat everything! When my daughter comes, we make batches of soup from veggies in my garden, and freeze them so I can eat soup all winter.”
When Smith turned 80, her friends gave her a 14-karat-gold tennis racket charm for her necklace. When she turned 90, they gave a gold tennis ball charm. “They keep saying, ‘wait until your 100th birthday!’ What do you think I’ll get? A golden golf club?”
