Happy 100th Birthday Catherine!

by Jeff Jacomowitz

On August 25th, Cooperstown Center resident Catherine Reilly turned 100 years old and Cooperstown Center celebrated!

[Standing L-R: Jacky Devine (Daughter), Joe Reilly (Son), Cathy Elias (Daughter), sitting are Catherine with her other son, Chris Reilly]

Born, Catherine Smith, in the Glendale area of Queens New York, Catherine was raised in Queens Village and she is oldest of three sisters and one brother. Through the years she lived in East Meadow and Plainview NY, then to Jupiter, Florida and later, Wichita, Kansas. Catherine went to business school, worked in retail sales selling high-end furniture at the W.T. Grant store in Plainview, NY. Her mother once said that if it weren’t for the financial impact of the Depression, she would have liked to have been an Interior Decorator.

Her husband, Joseph F. Reilly passed away in 1998 and they would have been married 80 years the week after her birthday on September 2, 2018.

“We met in business school, he had brown reddish curly hair and Irish blue eyes,” remembers Catherine. “He got on my bus every day at a certain stop and little did I know that he got off another bus and got on the one I was on, just to see me.”

Catherine has quite a nice sized family….four children (two girls, two boys), twelve grandchildren and 17 great grandchildren.

"Catherine lights up the room wherever she is here at Cooperstown Center," said Amy Rose, Recreation Director. "It's always so wonderful to be around her, she is so well-loved."

She has been at Cooperstown Center since November 2015.