The memories are legion but they come and go like scouts. This time, the moment Grace Green remembers is throwing a baseball to her half-brother on a Saturday morning, then going fishing in a nearby river. She thinks it was the Tennessee River, but it’s been a long time since she was that 7-year-old girl. “One hundred years ago. Can you believe it?” Green said in an interview Thursday. She celebrates her 107th birthday today. She lived through two world wars, the Great Depression and 19 presidents. Her favorite leaders, her great-grandnephew said, were John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom were younger than she and served when she was in her 60s. She was 2 1/2 years old during the Wright brothers’ historic flight and 68 during Neil Armstrong’s. “I feel fine,” said Green, who was born in Georgia, spent most of her life in Knoxville, Tenn. and now lives in the Baldwin Health Center. Green outlived her husband, both daughters and her granddaughter, said her niece, Nancy Brown, 77, of the North Side. “Her sister’s gone. Her brother’s gone. But Aunt Grace is still here,” Brown said. “She’s feisty.” Among those who live to be older than 100, women greatly outnumber men, said Dr. Stephen Coles, director of the Los Angeles-based Supercentenarian Research Foundation. The foundation limits its studies to people who live past age 110. Of the 75 people they track who are older than 110, 65 are women, Coles said. A similar ratio existed for Pennsylvanians who were older than 100 in 2000, the latest year for which such Census data is available. That year, of the 2,400 Pennsylvania centenarians, 1,952 were women. A person’s lifestyle is mostly responsible for reaching the average life expectancy of 77.8 years. After that, genetics takes over, Coles said. “If you manage not to get hit by a truck, your DNA has a chance to express itself to its maximum potential,” Coles said. So dieting isn’t much of a worry at Green’s age, he said. Her food choices are the stuff of nutritionists’ nightmares. Green’s favorite main dish is Kentucky Fried Chicken, and she eagerly awaits the mornings when the Baldwin center’s chef cooks made-to-order waffles with sweets on top. “She eats anything she wants,” said Cathy Hershberger, activities director at the center, where Green is a favorite of nurses and other residents, all of whom are younger. When Brown visits, she makes sure to stop at KFC on the way. The first thing Green does upon seeing family members is to look at their hands, to make sure they’ve brought her a bucket of chicken, Brown said. The life lessons Green gives to her nieces and nephews revolve around the importance of family, said great-grandnephew John Saunders, 35, of Brighton Heights. “She is just the joy of our family,” said Saunders, a father of six whose oldest son just finished his junior year of high school.

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